West Point A meet

This last weekend was an A meet down at West Point, and we had great weather, great courses, and a really fun time. Ed and I drove to Poughkeepsie Friday night to stay at Ali's parents' house, and along the way found THE worst Chinese restaurant I've ever been to. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised when the name of the place is "Tasty China restaurant". Well, we didn't get sick...


Saturday was sunny and pleasant, and we had two races on the agenda: A middle distance and a sprint. The terrain around the campground (nice central location, and most people were camped there) was pretty crappy, I thought - lots of dead trees down, lots of knee-high woody shrubs, and lots of rocks underfoot. But the maps were alright, and the course was nice. I had a really crappy run, just couldn't get my body to cooperate with what my head was telling me to do, and while I did have some decent legs out there, mostly I was just not thinking very hard, and paying for it by hemorrhaging minutes to the winners. Sigh. More whining and more details on my training log.

Soon after finishing, it was time for the sprint, which really was just a shorter middle distance - not all that high-speed except for the end. I made a horrible mistake on #7, basically messing up the scale of the map and way overrunning the feature, but managing to make things make sense in my head anyway. That put a damper on the rest of the course, because when you lose 5 minutes in a 20min race, you're out of it. Kind of disappointing, but the day was so nice, and it was so much fun to hang out with everyone, that I was in a good mood by the time we left, anyway. To top it off, dinner at Ali's place used 11 avocados, for 9 people, so life was pretty good, all in all.

We had a very large crowd of CSU runners at this meet, so tried to get a photo of everyone. Unfortunately, we couldn't round up a couple - this photo is missing Peter, Ken Sr, Ken Jr, Brendan, Pia, Mark, Tor and Lukas, Bill, Dean, and probably a few more. Still cool to have so many from the club all there!



Ken is a crazy old man, so he brought his rollerskis, so naturally Nikolay went out skiing too, as well as a couple others who would fit into Ali's boots. Mixing sports! Ahhh!

Much lounging about on the pavement, as per usual.
Clem took it to a whole new level, but in his defense, the pavement was wonderfully warm. Of course, pavement lounging can quickly be interrupted when a cadet comes over and tells you that a Hummer is coming through so we'd better move. Right, we're at West Point. Actually, you could hear the firing range from all the points on the course, kind of a reminder not to get TOO lost...

Some photos from the sprint, courtesy of Ed. I don't look very fast compared to Ross or Ali, but I guess I wasn't that motivated after my 5min mistake.



Rosstopher.

The Ali-gator.

The Kens.

Ed finishing the middle race in the morning, with his fancy new headcam. That he won't let anyone watch because he doesn't want anyone to see all his mistakes.

Speedy Sam finishing the middle.

Giovanni made himself a chocolate sandwich - two pieces of bread and some chocolate in the middle. Why haven't I thought of that yet?

Sunday was the long distance race, and it certainly did feel pretty long and hilly. Luckily the terrain was a lot nicer - more open, with many fewer rocks. I had a much better race, very solid navigationally, if not exceptional, and only made one questionable route choice. On paper it looked good, in reality, the terrain over there was just slower. Details.


I ended up 5th for the weekend, which isn't too bad, but that's the trouble with expectations - they keep rising, while your performance has ups and downs and just won't keep pace with those expectations. Ah well, I have some time to train between now and the next big race, at the end of May.

Running in the woods

I've been doing a lot of running in the woods lately, and it's been wicked fun. This, combined with being out in the field a couple days, combined with the end of the semester, has kept me sort of busy. But it's fun. I just need to come up for air occasionally.

Two weekends ago, I headed to Pawtuckaway for a day, in the company of Giacomo and Alexei, and confirmed my belief that Alexei may be a robot - he wasn't slowing down, even four hours and 35km later. I was pretty trashed, and Giacomo's legs were cramping to the point where he was falling over and whimpering, luckily we stuffed him with some Mcdonald's and a couple hours later he was able to walk again. It was a beautiful day to be in the woods, and we did a re-run of the long distance course from the World Cup at Pawtuckaway in 1992.

The map was at 1:15,000 scale, which made it a bit hard to read, because Pawtuckaway has so many damn features, but once you got moving it wasn't so bad. I did make a 22 minute mistake, which was humbling - nothing like a trip to Pawtuckaway to put your ego back in it's place, I knew the orienteering last weekend had felt too easy! This map is a bit tricky to read, because it was printed for putting in ONA, with the routes of the winners on it, and both the men's and women's courses printed. I made it through #8 on the women's course before I realized I had to go back, if I were to meet Giacomo and Alexei in time for the next group training.

We ran this one together, trading off who was leading. It went really well, and I was feeling all smug, so I headed out on the next course expecting similar results. Unfortunately, I was more tired and dehydrated and hungry than I thought, and after about the third control, I was just walking. Not fun.

