Orienteering USA Nationals

Orienteering USA Nationals were hosted by the Southern Michigan Orienteering Club and Orienteering Cincinnati, two weekends back. The joint effort meant that the venues were spread pretty far apart, but it enabled the event to happen, which was a good thing. Middle and Sprint distance races were in South Bend, Indiana, and the long distance was up near Bishop Lake, Michigan. Two states I hadn't orienteered in before!

Drive from Detroit to South Bend featured a lot of this





Middle Distance
I'd had a pretty hectic week at work leading into the weekend, and combined with a very short night of sleep to catch the early flight to Detroit, I was feeling somewhat zombie-ish for Friday's middle distance race. The map, such as we'd seen before the race, looked to be a flat course, with a lot of trail route choices. I knew it would feel like a cross country race, so I tried to psych myself up, but couldn't quite tap into the right mindset. The cold soaking rain wasn't helping matters, and I would much rather have been back in the warm hotel room wrapped in a blanket.

I also badly miscalculated how much time I had before my start - I had thought I had 40 minutes, but it turned out I had 7 minutes. Whoopsie. I tried to keep the effort steady at first, to let my legs warm up, but then found myself lacking enough give-a-damns to either push hard or to push through any forest. I fell into the trap of reading one control at a time, and thus got totally caught by the trap with the uncrossable fence (that, yes, we had driven past to get into the park. D'oh).

Not seeing said uncrossable fence on my map, because I was being a little lazy with the map reading, I chose to go straight-ish out of 11, and crossed the muddy slough. That part looked so innocent on the map! I was chest-deep, with a foot stuck under branches, and wondering if that was how I was going to die. Spoiler: I got out. Shortly thereafter, I emerged from the woods and hit the fence, and had I read the whole leg, I would have just run around to the north, stayed dry, and saved a few minutes and a lot of annoyance. Ah well, orienteering. You think you're soaked through when you orienteer in the rain, but you're not *really* soaked until you've gone swimming.

The red line is my GPS track. If you look at the beautiful piece between controls 11 and 12, you'll first see a zigzag on the trail, where I'm searching for a way through some thick multiflora rose. You can't quite tell how much time I spent wallowing in that thing blue line of muck, but that was a while, and then I had to run around the fence anyway. The thick dark blue line is the route I *should* have taken, thus saving myself a few minutes... d'oh. 

The few controls in the woods after the stream-fence debacle were too few to get me back into a good mood. Mostly, I was upset that I had skimped when packing, and would thus have to wear this wet and muddy kit tomorrow, too. Anyway, I finished the race not feeling great about it, and like I'd left some 3-4 minutes out there in terms of effort and sharp navigation, but it was good enough for a silver medal behind Ali, who had blazed around the course in lightning time.

Sprint Championship
Saturday was colder than I'd expected, but in good news, my kit, that I had painstakingly rinsed out in the shower, was dry enough to wear. There were two sprints today, and the combined time would be used to crown the national champion. Ali could only race the Friday race, so given the depth of the women's field, this race was mine to lose. My recent marathon training has been a lot of slow miles, so I was somewhat worried that I wouldn't have enough get-up-and-go for sprint racing, and I was correct in my worries.

Speaking of marathon training, I was also trying to get in my last hard-ish workout on the plan. My compromise involved doing two mile repeats in the warmup for my first sprint, and while the mile repeats felt great, I could tell as I was running that my sprinting was suffering. Not surprising.

The first sprint sent us across a knee-deep ford of a cold river on the way to the second control. This wasn't cool, because my feet were now wet and frozen, and shortly thereafter I felt my lower legs lock up because of the cold. The course was relatively straightforward, and I had good sprint-flow, always knowing my exit direction and anticipating well, but I didn't have much speed to give it. That was enough to take the women's win by 35 seconds over second place, who wasn't actually US-Championship-eligible, and third place among the men, just 43 seconds behind Wyatt.




We had a short break, and then it was time for the second sprint, which promised to be more woodsy. Alena, the second place woman from the morning's sprint, was starting just 1 minute behind me, so I was worried that she'd get to hunt me down. Indeed, after a few micro-route decisions that were the wrong decisions, and one long hesitation in the floodplain near #11, she had made contact. Darn! I tried to keep up, and slowly narrowed the gap, but the race was over too quickly. At this point I was totally exhausted, the heavy warmup, two races, and all of last week's stress crashing into me all at once. And we still had a 3h drive to get to the banquet location and our hotel for the night.

