UNO Boulder Dash

Up North Orienteering Club hosted a National Event last weekend: The Boulder Dash. It was on the Burnt Mountain map that we used last year for the North American Orienteering Championships, and this year I got to run on a 1:10,000 scale map instead of 1:15. That made a big difference, because suddenly I could ready the map! Turns out, reading maps is an important part of this sport. 

Ed and I arrived Friday afternoon, for the US Team fundraiser sprint. This was a low-key affair, just a chance to go out into the woods and find some controls, and I struggled with map interpretation. Not good. I went back out for a walk, just reading every feature, trying to make some sense of the contours. There are a lot of little wiggles and wobbles in the contours, so the trick was definitely to take in the bigger picture, to have an idea of what you were looking at. So much rock on the map, that you sort of just had to look beyond it. 

Can't beat the excitement of finding a control in the woods where you expect it! 

Saturday rolled around and I had a nice morning with Sharon, who lives at the edge of the map and graciously hosted us. Then it was off to the races. I knew that this map demands respect, so my plan was to start slowly, and always have a good plan. My main competition was Violeta, the Spanish Team runner living with Barb right now, but I was confident that I could take her on if I could run cleanly. I was in the huntress position today, starting 6 minutes back. 

The race felt unremarkable. I was trundling about slowly, never feeling like I could push the pace, because then I wouldn't be able to read the map and simplify away all the detail. but I was finding controls, one after the other, exactly where I expected them. This feeling is such a rush! I love this sport on days like that! 

Approaching control 7, I saw a flash of yellow up the hill from me - Violeta's jersey! She was clearly still in search-mode, so I snuck up to the control and then blasted away down the hill to 8, hoping she hadn't seen me. Definitely a confidence boost to know you've picked up six minutes on a competitor! She caught me on the hill up to #9, where I was sucking wind and she was blithely bounding away. I tried to maintain contact up the next hill to 10, but simply didn't have the legs. Luckily, this was followed with a trail descent, so I had nearly made contact by 11. We stayed separated by maybe 20 seconds for the rest of the course, neither able to make up ground or out-navigate the other, but in my chase I managed to have the second-fastest finish split among everyone on that course (including the M-20s, a tough group to beat in finish splits), and nearly won the course outright - my companion from the Highlander, Joe, bested me by 10 seconds. So close!

En route to crushing a finish split. I guess that means I could have tried harder during the rest of the race...

The second day of racing is always difficult. The overall winner is the one who is fastest with a combined time from two days, so could I hold off Violeta by 5:30 minutes? I was feeling fairly confident, but given her hill-climbing prowess, I knew that if the course were faster, or if she avoided making a 7-minute error, I'd be in trouble. Pressure!

I was starting first this time. My approach was the same as yesterday: Calm, smooth, and steady. But approaching #2, on the trails, I made a big mistake, overrunning a trail junction for a minute and a half before spidey sense tingled. Arrrrgh. I tried to put the mistake out of my mind, and carried on with the course. I was starting to get into the flow of things, and then there was another long leg to #5, which I again elected to do on trails. Things were going great, until right at the end, when I made a parallel error, thinking I was at the correct little reentrant with a cliff next to an open nose right off the trail, when I was at an identical feature nearby. Five minutes gone, like that.  Now I really was running scared, pressure totally on. I thought I was better than eight minutes of mistakes! 

Following a beagle to the end will always make me happy.

I got back into the game after that, but I wasn't feeling very good about the run. I couldn't stick around to see how Violeta (or Izzy, who hadn't been very far behind on the first day) were going to run. In my infinite wisdom, I was running two races in one day, heading down to Groton for my fifth Grand Tree race. I want to run six this year, and after missing most of the summer thanks to knee-bashing-marathon-not-training, I need two more. So, I abandoned Ed at the event, and got to the start of the trail race with about 20 minutes to spare. Perfect! 

Probably the less said about that race the better. The course was very pretty, a single 9-mi loop through golden leaves and winding trails, with minimal elevation gain. What elevation there was to gain came in the form of short, steep, glacial hills, which were perfect for my tired legs, because I could justify hiking. I found myself in third place after a few miles, and managed to stay there, trailing the woman in 2nd for most of the remaining miles, but never able to close the gap. Not much spark, but a beautiful day for an up-tempo run in the woods, and I won a bottle of home-made wine for my efforts! (it's the thought that counts... I've had better)

Upon getting back to my car, I checked my phone for results, and found that not only had I hung on to first overall, I beat Violeta on day 2, too! She had had a rough time out there, unused to the map or the terrain, but I was mostly just happy to win the overall weekend! I haven't won a National Event in a very long time, so this was pretty exciting for me. Nice confidence boost before the classic distance championships in November! 

I won a box of rocks! Chocolate rocks

Some photos below from the weekend before, at a training camp in VT with my juniors. We had a mix of weather, but some very nice workouts, and Ed was cooking for us, so we had some good food too. Hashtag happy place?