After a day of doing absolutely NOTHING (sometimes, you need those), I was recovered enough to jog down to Comm ave to watch the marathon. Our friend Chris was running, and we managed to find him in the throngs of people, but not to take any photos. Instead, I took a photo of the fast people: They were really speedy. It was impressive. Also impressive was the guy running 26 miles in a full gorilla suit, with the head thing. No way can you return that suit after that...

After some frantic fieldwork, attempting to get to all my sites in the Westfield in one week, I was feeling a bit worn down, but ready for the next adventure. And really, when this is work, how can you complain?

So, last weekend, a bunch of CSUers headed to Western Connecticut and Harriman, for a training camp and a local meet. The local meet was Saturday, in the pouring rain, but it actually wasn't as bad as I feared - just wet, not too cold. Although things had the potential to get cold when all my dry clothes were in Ali's car, and she and Ross took her car to get the far-off controls while I was running a second course. I came back to no car, and was about to collapse in a little heap of cold tired wet Alex, when Sam poked her head out of her car and invited me in. Phew. Disaster averted!
Route and course from the long race. I was slower than I wanted to be, but didn't make many mistakes, just one goof and one really bad route choice.
The second course - meant to be done against someone to make it fast and exciting, but everyone else had already started, since we had gotten there a little late.

We spent the night at Ali's parents' house in Poughkeepsie, which was great, and then headed down to Harriman Sunday morning. It was sunny and warm, which was pretty wonderful after the deluge on Saturday.

Ross and Sam's reactions to Sunday's sunshine:

First exercise was a control pick, and then we headed straight into three intervals, of about 5-7min. We ran these interval start, so that you were always chasing or being chased, and that made things really fun. I jumped over a snake at one point, and made a very girly noise. I was surprised!

As tends to be usual at our training camps, we picnicked in a parking lot, just loving the sunshine, and trying to guzzle enough water that we could finish the day's training. The second exercise was a corridor training, where you're supposed to use your compass to go straight. It's a lot harder than it looks.


After that, we headed out one more time on a route choice exercise - run in pairs, and meet at each control to discuss which way you're going, and see which one is faster. This was really fun, but I was really tired at this point. Too much fun for my own good!

You know it's a good day when legs and shoes look like this at the end...

Winter's last gasp

Sunday was the last day Magic Mountain was open, and Ed was dead-set on skiing it. Twist my arm, why don'tcha. Ed pointed out that as long as you manage your expectations, anything is awesome, and that meant I had a really good time. There were some runs that weren't going to make it through the day, but we managed to not have to take off our skis at any point. This is normally not a goal, but then again, there is normally snow all the way down the runs...


This was one of the better runs, in terms of coverage. I went with the under-the-tree line, didn't lose my hat so it's all good.

Looking up...
Looking down.

Since springtime in Vermont means the sap is flowing, Ed has been up there helping his cousin Rob boil water pretty much constantly the last week. Rob re-built the sugar house, and now there is a bench for sitting, and a bigger evaporator. And many fewer drips off of the roof.


Louisa and her puppy.

A good weekend! Now back to chipping away at the list of impending doom...

CSU training weekend

One thing that some of the national orienteering team members are trying to do is to hold more training camps, especially those of the weekend variety in easily-accessible areas. The Western Connecticut folks held a training weekend while I was at Ski WOC, and this last weekend, CSU hosted a weekend, basically by compiling some of the already-existing options. Saturday everyone met up at Breakheart to run the "semi-permanent" course that I'd set for the month of April, and then gathered at Brendan's house to have lunch, and then run some sprints at Tufts on Brendan's new ISSOM sprint map there. Sunday, Ed and Ian were hosting a local meet at Rocky Woods, in Dover, so we all headed down there. The weather was awesome, so we had good turnouts.
My route from Saturday's training at Breakheart - it felt so good to run in the woods! I guess I missed orienteering.

I missed Brendan's sprint in the afternoon because I had to go to the CSU junior end-of-season party, which was awesome. Those kids are great, and I got all sorts of warm fuzzies inside watching the seniors get their "athlete" certificates from Rob. *sniff*. The skiers had decided that they wanted to have an energy bar competition at the party, and a whole bunch of them came up with different recipes for energy bars, which we judged (the distinguished panel of judges was Jamie, Rob, myself, and Amie) based on taste, nutrition, and packageability/presentation. Although there were some that weren't bad, I can't believe I skipped dessert to eat energy bars. Even with just a bite from each one, that's a lot, and some of them were pretty bad. oof.


