Training Log Archive: Bash

Rode to Albion Hills for a sunset tour of the single track surrounded by spectacular autumn leaves. Couldn't wipe the smile off my face. This is why I ride a bike! :-)

This is the week I'm starting to semi-follow the Coast to Coast training program. It's the beginning of the 8-week "Phase 2 - Speed and Endurance" segment. I missed "Phase 1 - Strength and Endurance" but hope that my regular training and racing was enough.

Steve Gurney's companion notes are very practical. He gives advice about moving training sessions around in the week (OK if you don't do two hard running sessions on back to back days), moving workouts from different days onto the same day, cutting back training hours if you don't have enough time (reduce the cycling), and tapering if you have a race that the training program doesn't include. With all that flexibility, I should be able to let the program guide me.

The kayaking is going to be the hard part in Canada. We have a kayak erg in our basement but it's booooring so I'll be looking for water to paddle on. 'Bent and I are attending the Georgian Bay Storm Gathering in Nobel this weekend so we'll be doing lots of cold water kayaking with some amazing people. Should be fun!

It's a big day for us... 'Bent and BulletDog are hiking home from work - a little over 4 km cross-country. This is 'Bent's first major expedition on foot since his knee surgery 18 days ago. He plans to ride his bike in tomorrow. I've got his ice pack waiting!

Update: 'Bent and BulletDog are home. No knee pain and he even jogged for a minute - yay!

Joined 'Bent for an easy kneehab ride. I took Princess to test her toughness on gravel and uneven ground. She did fine on her skinny tires, even when I had to bounce through the grass to avoid hitting people. 'Bent was riding well!

GLOF Long / Ontario Championship - Almost all my A Meet Long orienteering races plunge into disaster, usually on a long leg. It makes no sense that an adventure racer should be good at Sprints and bad at Long courses, but that's how it is. Maybe it's a concentration problem. I go into every Long race believing that I'm finally going to banish the curse - and so far, I've always been wrong. But today I came close.

Running down the hill from the start, I was surprised to see that the first leg was long - over 1 km with no obvious route choice. There was a curve in the trail and I started away from it in one direction, then circled back to it. (Luckily, I couldn't hear Hammer laughing at me from above.) I took a fairly straight route to #1 using trails where I could. In spite of the time wasted scratching my head at the start, this might have been my best-ever result on a long leg - 3rd fastest split of 28 men and women on our course (13:51). Yahoo!

The leg to #3 was another long one - about 1.2 km - and I wasn't as lucky. After doing the hard part, I had an easy trail run to an obvious attackpoint for the control but I got over-enthusiastic and decided to cut the corner between two trails instead of running to their junction. Unfortunately, when I left the trail, I wasn't where I thought I was. I had to scramble across a steep-sided creek instead of crossing a nice bridge, then when I reached the main trail up above, I wasn't 100% sure which direction to turn. I guessed incorrectly (although in hindsight, the first guess should have been the other way) and had to turn around. Argghhh!!! About 7-8 minutes wasted there. Then I made what felt like a minor error on the way to #4 but Winsplits tells me it was worth 3-4 minutes. That must have been a bad route choice as well since the error didn't take that much time.

I punched #4 and BOOM, someone slammed a baseball bat into my skull. WTF??!!? I was seeing stars - and when they cleared, I also saw a log at forehead level which my hat brim had hidden from my peripheral vision. I was shaken up and in pain and wondered if I should stop racing. As I stumbled down the hill, I saw Valerie and told her what had happened - just in case I didn't show up at the finish. From that point on, I kept trying to analyze whether I was getting stupid or uncoordinated. The problem is, I always spend part of any orienteering race feeling stupid or uncoordinated, so it was really hard to tell!

It seems that a good smack on the noggin was exactly what I needed, since my orienteering and running improved steadily after that. My splits for #8/#9/#10 were 2nd/3rd/2nd of 28. I finished 2nd in my category (9th on the course), 8 minutes behind Marketa, which was just fine by me. I didn't quite banish the curse but this Long race was much less disastrous than usual.

So over the weekend, I came home with a full set - Ontario Champs gold, silver and bronze . Using the cool race analysis tools, it appears that my speed, endurance and strength were fine but navigation skills were the limiting factor. On average, my route choice and execution were good but not great. I haven't orienteered much this year and you just can't fake it at a meet like this. But that's OK - at least I know what I have to work on.