Can't beat days like that for a long rollerski

Secret training

Gorgeous view from the Jericho biathlon range, where the kids raced on rollerskis

Definitely the most important part of any camp is eating.

Craftsbury Eastern Cup

There isn't a huge amount of snow in New England right now. After last year's snowpocalypse, my colleagues at work all have a bit of PTSD, and my colleagues among skiers are just wistfully longing for it to happen again. So far, nothing doing, but at least we've been able to drive to our little Weston loop of the north, Craftsbury. For now, let's ignore the implications of needing to drive further and further to practice this sport. 

CSU has been up to Craftsbury pretty much every weekend since Thanksgiving, in varying groups, with the largest contingent showing up for the Eastern Cup, two weeks back. I figured, you gotta start somewhere, so I signed up for the 5k skate race, since the classic sprint would be too much chaos for a coach to take part in. Easier to stay in the trenches waxing skis. The poor manmade loop of snow at Craftsbury was getting thinner and thinner as nights stayed warm, and the race organizers ultimately had to change the classic sprint to a skate sprint, with heats of four skiers instead of six, in response to the thinning snowpack. 

During the sprint races on Saturday, the snow gods finally heeded our prayers and dribbled down the flakes, first hesitantly and then with gale force. By the end of the day, we'd put six skiers into the heats and we had enough snow that I managed to actually go for a ski on real snow, over lumps and bumps and hills and things; such a change from that manmade concrete that we race on! 

Sunday rolled around, and I woke up remembering how TIRED I get after coaching all day. But the Craftsbury breakfast delivers, and soon I was fueled up with coffee and bacon and ready to attack the day. Still a long day of coaching, but I made sure to put on that bib early, so that when a window opened up with an opportunity to race, I'd be ready! My plan was conservative - accept that my body was tired, that this was my fourth day on snow, and that I haven't been doing rollerski intervals. I knew that I wouldn't be feeling sharp, but if you don't race because you know you won't feel good, you'll never do another race. So, ski the transitions perfectly, maintain good technique, and try to ride those skis as smoothly as possible.

The course was harder than you'd think, for a flat-ish loop done five times. Smooth descent out of the start and around a corner, then up a short steep wall, around a sweeping turn to the right and back down to the bottom fields, then a smaller U-turn, to the left, finishing with a gradual hill that felt like it never ended. I started out right near the end of the good college skiers, so for a few laps I had people to chase. Each lap, I made it a game to see how efficiently I could hunt down my next rabbit, and I tucked past many skiers. It felt good. I stayed controlled on the short, steep, grunt of a climb, and tried to punch it around the wide right-hander. 

Somewhere in there, I lost track of how many laps I was doing. I hadn't been focusing on that, despite reading the riot act to the kids about how only YOU are responsible for the number of laps you've done! Crap, not only was this embarrassing, it may have a very bad outcome. I knew I was somewhere between the 3rd and 4th lap, and a check to my watch made it clear that it was more likely the 3rd. I hadn't caught my 30-second girl, yet, so I looked for her green suit as I came near the lap point, saw her head out for another lap, and figured that I had two to go. Luckily I was right, but that could have ended differently. Idiot! 

It's amazing how freaking hard ski racing can be. I felt like my arms were falling off, my legs were burning, and my hips were coming unglued from my body. You mean you're supposed to train for this sport? With one lap left, I tried to summon a little oomph, but still barely broke from my pedestrian pacing. Strange how a marginal increase in effort up the steep hill leads to so much more pain on the flats, but I managed not to completely trip over myself, and got to the finish eventually. It was good enough for 50th place, out of 205 women, and a better points race than any of mine last year. I suppose that's a good start, and considering there were 20 places inside of 10 seconds ahead of me, I'm not worried. There is still time to ski into this season, and it takes more than four days on snow to get the feeling back!

Muscling my way up the short steep grunt of a hill. Thanks to Regina Sohn, a CSU mom, for the photo.

Next stop, after a week in Rochester, was a week in Quebec. We were worried about the snow conditions, but shouldn't have, as it started to snow on the day we arrived and delivered some gosh-darn-beautiful skiing. I didn't want to leave. 

Skiing, for me, is so much about the people I get to ski with. This bunch of monkeys make it all worthwhile.

Quite the army up in Canada. We tried not to take over the entire trail, but pretty much failed.

I managed to take part in the annual time trial up there. It wasn't as cold as it could have been, but I lacked the willpower to strip down to a race suit, and as such, lacked the need to go much harder than a controlled wheeze. I couldn't hang with Rob and Kathy on the classic portion, so faded back into a pack of my U18 girls to recover, finally getting ahead near the end of the skate portion, after what felt like an insulting amount of work. Managed to maintain my placing among the kids from the Craftsbury weekend, but it would be nice to feel a little snappier. Thanks to Jamie for the photo of me looking like I'm dying during my nature walk. 

