The Adventure that was 3rd year

Well my blog has gone in hibernation a bit since POM. Guess it is time to update and reflect on my 3rd year at Heriot-Watt. The first thing that comes to mind is "WHOA what a year!" in the most positive way possible! So what made it such a great year? lets start at the beginning maybe... or an attempt of some organized version of my thoughts for the year

Heriot-Watt Athletics Presidency
I had the privilege of being voted into the President position in the Athletics club this year. I knew this was going to be a tough job as I wanted to give so much back to the club. I had had two very welcoming, hard working and fun presidents my first two years, I knew it was going to be a tough act to follow. But I was up for the challenge and I think it went quite well :)

The year started with a lot of hours spent trying to put together sponsors, a social calendar and promotional material for the freshers fair. Also with the amazing work of the committee time on a track was eventually acquired as well! All this time set us up for having more club members than ever before! growing to just over 40 people and way more people at training which was great! With more people at training and committing time to training lead to us having more people actually wanting to race as well. BUCS cross country in Stirling was my first time in a mini bus with heriot-watt and I'm looking forward to many more mini bus trips with them in the coming years! We got a mini bus as had 12 people racing this year as oppose to just 3 guys like past years. It was my first BUCS XC as well - really enjoyed racing cross country again :) (despite taking the first part too fast and dying at the end, but live and learn haha)
The club was also a tighter group this year with us having more socials to really get to know each other better. So really hoping we keep a lot of the new faces we gained this year, although some of them are on our committee next year so guess we did do a good job! 

Round the Grounds pulled back up on the radar this year as well. We got the word out early, right weekend picked, and better weather! (well apart from the freak hail storm just as the gun went off- oh Scotland!) James also put together a great online entry system for this year which made us even that bit more organized and feel like a real race. I know he put hours of hard work into and late nights and the club is really grateful for it! We got many many compliments from people who ran it this year which made me feel really proud of the club and all the work we did for it!

 
AND...
Because of all this and the time and effort the committee has put into the club this year, we believed we had shown great improvement and so did our sports union AS...

WE WON MOST IMPROVED CLUB OF THE YEAR!!!! 

Present and Past Presidents receiving award from Professor Steve Chapman, Principal & Vice-Chancellor

Whole club enjoying the award

So happy with everything I accomplished this year as president and looking forward to continuing with the club as secretary this coming year.

Orienteering

This year has had many personal breakthroughs for my orienteering and training in general. In November it started with me having a great race at the Scottish University Championships held in Edinburgh. The individual race was an urban race held on the Oxgangs map. I raced the Women's A course, 6.1km 50m, 28controls. 
From my Attackpoint log:  
"Really fairly happy with this race!
Well confused out of the start though and there was no start triangle on the map, or well there was just ... on the other side! :/ (the course was printed on both sides of the map)
Only really had problems then with #7 as was expecting it to be on a tree from the descriptions and so ran past the bush thing it was on to the first tree, it wasn't there so turned around and was well confused! Got it eventually after doing a few circles around things. Then wasn't very well prepared for the long leg to 11 so had to stop at 10 and just take the time to fine the right route. Eventually did. Again had to stop at 15 as didn't realise that was where the map flip was. Really wish that had been clearer! Hit 20 fine but picked a bad route to 21 so Kirsten caught me there. We then just put the foot down for the rest of the course and I gave it almost my all to stay with her. We almost caught Jo on 26 and just push push push to the end.
Really enjoyed this course and was feeling good :)"
 
And I should be happy with this race as it landed me in 2nd place behind Kirsten and JUST in front of Charlotte, and earning my first medal in the UK! I also managed to tie 3rd place with Rona in the Scottish Urban League so came home with a medal and a mug :) 

Then came the winter months where I normally lose the motivation to train as it stays dark longer and gets cold. But this year I managed a fairly decent amount of base training, and managing to orienteer every month in 2013! All this set me up to have a much stronger spring than I probably would have and made me start to feel like a real athlete. 


The start of spring lead me to racing at BUCS with almost a full Heriot-Watt team! and I was rather pleased with reaching my goal of top ten this year to come 8th. (More about BUCS see my previous post) Then it was fairly quickly on to POM in Portugal. This was my first time racing in Portugal and all the crazy rocks they have and it was only made possible by Martin Wilson agreeing to take me. So I would like to thank him again for letting me tag along and for all the support he has given me over the years. He has believed in me ever since we first met at the scottish 6-days in 2007. I really appreciate everything he has done for me to grow as an elite orienteer. 

