Training Log Archive: iansmith

So, it seems that it's on now.

Also this: https://xkcd.com/1022/

But seriously, how absurd is it for there to be conflict about such a small enterprise? While I can appreciate a just battle, OUSA is tiny. Ultimately, we all have the same broad goals; this will be so much easier if we cooperate and collaborate rather than antagonizing each other. Else, we are like two mongrels fighting over a morsel. Resorting to total war would be a pyrrhic victory, and for what? OUSA is declining. Will we fiddle while Rome burns?

C • Shine on! 6

Why do I have so much stuff?

C • stuff 27

Wee jog.

Lots of one-legged squats.

Morningjog. I had a really bad experience with some stinky cheese recently (something that started with a "W"). I'm much better off with a delicious gruyere. Or really anything else (except maybe surströmming).

Calves felt stiff.

Disappointing, but it's good to know this is where I am at. I didn't feel great before starting this - a bit tired, lackluster energy - so it's possible I can go a shade faster. Made it through 1600m in about 5:44, then fell off the pace. I plan to run these every 2-3 weeks or so.

While admittedly this video advertisement for Tough Mudder is 4 years old, it has 7.5 million views. Spartan Race trailer, with a similar 3.7 million views. Both of these (successful) obstacle course/endurance franchises are somewhat successful - 2 million Tough Mudder participants as of 2015, and 272,000 Spartan finishers in 2014. Both seem to use hyperbolic marketing - e.g. "possibly the toughest event on the planet", and both seem to draw grandiose inspiration about how finishing a race will change your life and motivate you to greater ends.

I find most of this rhetoric hilarious - is a rope climb really a "world class obstacle" compared with, say, running up Surebridge? - but the ideas behind them certainly resonate. I see Rundle as a challenge against which I want to test myself.

But the broader question: can orienteering appeal to a broader audience? I don't know that we need to market ourselves as some x-treme activity that demonstrates to all your social media friends how badass you are, but when people think of orienteering, they seem to often imagine boy scouts standing with a compass taking bearings. As opposed to this wicked cool video about orienteering made by Puresive films, "Go Hard or Go Home" featuring the Hubmanns:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnE-hftGQoU

These are also neat videos, from Oringen 2016 and 2014 (bahaha Jonas Leanderson fixing his hair). The challenge is to get non-orienteers to see this material. I think the short video - maybe 30s-2m - is one approach; it can be embedded on social media, maybe even used as commercials. Static pictures can also be impressive if done well; I'm not sure really.

To make it more concrete, what could we do for $50,000? Ideas:
1. Hire Puresive Films or some equivalent to take enough video footage in Harriman (e.g.) or at an event with suitable fast, photogenic people to make a few ads. Market these videos and materials heavily.

2. Concerted ad campaign - these short videos, posters of people bashing through the woods (or something), inspirational messages about conquering your fears or whatever. Seriously, who would pay $90 to jump through mud and hop over slightly burning wood when you could run around in Pawtuckaway or Harriman?

3. Accessibility: people need to have events to go to. Billygoat, Highlander, Traverse, national meets are all amazing, but they're relatively difficult for total neophytes to access. There is, however, this neat format of the urban sprint or city race (London, Venice) that is extremely accessible and doesn't require much special training. The Spartan races have 4 distances - 3 mile, 8 mile, 13 mile, and 26 mile, and the finishers were inversely correlated to distance. In 2014, 65% of the finishes were on sprints. Imagine a national series of city races and sprint festivals all around the country. It's a short jump from sprint to park to forest.

C • World Class Obstacle 23

Climbing at Brooklyn Boulders with bgallup. I climbed three autobelay pitches before Ben arrived, then probably did 8-10 with him. I sent my first 5.9! It was a glorious little overhang. Admittedly, gym difficulty notations are a bit arbitrary, but it was still a fun moment. Later, after poking around on a 5.10b that Ben did, my forearms were so spent that I completely whiffed on a 5.7. The 10b had some slopers that really wore out my grippy muscles. Fun times.

Today's official climbing word (from wikiP, so who knows):
Sloper - A sloping hold with very little positive surface. A sloper is comparable to palming a basketball.

Unofficial: schiessegrippen - The intense feeling of disappointment when finding a difficult crux after a jug or good handhold.