Handing out the medals after the sprint

Long distance championship
It felt like morning came too soon, especially considering how far west in the time zone we were. Pitch black at 8am! Today's race, up near Bishop Lake, promised to be some interesting glaciated terrain, again with relatively thick undergrowth, but at least some good navigational challenges to keep things interesting. It also promised to be even colder than Saturday, with the front that had blown through and brought a little ice and snow the night before. Exciting!

My plan for this race was to keep the effort pretty low, and treat it as a long training run. See the above thing about the marathon. I knew that my nearest F21 competitors would likely be running even slower, and I didn't want to totally trash my taper by building on the fatigue I was already feeling. So, the intention was to have perfectly clean navigation, looking for good micro-routes, sending it down the hills, and taking it easy on the uphills. This plan in general went pretty well, and the slower pace definitely helped me have clean navigation.

Fun glacial stuff!

This was interesting terrain and a fun course, not quite as nasty vegetation as I'd anticipated, despite plenty of green, which was well-used as a navigational challenge. I started out carefully, not sure how I'd deal with the glacial terrain, and made a couple hesitation-errors, but got into my flow moved steadily. I found myself choosing straight-ish routes, and reading the topography well enough. While this certainly wasn't a super fast time for me, it was good enough to beat all the women, even Alena, the speedy non-US-eligible runner! I was very pleased with that, as it was a little unexpected. Woo!




This is my last year racing in the elite category as per age classes. I can always choose to keep running against the elites, and may well do that for a while, but I also have permission to race the "old ladies' next year. Looking forward to it, but it was nice to go out with two gold medals and a silver!

Boston Sprint Camp and a skier adventure weekend

Ed and I pulled off the fourth year of Boston Sprint Camps two weekends ago. This is a fun event, usually very personal and interactive thanks to the small number of runners. Like the past few years, we had a little over 30 people, and the weather and vibes were great. We used three new orienteering maps - Cutler Park, Millennium Park, and Jamaica Pond - always fun to run on new places! Cutler was a double edged sword. It's a long walk, about a mile, to get down to the good terrain. But then, given the unproductive glacial geology going on down there, the forest is superb. People really enjoyed the course we did down there, despite the walk.

Sprint Camp started unofficially with the Thursday night park race at Moakley Park, in Boston. This was our final park race of the season, and most of CSU hung out afterward to have a potluck. Brendan from Inov-8 stopped by with a demo fleet of shoes, much to the enjoyment of the runners. We had a couple out-of-towners joining us for the Thursday race, and that was a nice ending of the season.


Inov-8 demos at our last park run at Moakley!


Sara Mae setting up the potluck


Race day shopping. Should have gotten fewer bananas and more m&ms.

Sprint Camp started officially on Friday with a day in Cambridge, doing a bunch of training exercises at Danehy Park before moving to Fresh Pond for the evening race. I only put one control in the middle of a patch of poison ivy... oops. Next time, I'll leave that one out. Lunch from Anna's Tacqueria, always delicious.

Saturday was out in the Newtons, starting with a "peg relay" in Nahanton Park. Mass start, but some controls have pieces of surveyor's tape looped on. If you get there and there is still a tape, you take it and run a "bonus loop," which serves the purpose of constantly consolidating the pack, making for lots of head-to-head racing. So much fun!


Izzy in to the first peg control


Keegan leading the whole race, taking a streamer to go run some bonus controls


Izzy leading Bridget, Kristin, and Marie


Tori leading a pack in to the first "peg" control


How to exit a trail: no hesitations!

From there we headed down to Millennium Park, for some more training exercises and then an e-punched park race. Ed made me take out any legs that went straight up the hill, and that was a good move. We ate lunch from BrickFire pizza there, and everyone was pretty hungry by then.

The final race was down at Cutler, on the new map in the gorgeous woods. Despite the mosquitoes, I think everyone really enjoyed that race. We quickly hauled in controls, and then went home to prep for Sunday's bracket race.



Route choice - Tomas took the trail, Pam cut through the woods.