Awesome weekend overall. Excellent job by all the GHO volunteers and Valerie!

Long 5 - Splits

Event: 2010 Golden Leaf Orienteering Fest
 

Thanks to all the volunteers who worked so hard to bring us another amazing Golden Leaf Orienteering Festival. Canterbury Hills Camp was a perfect venue with a grassy central amphitheatre where people could socialize, picnic and watch racers come into the finish. Cabins and meals were available onsite. All 4 races of GLOF weekend started at or near the camp and shared the same finish chute, yet the 3 races that I did each had their own distinctive character. Everything about GLOF was top notch - new maps, interesting courses with tough route choice, warm sunshine and none other than Valerie Meyer managing the SI.

GLOF Sprint / Ontario Championship - This was a forested sprint so I wasn't sure how it would go for me. For some reason, I've been doing well at park and campus sprints over the past few years. Over the same time period, I've lost my touch for Middle distance so the change has not all been good.

As it turned out, the forest part wasn't the problem. The only control I blew was #1, less than 100 m from the start - before we even entered the forest. I wasn't paying attention to the map and I got drawn to the wrong flag, which wasted about 30 seconds. After that, it felt like things went OK but I wouldn't have said it was outstanding.

As it turned out, it was my best run of the weekend and it stood up pretty well. I won my age group and took home a pair of the awesome new red Canada mittens from The Bay. My best two splits (2nd of 30 on the course) were late in the race on legs that involved steep climbs up big, slippery embankments. I guess everyone has his or her specialty and mine is a little weird! I'm sure we'll need to do some steep climbs in Salomon Dontgetlost.ca Raid The Hammer so I'll get to practise this again soon.

GLOF Middle / Ontario Championship - Glenn B. finished this course before I did and complained of a huge error he'd made on #2 due to inattention. As a result, I was super-careful up to that point, then I totally blew #3, just 200 m away. It was in a busy area of the map with spaghetti-style ridges and re-entrants, and my plan for the leg was too imprecise. I got what I deserved - a seemingly endless period of wandering along the hillside as I tried to relocate. Turns out it was only a 5-minute error but it sure felt longer!

Thanks to WinSplits analysis, I realized that I also made a really bad route choice on #7 and lost several more minutes. I took trails where a cross-country route would have been more efficient.

Other than those glitches and some slow-as-molasses running on a couple of legs, the race went fine. I squeaked in 3rd in my age category. Huge congrats to Trudy D who finished 2nd on a tough course and came close to beating Marketa. Seriously impressive!

Sprint 3 - Splits

Middle 5 - Splits

Leanimal and I went to Forks of the Credit Park for an autumn photography session. We were there for most of the morning and given that we travelled several kilometers, climbed up and down the escarpment, and bushwhacked through goldenrod over our heads, I figure we can log some of it. We should have some nice pics.

For the first time, I used my shiny new iPhone to check the Internet from the woods. Untamed New England and Guats weren't quite done the AR World Championship yet but they are done now. Congrats, all!

Core class.

Class with substitute instructor. Caron had told her that we "like to work hard" so she ramped it up. This would have been a great class for anyone who thinks that yoga shouldn't be logged on Attackpoint! (Although I don't log the relaxation - ya gotta have some standards.) One of the tougher things for me was the series of linked one-legged balancing poses where we had to close our eyes - yikes! Most people depend on a visual focal point to keep balanced so this required lots of little foot and leg muscles to work hard and stay in control.

My muscles were screaming at a number of points in the class so I tried to use it as mental toughness training, i.e. do I *really* need to stop doing this or is my brain just telling me that it's painful?

This is just too good not to share. (Bender, please forgive me!) There were pro photographers at the Toad offering many different photo products after the race. The e-mail sent to over 1,000 participants included these examples of the new Trading Card and Magazine Cover we can get made up with our pics. Obviously, they picked a hot guy who they figured would sell a lot of photo products for them. I think we were all expecting this but now it's official... Bender has become the newest male model in our midst, joining the likes of Hansel and Zoolander.

If anyone would like to buy a Bender trading card, I'd be happy to direct you to the website. :-)

First run since the Toad. Around Palgrave West under the careful supervision of BulletDog. Felt surprisingly energetic but could tell that my quads/hams would start to hurt a lot sooner than usual if I was foolish enough to attempt a long run.