Just amazing:

#gpsanimation from #woc2016 Middle Women: See how Emily Kemp is in the lead until just before the arena passage - and Alexandersson takes over the lead and takes GOLD when Kemp does mistake! #orienteering​

A video posted by World of O (@worldof_o) on Aug 23, 2016 at 9:58am PDT

C • Thanks 2

Run to track workout. Uneventful.

Track workout! Many of the usual suspects were in attendance - Patrick, Amore, Kevin, and Terry. I just missed drills, but I hopped on board for the last bit of strides. The workout tonight was 3x(1200, 600), with a 1 minute break between 1200 and 600 and 2 minutes between sets. I hung on to the group for the 1200s, but I would fall behind on the 600s. I decided to skip the last 600 because the wheels were falling off. We finished with 2x200, which is always fun.

My calves were a bit tight, and I felt a little tired, but I'm happy to make it through the workout.

1200s: 4:27, 4:31, 4:39 (glacial)
600s: 2:04, 2:07
200s: 36, 35

Ugh, mornings. GPS track was wonky to start, and I felt really lethargic. I started to loosen up a bit by the end, but I'll reiterate: ugh, mornings.

I came across this commercial for the Canadian olympic team while watching CBC's olympics and was inspired. Ice in our veins (is probably not good for circulation).

C • ice in our veins 2

Easy peasy Skyline run. My legs felt a bit tired and heavy from yesterday. Also, today was my first Skyline run since I rolled my left ankle hard two weeks ago, and I had some concerns about its resilience. It held up ok, though I had one wee roll. My lower left leg feels a bit strange, though it hasn't been hurting or uncomfortable. I continued my latest audiobook, Neil Gaiman's American Gods. It has been interesting but unremarkable.

From NPR, apparently the US has a feral cat problem. The introduction of 80-100 million predators into the ecosystem has wrecked havoc on populations of wild animals. Apparently Trap-Neuter-Return programs haven't demonstrated much impact on the population. I speculate that this is because the population is saturated for other reasons - i.e. the number of fertile cats is not a limiting factor, and so you need to remove huge chunks of reproducing adults before the population is dented. It seems that mass euthanasia is one of few viable solutions to addressing the problem, but I wonder if that would work. For the sake of argument, suppose within a region (a county, say), we euthanized all the feral cats. Wouldn't that population eventually rebound from the steady supply of people losing their pets? Is it even technically feasible to euthanize tens of millions of animals, humanitarian concerns aside? And yet, it seems the greater tragedy is the devastation and suffering both of the wild population of animals on whom the cats prey and the cats themselves. Life as a feral cat cannot be pleasant. This is a problem our civilization created and must address.

C • cats 11

Event: CNYO Regaine - Letchworth State Park East
 

Track workout - the first in quite a while. My workout was 4x800 + 2x400; I ran in silence, and the track was a bit damp from overzealous lawn watering. It's definitely time to get back on the bandwagon, as it were. My cadence is slow, and my breathing was labored. In the past, I might have run 2:44-2:48, but I set a more modest goal of 2:50-2:55. Music appropriate for intervals albeit not as good as East German techno.

Splits:
800m: 2:54, 2:52, 2:55, 2:55
400m: 79, 79

I aspire to a well-ordered life - a life of meaning and direction. I wonder sometimes what that is. I've often imagined if we prepared a large ensemble of independent Ians, how could would the best among them be? It's not healthy to compare myself to this Ian, for he is unrealizable. But perhaps life is not about achieving order and objectives, but about striving. Life is not some contrived script of destiny and fate, but a random walk, a stochastic process. And who can say where the winds of time will blow?

Easy run home.

Wrestling with linear mixed models, stochastic gradient descent (to fit the LMMs), and how to present my vision for OUSA.

Climbing with Joe at Brooklyn Boulders. I did a long 5.8 on autobelay, some short 5.7s and 5.8s, and bouldering.

The original plan for today was 4-5x800m, but the MIT track is closed for construction. So, instead I ran a tempo run along the Esplanade. It was a balmy 26 C, and the pedestrian traffic along the river was motivating. My plan was to run 4 km at 4:00 - 4:06/km, but I tacked on a few hundred meters more for good measure. On my cooldown, I ran a few bouts of strides to get my turnover up and to test how fresh my legs were. I need to keep my cadence high, and I think the path to victory requires East German techno.