On Sunday, the Bermans stopped by to help us organize things. We were based in one location, but runners did six races in total, and each one had a different start and finish. We all marched out to the southernmost area together, and they ran the qualification race there. From the results of that, I slotted all the runners into eight heats of four, and they ran the first of five elimination heats. There's a big complicated bracket to explain it all, and we fell down by not having this thing printed out ahead of time. Next year. I think we actually managed to stick to the bracket and not screw anything up, which was a minor miracle considering I was basically sitting there with a pencil and a clipboard trying to interpret the basic results from the mini screen we were using in the field. Phew.


Huddling in the shade before the start of the qualification


Heat #2 under way!


One of the master heats starting out


Junior heat starting off. Read the map, THEN run


Ed manning download, in the field

Five heats later, everyone ran the final sprint, now in heats most closely matched, and it looked like a ton of fun. Everyone loves head-to-head racing, and boy did I wish I could jump in. I'll have to go back to the Seattle Adventure Running Tournament!

Lunch from the Noodle Barn, award pies, and then it was over. Quite the whirlwind, but thank god for such great hanging-around weather.

Adventure Weekend
Last weekend was the first CSU adventure weekend. We center this one around the Greylock mountain race, which I've raced the last few years. Unfortunately this year, I'm still recovering from my injury this spring, and didn't want to jump into the race, knowing that I have a hard time holding back when I'm wearing a bib. So the usual thing of "beat Alex's time and I'll buy your ice cream" had to get shifted to beating last year's time, which was a pretty soft one to beat.


One of THOSE days. Great pavement, perfect day to ski


I love these old roads up in the Berkshires. Maple trees lining the view of fields and forests, hills for days. 


The boys cruising past my favorite field of wildflowers


Sending it off a cliff in Adams


The crew up on Pine Cobble. Seven athletes, two grownups. Make that nine athletes, seven of them in highschool. 


Tunnel of green, line of runners.


Calm morning on what ended up being a hot day. Kind of glad I wasn't racing.


Love this

Despite lots of fun on Saturday, including a very hilly rollerski and a bonus hike up Pine Cobble, five skiers braved the start line, ready for the longest race of their lives so far. They all made it around, some with smiles, some with blisters, all agreeing that it was the best sort of Type II fun they've ever had, with at least one kid admitting to having a lot of Type I fun, too. Two boys earned free ice cream, and everyone felt very proud of themselves. Good stuff!



Looking forward to a weekend at home, now...

Boston Sprint Camp

Ed and I had so much fun hosting the Boston Sprint Camp last year that we decided to do it again this year. New year, new parks, so this meant a lot of mapping for Ed. I just sort of watched from the sidelines, not doing any advertising like I should have, and grumbling about having to stay up too late designing courses. Oops. Like last year, we had US Director of Sport Development Erin Schirm here to help with running the camp, and his input was invaluable. Over four days, camp participants were exposed to a wide range of techniques and tactics for how to do your best at orienteering sprints.

Chase Corporate Challenge

But then, I missed the first day of Sprint Camp, because I'm responsible like that. It was the same day as the Chase Corporate Challenge, and my company had a team, and I wanted to run. I guess if people are going to think of you as the runner at work, you occasionally have to do races they can understand. That was a really cool race. I've never done a race before where you are running with thousands of other people, of all shapes, sizes, and abilities (9,475 people!). Seeding the start would totally ruin it. I did push my way as far forwards as I could. It was unbelievable - thousands of people were staging on the Boston Common, trying to make it through the gates onto Charles Street. As I weaved my way forwards through the crowd, most people didn't seem to mind, since most slower runners don't necessarily want to start in front of a faster one. Or maybe they didn't think that somebody would have the gall to try and squeeze past 3000 people before the race even starts! Either way, I got just about even with the start clock before it was time to race.

Even being up by the line, it was six seconds after the gun before I started moving. Luckily it thinned out quickly, and by the time I had made the left turn onto Arlington St I was running as fast as I wanted to. I was still doing a lot of weaving back and forth to get around people, but at least the crush of runners made the wind disappear.

My goal for this race was only to finish in good health - I had no idea what to expect, having never run a race with this many people before and having never done a 3.5-mile race. Talk about a random distance. The last three flat running races I've tried to do this spring have not ended well for me - I got a side cramp in a time trial back in late April, and that stupid cramp has been shadowing me through every hard effort since then. The first time, I had to quit 1000m short, unable to finish the time trial. Two weeks after that, I had actually paid money to enter a race, so even though I had to come to a full stop 500m before the finish, I eventually hobbled across the line. In tears. Two weeks after that, in another 5k, the cramp attacked with 300m to go, and I managed to keep hobbling to the finish mostly upright, but really only because my mom was watching and I didn't want to scare her. So with each race effort, the cramp has held off longer, but it definitely had me worried. Since I've been running cramp-free lately, my hopes were high that maybe I finally kicked it.

