TRAINING LEAD-UP
Sunday, Sept 8:
10 mile, maybe zone-2 run at USNWC in 2:57:47 (at a slow 17:47/mi) with 1863ft of gain, on Parkway-Panda-Smokey-Bandit-Rail, wearing Altra Superiors
Monday, Sept 9:
MOVE - Day 29 - Trust & FLOW - Day 24 - Create Yoga with Adriene
Wednesday, Sept 11:
9/11 Tribute WOD
- 2001m 30#R
- 9x [11 slick pushups, 11 45#SB thrusters]
- 2001m 30#R
wearing MACV2 8"s with BP
I rucked 1.5 miles to Romare Bearden Park for a company BYOF picnic, followed by a Knights game (my first one), and then I rucked back. The 30#RPC is within the size limits allowed by the stadium, fortunately! I wore Ballistic Trainers.
GORUCK CLUB LEADER SUMMIT 2024
There have been leader events in DC (didn't attend that one), the 2020 GRT Reunion, and at Sandlot 2023 in the past, but this weekend would be the biggest, most programmed one yet.
Friday:
SB and I carpooled up to Ohio, where we'd meet up with others from the CLT area (we had a strong showing) and around the country.
Jay and Leslie were the best hosts yet again, thinking about all the little details that would make our time there so special. It's like a pilgrimage going there, similar to how it feels like a pilgrimage going to GORUCK HQ.
I've been to JHOP a few times before (TA001, TA002 shadow, Selection 2021 shadow), but I hadn't realized that there was a buckeye tree right there behind the Shedmahal! I also didn't know what a buckeye looked like in real life and had only ever experienced the peanut butter chocolate treat in the past.
They still had the buckets from their tier 1 events, converted into a trash can!
We checked in and got some nice swag, and then we got ready for a workout. Work is our love language, and it's how we bond! It's all done in a very welcoming and accessible way, though... leaders know better than anyone else, that creating an environment where everyone can participate, get in a good workout, and have a good time, regardless of their level of how they're feeling that day is important.
We did three laps on the infamous hill while getting to know each other. Then, we did a partner WOD where the goal was to get 150 reps of 40#SB thrusters, where one person got to do reps at a time while the other did a 50m bear crawl.
We had dinner and played in a corn hole tournament. For whatever reason, I was struggling big time with corn hole. I'd be way off to the left or right, often. It might've been a little farther than I'm used to playing at, not that I play often.
We had a mini version of Force Multiplier, with lessons on the key movements, a little test ruck, and DT. Once you've done the full class, you might wish that you had the parts that were cut in the shortened version. It's still good content and always a good refresher, though. We went down to the river afterwards for patching and a pic.
Dale King was a guest speaker and told us about how his gym helped to transform the lives of people who had hit rock bottom. It's a good reminder on the power of community and fitness.
We also got to share ideas on how to encourage participation in our ruck clubs, in a round table discussion.
The night before, over alcohol and the campfire, someone came up with the brilliant idea of doing a 100# beer mile... back and forth on the infamous hill. They'd design a special patch for it. It was tempting, but I knew it wouldn't be a good idea for my glute. It was fun to spectate those who attempted it, though. Downing the fizzy beer was apparently the hardest part.
More campfire and camaraderie at night.
Sunday:
In the morning, we did a goodbye workout.
We were well-fed throughout the weekend! It was good spending time with so many others who are passionate about rucking and bringing rucking to others.
I created a recap video of the weekend, for those who couldn't attend. It was a great time, so I hope they have it again in the future.
MIAMI VALLEY HARVEST O-MEET
When I go somewhere for non-event reasons, I occasionally think to check whether there's a permanent orienteering course of O-meet. I was able to find one when I was in Cleveland for a work trip. This time, I was lucky enough to find one 12 minutes away, not long after the RCL summit was over. Fortunately, SB was game for squeezing that into our agenda.
We seemed to be in a pretty random part of not-too-populated Ohio, but there were so many hardcore land nav people who had congregated here!
At this meet, you could just sign up as a walk-up. They had pre-printed maps and guesstimated how many they'd need. At the Carolina Klubb Orienteering events, they require pre-registration, which closes the Wednesday before the meet, so that they can print the exact number of maps needed. We were very happy that we could just show up and participate here. We even got our choice of maps.
They had whistles with their club details custom-printed on them for sale, too. I had just been thinking about how nice it would be to have some kind of souvenir from different places I've orienteered in. This was perfect! Very practical and inexpensive.
We made a plan and then set off.
Leaving the start point, we were going to look for opportunities to make a diagonal cut through a field. The vegetation was passable, so we did that and found the little cut-through on the boundary vegetation that was the little trail marked on the path.
Point 2 ended up being tricky and took us longer to find, probably too long to find, since there was vegetation to crawl through. We had gone into this confident and ready to crush the course, but point 2 was a humbling reality check.
Point 3 was probably straightforward. Point 4 was a bit farther away. Our first plan was to hug the housing boundary, but that was slow and highly vegetated, so we went back to the trail. When the trail turned south, we knew we had missed a turn. We backtracked and found whispers of a trail going north. They mark every whisper of a trail at this park on this map! We spent a decent amount of time attacking and re-attacking point 4, too. It was really in a depression, though, just like the map suggested.
Point 5 was probably unremarkable. We pace counted and found landmarks to help us find the turnoff for 6, and we followed the bouldery re-entrant down to 7. We ran into a guy who looked like a lizard, with his goggles and skin-tight green orienteering gear. He was moving fast.
We backtracked and went fast along the path after that, seeing others on the trail. We wanted to move fast to make it back to NC by a reasonable hour.
Point 8 was tricky. There was a main path that we used for an initial approach, and when we cut south after pace counting, we did see the smaller trail. We ran into big water at a place that didn't quite match up to expectations based on the map. We did backtrack to find the opposite end of the small trail to try to figure out where we were. I eventually noticed that the orientation of the water wasn't right and found a reentrant that did seem to go the correct orientation, and following that led to the point. Many others were in the area searching for this, too, so we weren't the only ones.
From there, we went back on the paths and hit point 9.
We went to the road intersection to attack point 10 and crossed the road to get 11. Then, we took the trail to get to where we wanted to go uphill to find 12, which we did.
We hugged the outside of the field, which was quite trough-y (must be hard to mow and till!), to get to where the trail got closest to the field, and then we backtracked east on the trail to find 13. We continued on the trail then jumped to a parallel trail to find 14.
We might've stuck with the safer trail to get from 14 to 15, which was in a spot with many cut pieces of branches. There was music in the area. We kept flying through 16 and then 17.
It was interesting how challenging points were mixed in with very easy points. Maybe it's based on how they laid out a field that could support multiple courses, and the easy courses might've just skipped the more difficult points. Looking at the splits, 2 points ate up nearly 30 minutes a piece!
For the green course, we were 6 out of 6 finishers. The others were moving, and probably didn't struggle with some of the points like we did. There's probably some home field advantage, too, if you've orienteered in this park before and know about some of the whispers of a trail.
I got to test out Adventure Racing Mode on my Garmin Fenix 7S PRO. It says that we covered 5.08 miles in 2:31:18, with an average speed of 2mph and 417 feet of ascent.
It was really cool to orienteer in another state [again] and see other fellow orienteer aficionados even far from home. 113 attended the event, with 47 teams/soloists punching that day.
We problem-solved and had a nice little tune-up before USARA Nationals.
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