Easy peasy joggeroo. It was a bit toasty, but invigorating. My body is learning to deal with the heat.

Easy jaunt around the river. Watch died. Ankle still feels a bit strange, but it feels stable.

C • Celsius 3

I am officially running for the Orienteering USA Board of Directors. My candidate statement - which is largely reflected in the log entry from Tuesday, is here. I welcome feedback, and I look forward to talking to many of you about these issues before the election.

I ask all of you to vote for the "coalition" candidates - Barb Bryant, Boris Granovskiy, Alex Jospe, Ian Smith, and (possibly) Jim Baker and Kevin Teschendorf. We are interested in changing the priorities of OUSA. I would characterize our platform as follows:

1. Support junior development and junior programs.
2. Increase our marketing and publicity presence both within and without the organization. Engage the membership more fully, and be transparent and accessible.
3. Increase the support for the elite teams.
4. Reorganize OUSA to execute these goals. Bring the budget into balance, and increase spending on the above areas while reducing unrestricted spending on paid positions.
5. Support clubs through resources, promotion, training, and best practices, and incentivize and adjust our event system to reflect the changing atmosphere of orienteering.

This is of course in addition to all the hard work in OUSA that goes into keeping the lights on and keeping everything running smoothly. OUSA represents a huge community effort, and I would like to see that effort directed towards a new set of priorities.

Archery at MIT. I shot perhaps 12 ends of 7 arrows. Fun times.

Easy peasy jaunt to test the ankle out. It held up ok, though there still is some swelling and pain when I probe it with my fingers. I think it is structurally sound, so I will resume moderate low-risk activity gradually.

Bowling with Izzy, Ethan, and Astrid. I struggled to get into a rhythm, but good times were had by all. Izzy fell short of her goal of beating Ethan, falling 91-96 and 78-112, but her resolve is undiminished. It was disappointing in both games to finish with a whimper, with only 1 mark in the last 3 frames of both games.

My scores:
5/ 8- 9/ 8/ 71 7/ 9/ 62 81 62 = 129
36 9- 63 9/ 72 X X 8/ 71 7- = 133

What is the role of OUSA in orienteering in the US? What can - and should - OUSA do?

Orienteering USA is the governing body of the sport in the US, but its role isn't well defined. Most of the power to impact the sport lies with individual clubs. A main facet of OUSA's ability to impact the sport is its budget. It has averaged an income of $286k/year from 2011-2015. No other entity in orienteering the US commands such resources. How we allocate those resources reflects our priorities.

However, some of the budget is restricted - restricted contributions and fundraising. Restricted income is explicitly allocated to a particular spending category. For example, someone can donate to the Junior Team, and OUSA must spend that money on the Junior Team. In that sense, OUSA is a conduit for funds. I wanted to know how OUSA spends is discretionary or unrestricted moneys, as that is the degree of freedom available to the leadership. For example, if OUSA spends $20,000 on the US Senior Team, but $15k came in the form of restricted contributions and fundraising, some of which likely came from the team itself, OUSA is in practice only spending $5k.

Method: I went to the OUSA website and obtained the December financial statements from 2011-2015. In addition to the revenue and spending for that month, the document includes aggregate data for the entire year. From that, I defined unrestricted spending as the difference between spending in a particular category and restricted income to that category. This data is meant to be illustrative rather than definitive. As I am not an expert on the OUSA accounting system, there may be some errors or confusions, but the broad trend should be clear.

Documents, which I would be happy to share upon request:
Summary report
Gross excel spreadsheet with underlying data

Key points:

1. OUSA has unrestricted spending of about $240k/year, while unrestricted income is only $220k/year for a deficit of about $20k.
   
2. Insurance Premiums and ONA - both of which I consider indispensible services - account for about 17% of the unrestricted expense.
   
3. Unrestricted spending on the elite teams amounts to 5.9% of the total unrestricted. (Senior, Junior, WUOC, SkiO, MTBO, Trail-O).
   
4. Categories whose product I do not understand - Payroll (30%), Fundraising (11%), Accounting and Member Services (10%), ED (8%), and a few others account for $150k/year or 61% of the unrestricted spending.
   

