Just got back from a week of the Canadian Champs. Day 1 and 2 were the Western Canadians, Day 3 a relay, Day 4 the short champs, and day 5/6 a two day combined classic champs.

Western Canadians

Here is my Western Canadians '03, Day 1 map.

Here is my Western Canadians '03, Day 2 map.

Always one of my favorite meets, since WCOC was my first A meet win. Had a very good day day 1, day 2 a bit sloppy but no disasters. Parallel error city on day 2. Terrain was open and fast. I was doing fairly well with my new found ability of changing speeds, but my technique still leads itself to parallel errors. Parallel error defense kept the errors manageable. I'll work on prevention some other time -- too much to think about.

I developed a system of analyzing legs and route choices and how much time is really lost. Its pretty simple, using time per k on good legs, adjusting for terrain and climb, and comparing to bad legs or legs with hesitation to see what is lost. I can also compare route choices this way by factoring my time per k in the various terrains on various routes. Using this analysis on day 1, my route on leg 1 was faster than the trail run, yet the trail run route was faster on leg 11, by about a minute. This is due to the navigational complexity on my route on leg 11 -- I hesitated too much.

I lost 2 minutes on leg 8, tho I am not sure why. I had some hesitations, but don't think it was that much. I can further the analysis by looking at the field's splits for leg 8 to see if there is something intrinsic about the leg, but the results have yet to be posted. It could also be the extreme climb at the end of the leg, which forced me around rather than over, simply because my legs refused to climb another line.

I'm not sure if this sort of analysis will be valuable, but I will try it the rest of the season and see.

One other note, the maps were laser printed, 1:10, and I found them acceptable. Never thought I'd see myself saying laser printing was acceptable. I would not feel this way for the actual classic champs, tho.

Relay

Our team won the relay. Third relay win in four tries. The secret to winning relays seems to be to get on good teams. I was on a team with Anelese Steubin and Eric Bone. We were up against a team of Thomas Nipon (a top Canadian junior), an elite woman whose name I cannot remember, and Ted de St. Croix. We won by about a minute and a half. It was a blast.

I lost 50 seconds to Thomas on the first leg. Ran 5.7 min/k, so I guess I can't complain. A.S. was even, so Eric went out 50 seconds or so behind Ted, and won by about 30 seconds or so. Eric really had a fantastic run. He was late in putting his shoes on, and was only able to get one O show and one running shoe on in time, and ran the race like that.

The thing that made this relay great is the way it was set in a spectator friendly mode without really compromising the course. Due to the sparseness of the trees, the second half of the first and third loops could be seen. Eric came into the last part about 10 seconds behind Ted, and you could see him put the race away on a hill climb with 3 controls to go on the other side of the course. Tough to describe, but very fun to watch.

Canadian Short Champs

Here is my Canadian Short Champs '03 map.

I don't care for short races. I did ok in this race, I guess. I went straight on every control. The climb was wrong; the consensus was that the contour interval was 7.5, not 5. It certainly felt like it. I noticed in my analysis that my core time per k was basically around 6, except after all the hill climbing, where it dropped to 7.5. Interesting. Of course, time per k on the hills was 11-14.

Control #12 was mishung. I lost about 50 sec on this leg, and 80 sec on the next one. I was surprised when I "boomed" 12, but it never occurred to me it was mishung. I figured I was an idiot. I found it by a back bearing off the finish chute -- turns out it was on line with that.

One runner lost 6 minutes, but the organizers required a $30 deposit to protest. The runner didn't have the dough, so he let it pass. Somehow I think this is bogus. I think the top runners may have been unaffected (amazing how that happens), so I did not feel it proper to protest myself.

Canadian Champs

Here is my Canadian Champs '03, Day 1 map.

Here is my Canadian Champs '03, Day 2 map.

Decent run day 1, bizarre run day 2. Day 2 boomed 12 of the 16 controls. All booms quite small, tho. That is very odd for me -- I usually spike most, and have bigger errors of getting lost on the way. This time, most problems were in the short game. Weird. I did get out of my game plan on day 2, I just decided to let it fly as fast as I could, and forgot my change of speed in the attack. I think I lost 8-10 minutes, but was never really that lost. Despite running as hard as I could for 12k, still wasn't tired at the end of the race. Frustrating.

Again the chatter was that the interval was actually 7.5. The hills were killer in any case.

Day 1 I lost 3 minutes on route choice on leg 2. I think leg 2 is a fantastic leg. I'm not a great route choice guy -- route choice requires more proactive visualization skills, I'm more reactive. Also, I'll usually eat a line or two for safety or to cut down distance, but the lines here were really 7.5, thus this choice is more expensive than it looks on paper, i.e. avoiding steep terrain was more important than it looks.

Boomed leg 3, day 1 by not visualizing the circle. Did not like the laser printed maps at all this time. Scale was 1:15. Had trouble reading the lines, especially in the brown, and to some extent in the green on leg 3. This really was a prob day 2, where, for example, #12 looks like its at the level of the lake, so I blasted in over confident and got nailed by a couple of 7.5m lines.

These two days were set by Ted. I think its fantastic course setting, tho the terrain was basically easy overall.

These races were alot of fun in any case.