Training Log Archive: cporter

Susquehanna Stumble - without the base I've had for the stumble in past years, this year definitely involved more stumbling than I would have liked, although the footing at Pine Grove Furnace accounted for at least some of that. For most of the first half of the race, quite a few of us were grouped up. At the start of the second window, however, is where we thinned out a lot, and I was eventually on my own and remained that way for pretty much most of the course.

I guess in hindsight the order I picked for the second window was unorthodoxed, but not terrible, the real issue was I just took a terribly long time to decide my order. The other real problem was I did the classic, hit a trail without any real sense of where I was along it, and spent probably about 5 minutes just trying to figure out where exactly on the trail I was.

Besides that error, I made another rather uncharacteristic mistake for myself. After running out to the road on our second to last control (#14) I just had it in my head that the last control was right at the finish, which was on the opposite side of a lake from where I was. Assuming I just had a good run-in to go, I dropped my head and started going for it. Thankfully my poorly folded, annoyingly flapping map saved me from total disaster. When I went to refold the map, I happened to notice that my last control as not, in fact on the other side of the lake, it was on the side of the lake that I was currently on. I'd already run about half the distance between what was my last control and the finish, so I wound up backtracking a lot, bobbling a bit to actually find it (in my defense the mapping was a bit weird there since there had been some forest cleared/buildings added that weren't mapped) and then doubling back and into the finish.

So, not the cleanest of races, and my legs were definitely getting pretty wobbly out there, so speed wasn't great, but still a fun race.