After the POM long distance race

POM was really the races I was focusing on this spring as it was the last event I could use to petition for the USA World Championships team. I was happy with how the week turned out and was feeling confident that my petition would be strong. And it was it was much stronger than 2013, Sadly with the new format of WOC and only getting 2 female start spots this year I had the massive disappointment of not making the team. I won't lie and say there were no tears (there were many!), there was confusion on how things were decided, there was frustration for the system and lake of feedback, and then acceptance and motivation to train even harder for next year so there are no questions about me making the team. Every Athlete has their set backs and the best are the ones that take it as motivation to improve. So now Andy Kitchen and I are working hard on my goals for WOC 2015 which take place in early august next year in the highlands of Scotland. We have a plan and for the first time I really feel like a true athlete! I like having weekly goals and feeling accomplished when I meet them. And I'm slowly starting to see strength coming through. The first test will be the North American's in October which I'm very excited for! 

Although hold on I'm getting ahead of myself - I was disappointed to not make the WOC team, but I still am getting the chance to represent the USA and Heriot-Watt at the World University Championships later this month (12th to the 18th of August) in the Czech Republic. I have been selected to race all of the distances and so it will be a real test of my orienteering skills and when to pick the right tools out of my tool box. Hopefully I'll have more time to write a few posts purely for WUOC.

Then to finish off the last 12 months of training I got a lovely surprise at the end of the year at the Blues and Volunteer Awards dinner at uni. I had put in to be considered for a blues award for my orienteering results. A blues award for those who do not know is

"A Blue is an award earned by sportsmen and women at a university and some schools for competition at the highest level. The awarding of Blues began at Oxford and Cambridge universities in England. It is awarded at British, Australian and New Zealand universities." (From Wikipedia)


I was not sure if I qualified at first for one but rather an outstanding sporting achievement award possibly instead. When my friend Lorraine and I went to go and collect our name badges for the volunteering awards we were receiving I instead saw on mine "Blues award winner".  Very honored indeed! 




 

Pims to Celebrate!

Study

So although my actual degree is FAR from the bottom of my list of important things going on in my life it is probably the most boring to write and read about. So I'll keep it as something short and sweet to end with. I spent many hours in the crush area at uni this year. Had pretty much every 9am possible. There were lab reports that had to be written -6 of them actually, and one marked by "Dragon Lady" where if you had the same amount of red pen than black ink you were doing well. Two group projects - a Business project where my group researched the feasibility of a wood pellet plant for pellet stoves. and a design project were my group looked into the viability of a carbon capture plant getting retrofitted to Scotland's Peterhead power plant. Went through two sets of exams - Christmas which we all thought went better then they actually did. There was a bit of depression in 3rd year ChemEng after results were realised. But then May exams came around - I studied solidly for a good few weeks, got a crash course from my friend Ross on how to actually take an exam (ie write everything you possibly can down on your test book even if at first you don' think it applies directly to the question) and then we waited.... End of 3rd year results are the first big ones! first to count towards your degree and even more importantly the deciding factor of if one stays on the masters program. A 60% average grade is required and many of us were sitting on the edge. I was nervous opening my marks up to find out. But I got a wonderful message. I had past all my exams and was able to complete my MASTERS! 2 more years of University to go!!!!

 

British Univeristy Champsionships - YOU WATT!

February 22nd and 23rd was the British University Orienteering Championships (BUCS) down near Leeds, UK. I was lucky enough to have 4 others from Heriot Watt joining me at BUCS this year!


The trip started with a long mini bus journey down to just north of Leeds with some of the guys from EUOC. We ended at Jack Woods house where his parents kindly let us sleep on their living room floor. There the buzz of BUCS started and people were starting to discuss their plans for the individual the next day. Then the Glasgow team joined us late that night bringing along our last team member for Heriot Watt. We finally got to bed and I was quite comfortable in my sleeping bag when at about 5am the alarm in the house went off. We had been warned that the burglar alarm was acting up but gosh that gave me a fright. Had a bit of a hard time getting back to sleep after that but managed to get a good enough nights sleep :)

Got up fairly early, had a champions breakfast and set off to the Individual event. The Individual event was being held on Ilkley Moor. Despite all the rain at night it was slowly clearing up which was nice. I was fearing having to navigate the moor land in the fog. By the time I got to the start though the sun was out and it was perfect running weather! This year I had a fairly late start time. Only about 4 or 5 girls starting behind me. But tried hard not to think about people who were starting near me or placing or anything. I had been worried all week about placing and was I going to mange the top ten result that I wanted or not. So the warm up to the start and everything was focused on warming my legs up, what the technical things people had told me about the map and trying hard to just visualise running smoothly through the terrain and no hesitations. I was ready to start :)

 

