Training Log Archive: EChild

Up.

A few notes before I begin: The weather was chilly and overcast, so not ideal conditions but at least it wasn't pouring. As long as I was moving it was fine. There has been a lot of water from rain and snow melt, and there were at least a couple of places where the water was significant enough to form standing ponds or marshes in areas marked as not even being wet on the map. I was able to figure it out, but it definitely confused me at times.

I don't really know how to explain it. I wasn't making mistakes, but I wasn't orienteering well either. I was just going to the area and not thinking about what I was doing, probably because I was going really slowly. At number nine I stopped, took a deep breath, and tried to pick up the pace and focus on my orienteering, but I had to do it again by the time I got to eleven. After hitting sixteen the woods cleared up a bit (the woods were pretty slow, you couldn't run fast for long before having to slow down) and I was able to focus a bit more.

So it wasn't that I had a bad day, I was just using poor technique and I worked towards focus more on the important stuff.

Up. Before the training course.

The training after the course (and immediately after a foot-long sub). I definitely felt a little slow from lunch at first, but I was moving fairly well. The training was one continuous course divided into five segments: Compass course, contour course, control pick, corridor-O, full-speed/no-mistake.

The compass part went fairly well, although I got a bit off to the left of two, to the right of number four, and overshot six. As I mentioned above, the woods weren't terrific, and so I would have to go around something and try to correct for the difference later on. This made it somewhat difficult, but I managed to figure them out fairly quickly (except six, that was just bad by me).

The contour course was fairly straight-forward although my speed wasn't terrific. No significant issues.

the control pick went fairly well also, but I did overshoot one control and get off to one side or another of a couple. I was trying to make sure I maintained a decent speed because the purpose is being able to maintain a flow , but if I'm jogging then it's not much of a flow. Too viscous. Also, the trails were taken off the map for this section (and the contour course as well, but it's a contour course).

The corridor-O was a little better because it was the first time I was really forced to navigate precisely. The map had a lot of detail, but the details were mostly significant features so the navigation was fairly easy. With the corridor I was forced to pay close attention, so I think it really helped in terms of getting me in the zone. There were a couple confusing parts, one of which I still don't understand the logic behind the mapping, but I was able to do almost all of it with little issue.

The last part was the full-speed no-mistake part, and I really wanted to go full speed with no mistakes. I made quick and simple route-choices and ran them hard, and I was able to hit most of the controls without significant issue. Sometimes I was forced to slow down because of vegetation or rocks, but I pushed hard when I could. I can only think of one significant error when I got on the wrong side of a hill (parallel error), but I did have small errors on a few of the controls. I was pretty happy with myself, though, because I was able to run hard with few mistakes on this terrain if I really focused on it.

Down, back to the car.

CORE!

Saturday Long Advanced - Splits