Training Log Archive: iansmith

Event: UNO Camping Weekend
 

Blue Middle Distance course at UNO's Pawtuckaway Camping weekend. I started out by remembering how to orienteer; I lost about forty five seconds combined on the first three controls. Things started clicking, but I was bumbling around in the woods much more than was necessary, particularly on a middle distance course with simple, short legs. I accidentally crossed to the west side of a marsh en route to 5. I hesitated running up the spur to 6 to be sure of my position. I ran south of the marsh to 7 (which I thought was optimal), and was ok on 8-9. I was sluggish descending to 10, as I didn't want to miss it and blast past. I ran north of the marsh to 13, which while longer, avoided a marsh crossing and a steep hillside. I finished with two spectacular errors of about thirty seconds each on 18 and 19; on the first, I let myself get distracted by a white control on a nearby knoll. On the second, I didn't have a great attackpoint and assumed it would be easy. There were enough boulders near the pavilion that it took some effort to discriminate among them.

Overall, my orienteering performance wasn't fantastic. I ran fairly hard and managed to have a cleaner run than a sleepy Giacomo and the rest of the field.

C • that white control 5

Canoe-O with bgallup. We mass started with Giacomo and Ethan and had similar plans for at least the first half dozen controls. There was a vicious south wind that slowed us making the east-west traverse from 5 and 6 to 8 and 10. Part of the motivation of our figure-8 loop was to take shelter from the wind behind horse island and to have a long south-north leg with the wind at our backs.

Ben proved his mettle by driving hard the entire way. The racing canoe paddle technique was unfamiliar, but he beasted while I chirped suggestions. We decided to bail on control 14 and finished with 13 total; it's questionable whether we could have gotten it in the four minute cushion we had, but I think it was prudent to avoid the penalties. Control 13 lacked a pin punch.

The Pawtuckaway lake doesn't really lend itself to splitting tactics. Ben (and Giacomo) ran to 1 while I paddled solo up to a rendezvous point. Ben had to disembark to get 12, but we got all the other controls together from the boat. When last I checked, we were in second behind Aims and JJ, who got all 14 controls in 47 minutes under ideal conditions with no wind and a questionable drug test result. My GPX track is shamelessly stolen from bgallup.

C • drug test 1

JJ's Wicked Hard Night-O from the UNO Camping Weekend. The course was novel, though on the easier of the difficulty distribution of historical WHNOs. The controls were geographically grouped into sets of three - controls 1, 2, and 3 were proximal; 4, 5, and 6 were a triplet, etc. The triplets had to be taken in order, but the controls within a triple could be taken in any order. My headlamp, which I have not used in months, turned out to be destroyed - at least one of the batteries had ruptured in the case, and there was damage to the lamp housing. I ran instead with my bright Fenix TK35 held in my hand. It had rained intermittently through the evening, but I think it was dry when we started.

The first leg was a km+ trail leg, and I moved into the lead with Giacomo and Ethan nearby. Neil got creative and tried to cut the leg, but we headed him off. Ethan decided to run 2-1-3; Giacomo, Neil and I ran 1-3-2. I had a weak attack to 1 and punched behind Giacomo, but I had the lead when we left 2 on the long leg to 4. Giacomo and I were together, and Ben had attached himself to us. We missed the spit of land across the lakes and had to hack through some reeds; we ran into Giovanni here, who seemed to be going in the wrong direction.

By the time we reached 4, the rain had become torrential, and visibility was reduced. We saw Giovanni again when we missed our marsh handrail poorly. Our trio punched 4 and ran into a confused Neil about 50m past 4; he ran back to get 4 and caught up to us by 5, where we found Giovanni. The five of us took slightly deviating routes to 6 but converged there. We lost Giovanni, who decided he was happy with his outing and made the 2 km+ run back to the start. Our merry quartet ran the 2.3 km leg to 7 without incident, though we did break up into two groups and reconverge well before the control. Controls 9 and 8 were uneventful; at 8, Giacomo decided to go "Hunger Games" on us and broke away from the pack. Ben and I followed Neil out of 8, and I decided to adjust my plan after some consideration. Neil had gone out of sight when our routes diverged; I probably should have stuck to my plan, but I instead bailed to the road. Through a swamp. Yay dumbness.

Anyway, Ben and I marched along and executed the rest of the controls fine, but finished about five minutes behind Giacomo. At the start of the race, I had planned to try to break away from the pack and run the race solo. I'm still somewhat inexperienced at Night-O, and having company through the deluge in Pawtuckaway in the dark was pleasant. Ben showed great toughness plowing through the night, and only majorly lost contact once. GPS track again shamelessly stolen from bgallup.

Blue middle - Splits