Training Log Archive: Vector

Event: OCIN FAST-O - Sharon Woods
 

Sprint 3 - Great sprint! Totally botched #1 on Sprint 3, had the wrong corner of the building, but other than that had a good Sprint 3. 1 was just messy, but should have been so easy! Guess I just had to get my head into it on the first one. :) Spiked the rest of them. 6 could have been better, wasn't looking for that trail through the green coming off of 5, so ended up taking big path south and then had to climb hill to 6. Good route choice from 7-8 helped me make up for my fiasco at 1, used relative clear through green woods to head west to the trail and clearing, then easy to follow trail to my corner of parking lot AP. From 9-10 I never saw that trail going east away from the baseball fence so I just kept going north and fought through the thick green and gulley. This must be wear I received the plastering of burrs. Speed pretty good but still need to shave off about 30-45 sec/km to be where I want to be by end of 2013 for this kind of course. Great fun course as always from OCIN!

Sprint 2 - Another great sprint course. Pretty easy navigation except for the route choice decision from 5 to 6. I wasn't sure my route was a good one but looks like it actually was. Ran to the top of the hill on the pavement and then cut over to 6 through the light green and passing the gulley, then using the other gulley as a handrail. Actually my #1 route choice probably wasn't the best either. When approaching the hill it looked clear as could be so I just went right up it through the woods but started having problems hald way up so that slowed me down, would have been faster just to stay in the open and run around the hill. Could have run faster to #8 but was planning ahead, but probably doing too much planning and map reading at that point.

First time doing ARDF Orienteering (Amateur Radio Direction Finding)!! This was awesome!! With my epxerience in doing DF work in Civil Air Patrol search & rescue it was pretty easy to pick this up, but definitely took a little getting used to. The signal strength meter seems to be the main key, and planning ahead. Got all 5 controls, so guessing this isn't bad for the 1st try. If I were to do it differently the next time I would get a better feel for where all the beacons are by taking bearings, plotting and making some better notes right at the start from a high ground area (or better yet two high ground areas for triangulation just as I would do in real world SAR) and then make a plan for getting them all in sequence based on what makes the most sense. I was pretty sloppy with my planning and ended up wasting a lot of time because of that... for example I crossed / ran across the map 4 times when I could have limited it to one round robin. Definitely a lot of pressure on you when you only have 1 min to work with the signal you're tracking! And then you can waste so much time when you're down to just 1 or 2 remaining and you're standing there waiting for your beacon to come active again... so using that time effectively so important... as in make sure you get a good azimuth and good feel for where you thing that signal is coming from before it turns off, and make sure you follow your plan and keep walking while you're waiting for it to come active again, and scan, scan, scan while walking. After a while it started becoming second nature to know about how far away you are from the emitter based on signal strength. But I did have a few reflection issues during the course, so that's always a factor in DF-ing. All in all I was super stoked to put these two hobbies of mine together in such a fun way, uber appreciative to OCIN for the great intro to this version of orienteering, can't wait to do it again!

C • ARDF... 2

OCIN_SW_Aug_2013_Sprint3 - Splits

OCIN_SW_Aug_2013_Sprint2 - Splits

Strong pace run

Heart rate run

Roaming around on the Waterloo HQ map. After 10 face fulls of spider webs and 10 times that in picker fights, I decided to forgo trying to re-run a course and just roamed around in nicer areas following terrain and features. Vegetation is T-H-I-C-K!! Nice weather again, just a little rain, but I take rain over heat any day.

C • spider webs 9

ILRA Badlands Sampler streamer thanks to Jens' awesomeness. Pretty thick vegetation but the weather was nice and cooler so that balanced it out. Fun course, felt good with how I ran most of it excluding numbers 3 and 4. Here's the shakedown:

1- Came across a trail, thought it was the one on the map, but then remembered from the e-mail that was supposed to be pavement, not dirt, so wasted some time there but got that settled early in the run, easy to find 1 after that.
2- Little bit of fight and got confused and stopped for a bit, but eventually got it.
3- This was my worst control. Bad compass use. Let the vegetation veer me south instead of trusting my compass through the thick, so went to parking lot corner and used that as an AP and then got it no problem, lots of wasted time there but at least I see now what I did.
4- With the thick stuff I thought I would just head back to parking lot, then found paved trail heading north right up to my AP at the intersection of the mapped paved trail, spike.
5- spike
6- spike. used the paved trail for high-speed transit
7- spike...but thick so it wasn't a fast spike
8- spike...but coming out of 7 it wasn't a fast spike
9- spike
10- spike
F- spike

Lots of fun out there, rain started almost the exact moment I finished! Overall happy with my pace and lessons learned. WIthout my funkiness on #3 & 4 it would have been solid. Good times.