I had a great run! I was a bit hesitant or at least a bit slower than I maybe should have been at the start of the course but was hitting things fine. Had my first real bobble on control 5 where I had just come out of the 4th control too far to the north and hit the bottom instead of the top of the rock wall I wanted. Then it was back up into the moor land where I started to find out that I could easily navigate faster than I could run. So looks like there needs to be some more pentland runs (or at least hills) in my training. But managed fine. The next challenge though was the monster of a long leg! I really should have looked at it a bit more climbing the hill up to 8. But I think overall I picked not too bad of a route. Was able to pretty much stay on tracks the whole way. Was able to keep moving and not feel like I was totally out of contact with where I was along the leg. Wasn't able to follow the path that well through the detailed rock, lost it quite a few times. But always had my eyes on the forest ahead and was able to get through it. Then had a bobble on control 11 I think just because I thought "oh this is short I can easily do this!" and just wasn't paying as much attention as before. I'll then be honest I'm not 100% sure how i did controls 14-16. They just kinda worked and things were popping up just where I was wanting them to and the controls just were there! It was a great feeling. Came back and downloaded and found out I was 3rd on the course! So went for a cool down and waited for the other girls to come in. 

In the final results I ended up in 8th place. So very happy about that as hit my top ten goal and up from 13th place from last year. Also was nice as I'm 8th place out of the girls that are competing for the British WUOC team and not that far behind them! Heriot Watt as a team also came 8th in the overall points after day one!

taken by P.Y. Photographic

The sunday was then the relay. As I didn't have 3 girls at the event Lauren and I teamed up with our EUOC teammate Rachel and ran the Adhoc relay. We did however have 3 guys so they ran in the mens relay and gave it a great fight!

I ran the 1st leg in the Adhoc relay. was nice and battled it out with Sophie from Imperial. Had a bobble at control 4 thinking it was on the further bush clump then it was and had to come back at it. Think there were more clumps then on the map. Then was doing well and just ahead of Sophie before messing up control 7. Went too far again, never seeing the big boulder at the top of the clearing like i was wanting and ended up getting sucked into sophie's control on a boulder just past the field :/ Stupid mistake! Then another bobble on control 10 was too far west but wanted to be west anyway just not that far. Got to the control and saw there was a path basically built to it not on the map :/ Then had the longer last gaffle then sophie at the end. So ended up coming in about 30secs behind her passing off to Lauren.

So bit to relaxed in a few places but not at bad run.

Girls came 2nd in the Adhoc relay and the guys were 20th. That put us in 9th place overall! our best result so far! 

British Univeristy Champs (BUCS)

The weekend of may 17th and 18th I boarded the mini buses with EUOC for our road trip down to the lake district. Cambridge University Orienteering Club was holding BUCS and it was guaranteed to be a good weekend.

We stayed at a travellodge friday night, not fair from Saturdays event. The weather forecast for the day was promising snow and rain so we were bundled up for the worst. However when we arrived at ambelside the sun was shinning, however the muddy ground reminded us that could quickly change. The map we were running on was Loughrigg, which featured open moorland. It was fast and great visibility so key was to keep looking up. I ran the Women's A Course which was 4.9km with 12 controls.

I was expecting things to be a lot more technical and small mistakes to be punished quickly. However, I actually found this course to be quite easy and the slip up I had on control 9 was a mental block which I was able to easily find the root of after finishing and sort out since. I did have the luxury of starting 1 minute in front of Jessica Orr which meant the two of us were pushing each other around the course flip flopping who was leading. She got away when I slipped up on my compass coming out of 8, but I had a solid run afterwards as well which is nice to see that I can keep that pace even without someone around me. And I was able to finish just before the rain started!

The race wasn't over though! It was quickly off to the mini buses and winding our way through the country side on the hunt for showers and race to get dressed for the social that evening. The ceildh theme was "university city" and so in true EUOC style we topped every one showing up as Pandas in Kilts:


The Sunday was the relay. It took place at Bigland, open rolling fields with many rock walls and a quite technical section in the woods. Great for an exciting relay! Sadly because I was the only one from heriot-watt it was slightly less exciting but had a brilliant adhoc (no competitive) relay. I was tagged of by Laura Ramstein (she has run JWOC for Austria) into a lead of around 30seconds over the second Adhoc team. I had a generally clean run on the second leg:

Slight bobble going to control 2 just was too far left and had to come back at it. But once I got into the woods i was feeling on fire. Was just moving quite well, had a plan and was only hesitant in a few places. It was such a nice confidence booster to have a good run in a more technical area. And to come storming through the finish to tag off to peter G (old EUOC member who likes to think he is still a student :p). Peter G had a great run and like the EUOC girls we managed to beat the second Adhoc team by a few seconds. In the end EUOC girls swept the relay, the boys were 1st and 3rd (after a bit of drama over hoping uncrossable walls, KEY lesson: READ THE FINAL DETAILS!), and the adhoc team made it a clean sweep as really we were all EUOC.

It was a lovely weekend spent with EUOC and i'm not hungry for next year. And I already have another runner from heriot-watt!