Sunday was CSU's local meet at Rocky Woods, and Ian and Ed did a great job with it, attracting 85 people. I ran the red course, which was 8.3km, pretty long for the first real orienteering race of the year, but Ian designed a fun course, and I didn't realize I'd been out there for so long. Things were pretty clean on the navigation front, just a couple bobbles, but I felt really in control of where I was going. Such a nice feeling! I ended up finishing pretty well - I managed to beat Ali, since she decided to spend an extra 9 minutes on #12, but Peter still got me. I think he's my nemesis this season, luckily he's old, so sometimes I can outrun him, but not on Sunday. Results for the red course with splits - I was the second woman, but Sam beat me by 19 minutes, so that actually wasn't that impressive.

Ed and Ian running the show.

Ian decided to run the white course (easiest one) while picking up its controls, and he did it in 11 minutes - the previous first place person had taken 39 minutes.

It was a sleepy, sunny, sort of day. Brendan and Ross took full advantage of the sunshine before heading out to pick up controls.

I also finally got some new orienteering shoes. My old shoes were starting to completely disintegrate, after 680 miles (yea training logs and OCD logging...) in the woods. I was impressed they lasted so long, and I had thought maybe I could get another season out of them, but I decided this weekend that enough is enough. And the new ones are shiny!

Ski WOC Relay

Speaking of the snow that had been coming down all week... It had been dumping snow and blowing it all over the place for most of the week - walking down the path to breakfast, the snow was definitely above my knees!

The relay was the last race of the week. Ali was scrambling, after her fantastic race the day before, I was going out second, to try to hold whatever place she brought us in, and Cristina was anchoring. Cristina basically only came to Sweden to complete the relay team for us, and not being a natural-born skier (she bought skis 3 weeks ago...), she was a bit nervous. I can't blame her! The guys' team was Scott, Greg, and Adrian.

Ali started for us (clearly, not nervous here), and she skied well, although she described her race as shaky - she came in 6th, just behind Finland, Czech Republic, and Switzerland, and ahead of Sweden. Russia and Norway were off the front already.
Relay map. You may have to click on it to see the whole thing. Again, this just shows one of a couple possible forked routes, but it gives a good idea of the general routes people were taking. My #7 was between the two loops of trail, two contours higher than the one shown here.

I took off just behind the Swiss girl, and let her block the wind across the windy field, and then we had different forkings. I caught the Czech girl just before coming back into the stadium, and actually climbed faster than her up the big hill from yesterday, so that was nice. The Swiss girl was just in front of me going up the hill, having had shorter forkings on the south side of the bridge, and having her dangling out there just uphill from me was motivating. I made contact as we double poled across the top of the map, and then I dropped her on the downhill, using this crazy trick called "good orienteering", while skiing like a ninja. I ended up putting 47 seconds on her by the tag zone, and came to the tag in 5th (Sweden had passed me on the climb).

Our time keeper had been negligent, and they weren't announcing any teams other than the top three at the pre-warning (lame), so Cristina wasn't actually ready for me when I came through. I came sliding around the corner, bellowing "CRISTINA!!!!!!" as I hadn't seen anyone in the tag zone - luckily, she was nearly ready, but that isn't exactly a relaxed way to start your leg of the relay...


Punching at one of the controls with the touch-free EMIT system, which is an AWESOME way to have ski-o controls set up.

Cristina bringing it home, for 8th place! Switzerland and Czech Republic caught up to her quickly, but given that our major goal was just to beat the British team, this was actually expected. Lithuania caught up at some point while she was out there, too, but she held off many of the other teams, most notably Belarus, Hungary, and Japan, who I don't think we've ever beaten before. We were incredibly stoked about our finish, that was a really great way to end the week. The guys did quite well, too, finishing 15th. There are a lot more mens teams out there, but all three of them skied a very solid race.

The US women's relay team!
I don't know what is going on in this photo, but I think it's pretty funny.

I was happy to have finally skied a clean race, and a race that I feel good about. It feels so good to pick up places in a relay.

After the relay, we had a couple hours to pack up before the banquet, so I headed out for one last classic ski - for some reason, I'm happier when I close out the ski season with a classic ski, especially when it's on extra blue. This really made me happy, and the sun was out, and I had some views - it just cemented the feeling of finishing the week on a high note.
Ali playing with fire - she totally deserves being called an astrologist when she does stuff like that with her hands over the candles...

The organizers wanted each team to sign something and leave it as a souvenir (I think they were thinking poster, or something along those lines...), so, we autographed Adrian's broken ski, which had both the tip and the tail snapped off.

The banquet was good fun, but the 8-hour bus ride back to Stockholm with our closest drunken Russian ski orienteering friends at 1am was a little less enjoyable. At least Greg found some chocolate-covered muffins when we got to the airport.

Another Ski WOC is in the books. It was hard to feel like I wasn't fit enough for it, but at least that is something that can be improved. At least I did feel like I was prepared for the orienteering bit, this year. I am excited for the World Cups next season - we have some really good energy going on the team right now, and I think it's time to take full advantage of that. Despite having had some disappointing races, I left this Ski WOC feeling like good stuff is underway, and excited for the future.