CIOR 25, 26

Day 25

The 25th day of training was... you guessed it. Orienteering. We did all three maps with our teams. The day started out like all the others. I was happy to be running around in the bush without a care in the world. Except not getting lost and finding all our points. The first and second map we cruised through. No issues what so ever. We had a great time for the race up until that point.

We were in the bush running/walking for over 3 hours. At the end of the second map we cam back to the meeting place for lunch. Wrong. We were handed another map and told to get going. The clock was ticking. This was at 1pm. We were starving and without very much water. The map looked short so we didn't mind too much.

Off into the wild we went. After about one hour of racing we started to make small mistakes. We would take a back bearing only to notice after 5 steps that we were going in the wrong direction. Later we missed a point that we should have seen easy. Since we were tired and hungry we were not thinking straight. Stupid things were causing us issues.

This is about the time that I started to lose my mind. I was going insane. Not because of the mistakes. It was the stinging mettles and rasberry bushes that were driving me to the brink of calling it quits. Because it is a race we don't have the luxury to go "around" these obstacles so you just go through them. I was wearing shorts and that compounded all my problems. Add to that me tripping on every branch in the forest and you can picture me cursing aloud every 3 steps. the other guys were laughing because they thought it was funny that I was losing it.

After one mistake I stopped the other guys and we had a little pep talk. Something to the effect of: "look we are tired, thirsty, and hungry. We have to start making the right choices. If that means we slow down a bit that is okay." The navigatior agreed and we carried on without incident.

Total KM: 15

Day 26

Ranges
Land Obstacle course
Water O Course.

One the Land O, we did the warm up as always. We had 20 minutes to practice the obstalces that gave us the most problems. Then it was 30 minutes of as many round as possible. After 15 minutes I got taken out of the game because my knee was causing me severe pain and I was not doing the technique properly to compensate for the pain. The coach pulled me from the practice and told me to go ice my knee. I felt kinda shitty that everyone else had to finish but I was sitting out. I think in the long run it was a wise choice but at the time I was pissed.

Pool.

100m Crawl
100m Arms only
2x50m one leg kicks
2x50m 2 leg kicks

100m = each 25m progressively faster

4 x 25m Racing Sprints

5 x Water course in teams for time.

Eyes are sore again from the water. I keep diving and the goggles fall off.