Fundraising in particular is baffling; while I may not understand the accounting system, we are spending an average of $27k/year explicitly on fundraising, but our average fundraising of both restricted and unrestricted classes is about $10k. Perhaps the best way to raise funds is stop spending money on raising funds.

In my mind, the key priorities for OUSA are:
1. Providing basic services for clubs, including insurance, communication within the community through ONA and newsletters, best practices and information sharing, and technology infrastructure like eventreg and membership databases.

2. Offering services to assist clubs like map loans, website templates, and instruction e.g. on how to run a National Meet. Ideally this would also include access to mappers.

3. Publicity, marketing, and outreach outside of the orienteering community. It's not clear to me how successful global marketing will be compared to marketing local events and calendars, but at the very least, the national federation should be publicizing the national event calendar. It can also assist clubs with their own marketing because economies of scale make this better done at the national level.

4. Support of elite teams. I think in most sports, the elite teams are the marketable product. OUSA should do all it can to advance and promote the growth and progress of elite orienteering in the US because success at the elite level is a viable mechanism for drawing attention to the sport. Consider how many people know of Ali Crocker because of her performances at WOC, e.g.

5. Growth of the sport through the development of junior programs. The best prospect for future development of orienteering in the US is junior programs like WIOL, ARK, Barb's Navigation Games in Boston, and generally engaging children in schools. This is a mammoth endeavor, and I don't think many clubs can create a school league or junior program on their own. At the very least, it would facilitate it if moneys and expertise at the national level were made available to interested clubs.

Agenda
My goals and plan for OUSA, in brief, as are follows:
1. Paid Positions: The Executive Director experiment was a worthwhile one to understand how to grow the sport. I'm grateful to everyone who invested effort and time, but after six years, we can conclude that it has failed to meet the two stated goals of funding the position through external fundraising and growing the sport. I would like to replace the position with a more sustainable and more limited in scope marketing role whose responsibilities are to create a marketing campaign for OUSA, aggressively market it on social media and in the press, advertise the national event calendar, and assist clubs with their own marketing efforts. This position could be part time; I propose a budget of $30k-40k. I'd also consider funding a technical position, probably also part time, to offer database support, build tools as needed, and help clubs with event registration and websites.

2. The Junior Programs are among the most important impact OUSA can have on the sport. Funding the Junior Team coach is paramount. I would also like to see a substantial allocation (say $25k/year over 3-5 years) in grants to clubs to startup junior programs in the style of WIOL or Navigation Games. Money is helpful but not sufficient; in addition to providing seed funding, OUSA must create a task force to collect and publish best practices. Finding clubs with the interest and manpower to create junior programs is also critical. Goal: start at least 3 junior or school league programs in the United States with 100+ participants in the next 5 years. I am counting Navigation Games as a new one even though technically it existed in 2015.

3. Increase spending on elite teams. Less than 6% of unrestricted spending on elite teams is a joke. I propose to increase that to at least 10% or $25,000 of unrestricted spending. Spending should not be uniform; the Junior and Senior national teams are higher priorities.

4. OUSA restructuring and outreach: I consider myself among the more interested parties in the US community, but I really don't know much about what OUSA does. There are many committees whose function is unclear to me. In addition to restructuring the committee system - figuring out what is working, changing what isn't - the budget must be brought under control through restructuring. Finally, OUSA must do a better job engaging the community. There are countless attackpoint threads which lead no where, and I am unsatisfied with how the OUSA leadership has reached out on the best forum for orienteering discussion. I would also to see regular open calls or chat rooms to discuss topics - perhaps 6-8 times per year. For instance, there could be an open forum on junior programs - what OUSA plans to do, what it is doing, how people can get involved, other ideas and so on.

Relating to this, I'd like to continue work on making OUSA membership more attractive to members of the community. We need to improve our offering and tell more people about it so becoming an OUSA member is second nature for anyone in the US orienteering community.

5. Events - it's not clear how much impact OUSA can have on the event calendar, since clubs organize everything. That said, I'd like to see better coordination among the various clubs and regions for the national meet calendar. I also would like OUSA to encourage additional national meet sprint tournaments like the Seattle sprint competition and Boston sprint camp. Forest racing is the pinnacle of the sport, but sprinting is readily marketable and an attractive alternative.

