Training Log Archive: Wyatt

Up Mt. Misery & back with phone/mp3 player/headphones. Don't normally run with music, and fell pretty solidly on the downhill trail part. Was I paying less attention to my footing?

A reasonable run technically - one 2 minute overshoot error, plus 2x1 minute route choice errors and some lesser stuff isn't too bad for Water Gap - but a pretty poor performance physically.

I need to aim higher though, esp. physically, but also technically. Physically I'm not sure what I should do - my HR was low. I could see that, and yet I was having a hard time whipping myself to push. No nearby competition was present at the event, but the DVOA rankings are a reason to push hard in the race...

Technically, this terrain is different, but is master-able. Better route decisions to balance climb vs. distance would have helped me twice (in opposite ways) and avoiding the use of softly ending reentrants as attackpoints would help too.

Bad warm-up - we were late in arriving to Water Gap - and it was a pretty long drive - >2hr....

Cool-down shadowing AJ, who again made a 90-degree error out of the start, and missed a hilltop on the side of the trail because he was simply following the trail, not reading his description of what to be looking for. We talked about doing that better. He still won White by a wide margin as he ran pretty much all of it.

Event: Dark & Dirty Nighttime Trail Run
 

Event: Buffalo Orienteering Festival
 

Typical Ron Horn Mt. Penn trail run mostly on rocky trails. With the added pleasure of this being at night (8pm start), with a thunderstorm that turned trails into creeks on the 2nd half (after a dry start.) And he attracted over 500 people to do this race...

HR was typically 170-175 on the uphills, then dropped to 160-165 on the downhills, as skill in staying upright was more of a limiting factor than fitness in those segments..

Was 10th for much of the middle of the race, but didn't push hard enough in the 3rd 4th of the race, and while I moved to 9th at the 8.5km point, that was at the head of a pack of 5 runners that had formed right behind me.

Thunderstorm hit in earnest at 8.5km, for the rest of the race it was hard to see 10 feet, and we went from "hard to see the bumps in the trail" to "hard to see the trail, or creek, or whatever it is..." And I got passed, by 4 guys on the downhill at speeds I was unwilling to push given the invisibility of what my feet where going to land on. They had a 10 second gap on me after a long slow downhill on a gravel/grass road, but then we had to scramble up to some mud, and eventually boulders, and I could see the guys ahead slipping on the mud. O'shoes to the rescue (still slipping a bit) I closed the gap quite a bit in the muddy uphill section, and then pulled out over some worse boulders to the side of the 'marked route" through the boulders, to move up to 2nd of the pack of 5. Scrambling hard I was right on the back of the guy in 9th, and as we hit the last 50m of uphill grass, we both pushed extra hard. His high gear was just barely ahead of mine, and one of the last guys I passed managed to sprint by on the right dartting in front of me at the finish line (finishing 0.3 seconds ahead - so I ended up 11th, though less than 1 second from 9th - just missing my top 10 goal. grrrr.

Still quite happy with the effort and result, incl. no hard falls or injury, hopefully some energy left for tomorrow morning's O-race, a pace just a bit faster than Angelica's tempo run earlier today (on a paved, ~1% climb loop), and a finish just 4.5 minutes behind the winner - less than 10%, which seems in reach of what a few months to a year of solid training could do to me.

C • great effort 1

Warmup (a bit fractured), and a 7 minute cooldown...

Plan was 8xMt. Joy hill intervals, but was really late getting started due to Angelica's schedule and delays, and ran totally out of gas, not to mention not being excited about this workout.

So I bailed, and committed myself to the dark & dirty trail run on Sat. to get my hill running workout in...

Over joy and partially back looping through the field, reading Hungary maps.

5x800m
2:50, 2:45, 2:46, 2:44, 2:40
Angelica was 3:17->3:30

Good to run with people. Was afraid to push super hard to avoid tweaking the hamstring, but it seems to have survived this okay.

10 minute warmup & longer cooldown - perhaps helping the hamstring to not tweak as much from this as the 3-weeks-ago-400m's that reinjured the hamstring?

A loop into a new (to me) open space preserve (Airdrie Forest) with Angelica. Unfortunately, the Chester Valley trail (unmaintained old rail right of way) is growing a decent mix of poison ivy - fairly low, but enough for Angelica to get a bad case on one finger, apparently (un)tying her shoes after, or next day? It's looking like mowed grass, deep forest trails, or pavement, are now the safe options.

Apparently http://www.openlandconservancy.org/Trail_Maps.html has some reasonably trail maps of the little local preserves - had never seen that before.