The Billygoat

The Billygoat is probably my favorite orienteering race around, mostly because it is so low-key and silly. At least, it's supposed to be like that, it always seems to turn into a super hard, super long, super hilly, super contended race. This was the sixth Billygoat I've run in, and I think last year is still the best I've ever run - I ended up 21st last year, so I got my initials on one of the control codes. Not so good this year, I ended up 32nd, so unless we have tons of controls, I won't get a code of my own again. The U.S. team was doing a fundraiser race on Saturday - a team sprint, that ended up being a whole bunch of fun. I teamed up with Becky, and while neither of us had horrible races, I don't think either of us ran quite as fast or as clean as we could have. Luckily, there were no other all-women's teams, so we won, by default.

Ed came and helped with results, which apparently are a pain to do with the existing orienteering software. So he's planning to write his own.

Katia and Giovanni tag off and head into another leg of the race.

Becky finishing a leg of the race.

My nemesis from last week! Peter finishing the race.

Uphill finishes SUCK. We got one on Sunday, too.

It was Ross's birthday on Saturday, so Sam made two different kinds of cupcakes, about fifty of them, all told. Peanut butter chocolate (with a reeses cup inside) and coconut. Ross gets excited when he's the center of attention.

Attempting to light a candle, in a windy field.

Peter and Gail guarding the cupcakes.

My calves had been in a lot of pain during Saturday's race, but instead of taking the time to massage them out and try to stretch, I went out for pizza and beer with all our orienteering friends, and wasted half the night playing boggle. Billygoat morning came too soon, and we drove over to Huntington state park in a serious-looking rainstorm. Luckily, the rain stopped by the time we started, but it was wicked humid. Ed had decided not to race to try and fix his ankle, so I left him my camera, and he took some photos of the march to the start.

HI ED!!!!

Ready, GO!

I started relatively fast, trying to hang with some of the fast kids. Pretty soon, though, just about as my heartrate inched towards my threshold, my calves made themselves known, in a burning sort of fashion. Shortly after my trail run to #3, I knew I was in trouble. My shin had gone numb, too, but I could still sort of use my quads, so I kept up with Becky and Hannah a little longer, stumbling and tripping with every step, since I couldn't tell what my feet were doing. But on a hill up to #5, I was done. I wasn't going to finish the race at this speed. Depressed, angry, and frustrated, I started walking, willing my calves to relax.
We chose #2 to skip - not a bad skip, but it was early in the race, so later on, we knew our pack was going to be able to skip a control and we'd have to hit them all.

After walking to #7, I tried running again to 8, and promptly made a parallel error involving marshes and reentrants. So I walked a little longer, and finally by #9, I could run again without my calves blowing up. Woo. I started jogging towards 10, and a group of old-but-accurates caught up with me. I decided that I didn't feel like running with them, so tried to run away, but the problem with orienteering is that it's really hard to open a gap, since your competitors can see where you're running, and they'll be able to run faster because they don't need to navigate as much as you are, if you're in front. So, the group stayed pretty together, and then Becky reappeared, from behind me. Turns out, she'd just turned her ankle and had a pretty negative spell, and was thinking of dropping out of the race. Since we are pretty similar in speed, I convinced her to keep running, if only so that we could both have company for the rest of the race.

So, we started running together, and chatting to each other, and life got a lot better. By #27, I was feeling spunky again, and so was Becky, so the pace went up, and my calves seemed to be cooperating. We bobbled a bit around 29-30, but we were ahead of our group. But, then they skipped #31, and we were behind them, with tired legs. We could see Peter and Angelica and Kseniya ahead of us on the trail to 33, but being tired, neither Becky nor I saw the fast, southern option to 33, and we lost about a minute and a half to our competitors by taking the little windy trail around to the north. Boooo. The last couple controls were fine, navigationally, but I was exhausted. When we finally hit the finish, it was up a hill, an insultingly steep hill, and I had doubts that I would make it up without collapsing. The photo shows Becky telling me there is no way in hell she is going to let me walk up the hill, so I made it up, jogging, but definitely should have taken in more calories around 1hr in.

"Becks, I think I'm going to have to walk this uphill". "No way am I letting you do that!"

Overall, we ended up 7th and 8th woman (Becky let me win the "sprint" for the finish), so not great, but, it was really fun to run with a partner, even if both of us weren't really in it with a fighting spirit for the last two thirds of the race... But now, time to take care of these calves. Foam roller torture time.

New 5k PR

Every Tuesday in the non-snowy months, the Sugarloaf Mountain Athletic Club runs a 5k race, at a park in Northampton. I ran this once before, and posted a PR by a good bit, hitting 21:02. I wasn't expecting to do that again, and given my pretty unfocused training the last few months, combined with a lot less sleep than I'd like this past week, I wasn't expecting much speed. But I strapped on the light shoes, did a barely-enough warmup, and set myself a goal: finish in front of Peter Gagarin. He ran 22:xx two weeks ago, and I figured breaking 22 today would be good, so I thought it would be close. The challenge was issued about a month ago, see who was faster at running, and although my times from last year put me in front, you have to be worried, because Peter doesn't take a bet he doesn't think he'll win, and he's fixed the injury that was holding him back last year.