C • Smith 2016! 27

I use my attackpoint log for much more than just logging my (generally inadequate, especially of late) training - it is means by which I record my thoughts and share them with all of you who have chosen to read my log. I'm the 22nd most viewed log on attackpoint, and while I have been recently passed by actual athletes like TGIF and Cat_T, it is clearly not my training alone which warrants this attention.

Often, I come across something I want to share with others who might appreciate it, and while there are other social media outlets for this broadcasting, I have never found twitter or facebook particularly useful for that purpose. For one, 140 characters is clearly not enough.

Today, I have two nuggets. First, I strongly encourage anyone who finds themself* with an hour of mindless or idle activity to listen to recordings of the Boston Symphony Orchestra on WGBH. BSO is a world class orchestra, and classical music is a wonderful canvas for expressing the human condition. I don't particularly care for either the WGBH or BSO's websites' layout for the concerts, but you can easily pop into the media center and listen to the latest concert - which appear to typically be made available once a week or so. Youtube is another excellent alternative, and I'd be happy to suggest some of my favorite classical music pieces. Today, I listened to pianist Garrick Ohlsson perform the gloriously romantic Piano Concerto No. 1 by Tchaikovsky from a concert July 23 at Tanglewood.

Equivalently:
BSO Media Center: https://www.bso.org/mediacenter#search/wgbh
WGBH: http://www.wgbh.org/programs/The-Boston-Symphony-O...

Second nugget: soundtracks have become one of the outlets for music expression, particularly classical music, of the television era. Howard Shore's soundtrack to the Lord of the Rings Trilogy is as epic and intricate as Wagnerian opera. I recently came across a superb piece of music from the television show Game of Thrones, which sets up a tense buildup to a climactic conclusion.

Light of the Seven, by Ramin Djawadi from Game of Thrones, Season 6.

Left ankle still looks like a bee stung it despite icing, elevation, and Aleve. On the plus side, the ankle generally feels ok through the full range of motion, though the outside ankle under the bone is tender. It ballooned a bit after bike intervals on Friday. I expect to be back in action this week, though I will take great care with it, especially when I encounter unfamiliar sports balls. The appearance of a hematoma along the lower edges of my foot suggests some bleeding.

Left ankle looks like a balloon or an inflated latex glove, though there isn't much pain when I gingerly move it. Running is clearly out of the question for the immediate future, but I think biking may be feasible.

C • Timing 8

My left ankle has basically transformed into a flesh boot, as the swelling - despite icing last night - is ample. However, walking on it and rotating it don't hurt, so I decided to do some stationary bike intervals. I ran the preprogrammed set of 7x2:30 with 2:30 breaks.

I finished up with two sets of a core circuit:
20 inclined crunches
2x20 12 kg kettlebell clean and press
20 4.5 kg shoulder fly
50 oblique crunches
25 kayakers + medicine ball
5 pullups

The second time I went to the mat for the oblique crunches, I dozed off for a few minutes. Oops.

I have decided to make my attendance at the 2017 Canadian Champs in Yukon contingent upon running a sub 18:30 5k this year.

C • 2017 Canadian Champs 9

After work, I got together for a quick pickup game of soccer with some other Broad people. Unfortunately, about thirty minutes in, I rolled my left ankle hard while putting my foot on the ball, and it has swollen considerably.

Link to Rundle photos:
https://www.facebook.com/iamsinht/media_set?set=a....

C • nice photos! 4

445 am started up East end of Rundle. Black Nissan Versa. Expected return by 5 pm, though probably much earlier because of predicted storms. The mountains are glorious in the pre dawn twilight!

Returned to the car at 230p, all is well. More to come.

C • Nice 2

Assault on Rundle! While my trip hadn't been explicitly catered to climb Rundle, I had arranged to arrive Thursday and depart late Tuesday to allow for an attempt. I think this compromised my racing to some extent, as my legs were definitely tired on Saturday and Sunday. It is difficult to have everything.