Then on to Vermont, where the ski-o community convened. Some good skiing at the Danby Rd, totally the proper way to ring in a new year. 

Next up, hopefully, is the Bogburn. 

Seattle Adventure Running Tournament

Patrick, one of the thinkers/acters/doers in the orienteering community out in Seattle, was hosting a race tournament made up of elimination heats of orienteering sprints. This sounded awesome, so I signed up. Unfortunately, I have since been nursing an overuse injury that just won't go away, so I found myself facing six races over two days from less than 10 miles a week of training. What could possibly go wrong?

The format was elimination heats: everyone started with a time trial, to rank the entire field of 80 runners. Then we were divided into 16 heats of 5, and the top two from each heat moved up, the bottom two moved down, and the middle runner from each heat battled the middle running from the neighboring heat, with the winner moving up and loser moving down. So, you end up with a constantly moving bracket of runners, and ultimately get a single winner. No allowances were made for oldness or femaleness, everyone was in a single race. Of course, this meant that there were many unofficial sub-races going on all weekend!

The time trial went well, and I landed in 19th place. I was not feeling particularly fit or fast, but didn't feel like the first effort had taken too much out of my legs. A good start! We had about two hours before the next race, in a wooded park maybe 10 minutes away from the first spot. In this one, I was ranked #2 in my heat, behind Ali. I took the race at a very controlled pace, since all I had to do was finish in second, and this proved to be well within my ability. 

Team Giggles heading out for heat #2.

The third race was about a half hour away, at North Seattle College. This was a cool area, with a three-layer campus, always difficult to both map and understand on an orienteering map. I knew that this third race needed to be fast - I was up against Ali from my previous heat, and Will and Cameron, winners from our neighboring heat. I seriously doubted that I could beat Ali or Will, but the name of the game would be to make sure I was ahead of Cameron, and running fast enough to beat out the third-place runner from the neighboring heat. As expected, the heat started fast, but I felt comfortable and in control of my navigation, my legs having finally awoken to the fact that we're racing. Alas, I made a bad mistake on the 2nd control in the multi-level area, running a level too high because I didn't realize that we weren't using the third level, only the first two. D'oh! Combined with another 40-second error taking a very bad route to control 7, and I knew I was in trouble. I pushed the remainder of the course as hard as I could, but it wasn't enough. Third in my head, and 22nd overall, but about 20 seconds too slow compared to Nikolay, third place runner in the neighboring heat. Out! Now the best I could do was somewhere from 20th - 40th place. 

Well, nothing to do but gather myself and run well in the fourth and final race of the day. At this point, I was starting to notice that I really hadn't done any training of note in the last two months, but thankfully energy was still relatively high, even if my legs were getting sore from all the high-speed running. Through a twist of fate, I was in a heat with Ed, so my sub-race was definitely to beat him. Maybe I was too cocky, but a heat that should have been mine to win went downhill fast, when I lost two minutes trying and failing to figure out levels on the way to the 2nd control. This multi-level orienteering is so different from anything I've ever trained or raced in before, that I couldn't get my mind to accept that the tunnel symbol actually meant building on the first level. I clawed my way back through most of the field, but it wasn't enough. I could see Ed around the 19th control, but unfortunately he knew he was ahead, and it turns out a man will suffer like he hasn't suffered in YEARS to stay ahead of his lady in a race. Cameron (from the previous heat) was just ahead of Ed, so I was racing for 3rd. I could only close the gap to about 10 seconds before the race ended. D'oh! Now relegated to 30-40th place.

The final two races were at Shoreview Community College, on Sunday. I woke feeling rested, and despite being a little (a lot?) grumpy about making such huge mistakes the day before, I determined all I could do was move on, and perform as best as possible in these last two races. I crushed the first race, despite learning first-hand that you really can't take a shortcut through dense vegetation in Seattle - apparently those Himalayan blackberries are for real. Lost a minute tangled in vines, but thankfully emerged from the other side without losing too much blood. 

The final race was forked, which meant we didn't all have the same order of controls, but we all went to them all eventually. It was a lot of fun, and I had a great battle withe Celia, a New Zealand runner who is living in Seattle for now. I found a little more in my legs to give on the finish chute of death, and held her off for the heat win, and 13th overall, but... 31st in the tournament.

While this was definitely not my best showing at an orienteering race, it was an immensely fun format, and a fabulous weekend. I had been needing a bit of a kick to get going with some training again, and getting my butt kicked was exactly what the doctor ordered. Doing that much running was not great for my injury, but, the fun outweighed any pain.

We spent Sunday evening exploring Seattle a bit, before it was back home on a red-eye. Totally worth the trip, and hopefully we can recreate that environment at Boston Sprint Camp next June!