So I lined up, they said "go", and I took off - this course starts with a downhill, and I can do downhills. After the downhill I was passed by a steady stream of people as I settled into my pace, it felt easy, in the way the first interval feels easy if you're actually going the pace you want at the track, but you know it's going to start hurting pretty soon. We go up the first hill, and I tried to run within my abilities, just nice and light and relaxed, and by now there were fewer people passing me. I could see that I was the fifth girl, behind Ali, Kelsey Allen, her friend Kristine, and a teenager with an ipod, but I knew the race wasn't really about beating them - they'd either be faster or I would. I was in it for the time, and to beat Peter. Stay focused, kiddo.

I rolled through the first mile in 6:36 - my plan had been to go for 7min miles, because that would put me at something below 22min, but this didn't feel that hard, yet, so I didn't slow down. We did the loop through the field and headed down that first hill again, and I used it to narrow the gap between myself and ipod-girl and Kris. Ali and Kelsey were long gone, but the other two didn't seem to be pulling away very fast, encouraging. Every time I turned a corner, I was checking behind me for Peter, but he was wearing a gray teeshirt in a field of people wearing white and gray teeshirts, so I couldn't really tell if he was closing.

As we cruised along the river, I could feel the work load settling into my legs. This pace was ok, but I knew there was a steep hill coming up just after 2 miles, and I could tell that I was right on the brink of my lactate threshold - wouldn't take much to put me over and into a world of hurt. I hit the 2mi mark at 13:13, still right on 6:36 pace, but I was definitely starting to feel it. Another check for Peter and I thought I saw him back there, just had to survive this hill and the last false flat mile... The shirtless guy I'd been pacing for the last mile dropped me up the hill, but I closed the gap to Kris, focusing on a light stride, relaxed shoulders, just flow. We got to the top and I was solidly in the hurt box, legs feeling heavy with lactic acid burning, but if there's anything I ever learned from racing a bike, it's that you don't rest after uphills - you attack. So I surged, Kris matched it, pulled ahead, and dragged me up to ipod-girl. ipod-girl was looking pretty wasted, but I couldn't help it, I rested a second or two behind her, and Kris got a gap.

The last mile of this course is just stupidly painful. I had passed ipod-girl, and was in full-on fat-kid-with-asthma-breathing mode, with my own phlegm threatening to choke me any second. My legs were burning, and there was none of this relaxed pacing stuff going on anymore. I could see my rabbit, and I was doing my darnedest to chase her down, as we got to the crest of the little bump at 2.7ish, I checked my watch, 19min - less than 3 minutes left, you can suffer through just about anything for 3 minutes! Suck it up and run, bitch!

I made contact with Kris just as we hit the 3mi mark (20:24 - that third mile is tough), and started questioning whether I had the fight in me today to take her in a sprint. I was exploring dark corners of my pain cave I haven't been to in years, and I really wanted to lie down and breathe. But we hit the pavement, and I found some fight, went for it - kicking at the end of a race is somewhat transcendental for me, it takes a massive amount of energy to overcome the first barrier of deciding I'm going to do it, but then, once I do, I haven't been beaten in a full kick, yet. It's this realization that all you have to do is go faster than the other person, and that's purely mental. Booyah. But holy moly was that a painful last 100m, I thought I might actually die if I didn't start breathing soon.

In the end, I finished in 20:59, a new PR, and compared to last August, when I was just 3 seconds slower, a much harder effort (avg HR was 183 this time, and 179 last August). But I ended up as the 3rd woman, and 16th overall, so that's pretty cool, though less exciting than beating Peter (who did set an age-class record, so he was happy even though he lost the bet). Hopefully I don't have to do another one of these for at least a week or two, when the memory of the pain fades. Racing is tough. But it's quite encouraging to see this speed at the beginning of the summer; clearly, I'm fitter than I thought. Woo! Now to just stay un-broken...

Map and HR graph.

Orienteering headcam

Ed was swayed by the awesomeness that people have been producing overlaying maps with google earth and headcam footage, and bought a headcam. I tried it out last Thursday night at the park-o at Cat Rock, and discovered that while it's a bit annoying to have on my head, there are a lot of good training opportunities to be had from it. For example, I discovered that I bash through branches head-first, mostly, and that I breathe really heavily. Of course, the problem with running with a headcam is that you know people are "watching", so you are trying to run really, really fast. And this leads to more heavy breathing. I attempted to narrate my way through the video, but it's hard to talk when you're going at race pace, so mostly it's just heavy breathing, and some wheezing near the end, for good measure. Luckily all that heavy breathing was good for something - I was second on the day, just over a minute behind Ross, which will probably never happen again in history. Granted, I think I was working harder than everyone else out there...
Results, Ed was directing the meet, so he didn't run.

Click here for the map-video-google earth integrated awesomeness. It's pretty darn cool.

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...