After a pleasant afternoon and evening of socializing with the Canadians + Will and Biggins, I left Tori's at about 9:30p, drove to the Willow Rock campground, and plopped my tent. I woke up at 3:30, packed everything up, and drove to the EEOR trailhead. I wasn't seriously considering a Traverse; while there was a bus from Banff to Canmore, getting from Canmore to EEOR would have been tedious, so I was committing to returning to the trailhead. I packed four liters of mixed gatorade/water, some M&Ms, Snickers, sunscreen, a jacket, gloves, toque, my phone, and my usual bag o' survival stuff including an emergency blanket, matches, knife, and whistle/compass. Unusually, I didn't have a map. Two glaring errors were I forgot to put in my contacts and my watch wasn't fully charged (hence the patchy track).

Hiking through the night and reaching the ridge just as dawn hit was sublime. It was gloriously cool and pleasant, and the beauty of the mountains cascading into the distance in the gentle light of the rising sun was overwhelming.

My trek to Rundle 4 - my previous turn around point - proceeded uneventfully in about three hours. The few tricky sections felt trivial - since I had already done them, and I was in good form when I started the descent from Rundle 4 to the main peak of Rundle 3. Leaving Rundle 4 required downclimbing a good 10-15m pitch, and seeing holds to place my feet was tricky. The actual trek from 4 to 3 took longer than I expected, but I arrived at the base of the Rundle 3 rock at about 8:30. It's a little tricky to see from the photos, but there is a clear buttress on the SE ridge of Rundle 3. The route that I had read about ascended south of the buttress and up a steep reentrant, climbing a sequence of steps. My first attempt went up the ridge too quickly, and I found myself surrounded by steep walls (waypoint 9). I descended a bit, then traversed west to a different couloir-ish guy with two streams running down it. I climbed a set of shelves that in my head I dubbed the first through fifth steps to about 2840m by my watch. At this point, I had basically stopped scrambling and was climbing. Foremost on my mind was assessing whether I could downclimb each section, and a few times, I backtracked to make sure. Some of the pitches were steep and disconcerting in that I couldn't see my feet at all while downclimbing and had to step by feel and memory alone.

I have read much of summit fever and otherwise intelligent people making bad decisions in the stress of an ascent; eventually, I decided that it was becoming too risky to keep going. Beyond the challenge of downclimbing, I was very concerned I might lose the route - and many of the steps only had a few points at which they could be challenged. Looking ahead, I really think I could have proceeded further, and maybe even made it to the top, but given that I am inexperienced and was traveling solo, it was the right call to turn around. I also had the tricky descent and the ridge ahead; as has been said, getting up is only half the battle.

The views and journey were fantastic, and the challenge was within my abilities but formidable enough that I grew and improved through this adventure. I considered making a different scramble for Tuesday - e.g. Cascade, since a Traverse was impossible, but I'm glad I attempted Rundle, even if I fell short. It was a wonderful experience and memory, and perhaps some day, I will return to Canmore even stronger to continue my adventures in the mountains. Thanks to everyone who gave me advice, support, and knowledge - especially Tori and Marion, and to Will for the pep talks.

Warmup. X-talons would have been preferable to my clunky trail running sneakers.

COC Sprint at University of Calgary! This was a fun course in an interesting area; it was definitely a runner's course, but there were a number of decision points, especially in the network of buildings at the end. I really enjoyed the race, though I was ponderously slow.

COC HPP Sprint Relay! This race had the best festive atmosphere of the weekend. I ran on a team with Carol, David Ross, me, and Biggins running anchor. My leg was the longest at about 3 km (apparently). The character of the race was similar to the morning; it was a great chance to fly. Unfortunately, I was moving at more of a plod. BigWillyStyle caught me at 9; I attacked with all the gusto I could muster. Kudos to a great finish by DGL, FWOC, and GVOC, and to the organizers and announcers extraordinare, Meagan and Brent!

Afterward, our crew went to the public wave pool at the Village Square leisure center. Canadian public pools are excellent, and I've never been in a wave pool before. I can imagine there are some interesting possibilities for coupled oscillations, but I didn't really experiment. We rode the water slides, including one that required climbing stairs outside the building. Delightful. Pizza, games, and beer followed before I said my goodbyes.

Thanks to everyone for a wonderful weekend. While the terrain, racing, mountains, food, and pools make great contributions, it is the people that really define the experience. To my surprise, this is the third Canadian champs I have been to, and it is great to hang out with such a friendly group.

Sprint M21-34 - Splits