I hit the first mile a little slow, 6:43 or something. But my watch was ticking off 4-minute kilometers, so I figured that was just 20 seconds that I'd wasted at the start. We hit the 2-mile mark somewhere after the turn-around at Kenmore, and the crowds were starting to thin out now. It was much nicer to run with other people my speed, though I was still passing 10 for every 1 that passed me. My watch beeped at the 4km mark, and I was nervous - now is about when the cramp starts to make itself known. But stride after stride, I was blissfully pain-free. I cruised past the 5k mark around 20:00, starting to contemplate a kick, but I was feeling a little too flat to make it actually happen. Still no cramp! The crowd was deafening along the final stretch, but I still managed to hear my colleague Terri cheering for me. Eventually I found the finish line, and I guess I finally outran the cramp monster! I ended up 23rd woman.
Results

Sprint Camp
So, Corporate Challenge over and done with, it was time to join Ed back at Sprint Camp. Friday was based in Newton, with the morning a pile of exercises at Skyline Park and the afternoon a partner sprint relay at Nahanton Park. Friday morning was definitely an intense one - we did a micro-o, some hill sprints with map memory, a maze-o, and a regular sprint course. Pizza for lunch, and then a bit of a nap in the park before it was time for the afternoon. I tried to pair people up based on their results from the race they'd all done on Thursday night, but the back of the pack tends to string out a lot more than the front, so that wasn't totally fair. But since everyone's times were recorded individually as well, nobody seemed to mind too much. I was really enjoying the atmosphere at the camp, people seemed to be genuinely enjoying themselves.

Saturday was based in Cambridge. It was another pretty intense day of sprint training. We started at Magazine Beach, with a dynamic warmup (above), then some exit direction practice. Erin was on hand to offer advice, and then we were off on a street-o, but with the directional information on the map. You basically had to run pretending you were a car, and couldn't go the wrong way down a one-way street. Pretty fun exercise, because you're solving a puzzle as you're running. (see left for map). The street-o ended at Dana park, a dinky little neighborhood park, where we did some sprint intervals. Super fun, but at this point my legs were starting to feel wrecked. Three hard days in a row! Then back to Magazine Beach, where we ate lunch (from Clover) and I gave a brief goal-setting workshop. 

The evening race was at North Point, and I had set it to have as many tricky traps as I could. Quite a few people got caught, ending up on the wrong side of an uncrossable fence because they hadn't checked their control descriptions, or running across the wrong bridge because they hadn't looked at the full leg. Great to push the comfort zones!

Click here for full-size map.

Sunday was the double-header National Meet, a qualifier and a final sprint, at Franklin Park. I thought the final in particular was a really nice sprint, and so I went and pre-ran the race just to feel it at speed. A lot of people made some big mistakes in this race, I think through a combination of tiredness and laziness - you have to approach each race with a sharp mindset, and if you let yourself get lazy on any of your sprinting habits you'll pay the price. But overall, seemed like every runner got a lot out of the camp, and we're already laying the plans for next year. 

Franklin Park Final. Click here for a bigger map

Results from most of the sprint camp races are here: Results

2015 Boston Sprint Camp

A while ago, Ed had this idea that we wanted to host a "sprint camp" event, basically four days of orienteering races and training and we'd make it awesome and simple to put on and people would come and enjoy themselves. I liked the "simple" part of this idea, but things are never as simple as you think they will be, when it comes to putting on events. But, this idea came to fruition, with a lot of help from Erin Schirm, the national junior team coach, and Becky Carlyle, as the course consultant. We didn't really get our advertising act together until three weeks before the event, at which point lots of people already had plans, and school was still in session thanks to all the snow days, so that cut into some of the local junior attendance, but we still managed to attract 35 runners from around the country (and a handful of Canadians), which isn't too terrible considering we were going to cap the event at 60 people.  Overall, everyone seemed to really enjoy themselves, and the weather totally cooperated, which makes it a lot easier to pull off a four-day event.