Training Log Archive: TomN

Still can't navigate in this park. There must have been a magnetic anomaly between 2 and 3. No matter where I started from, I always ended up at the road.

Red - Splits

Trail run at Wheaton. Well, 2/3 trail, and the rest of it on paved paths. There was construction on the path down from the dog park to the lake. A sign said "Trail Closed" but when I got around to the other end of it there was no sign and nothing to keep people off the trail. It was pretty much the same when we held the O meet at Wheaton last month, trails newly paved, with cones and signs at one end and nothing at all on the other. And people walking on them. In that case I made the executive decision to ignore the signs. I should have done it again today.

Biking to work! Florence is at Goddard today, so I packed a bag and put it in her car. Left around 8 :15, and it was already 70 degrees.

There is bridge work on the Northeast Branch near the West Hyattsville Metro, and the bridge is closed. I went around the other side of the Metro station, through the back side of some apartment buildings, and took a likely-looking path which eventually brought me out to Queens Chapel Road where the trail crosses.

Streamering control locations for Rosaryville. I got there at 9 a.m., got 30 streamers out by 1 p.m., ate a sandwich, and did the remaining 21 in the afternoon. Got the last one at 4 p.m., but it was a half-hour back to the parking lot. I missed one -- there should have been 22 in the afternoon but one of them was off the bottom of my map.

The rootstocks currently on the map are useless. I had 2 controls on rootstocks originally, and I couldn't even find one of them. So I relocated both of them. Another one is on a knoll that's now dwarfed by a 1.5m rootstock, but I left it where it is. The rootstock blocks the view of the knoll from that side, but it wasn't very visible to begin with. I'll hang it high.

I used Open Orienteering Mapper on my phone to great advantage today. I imported the georeferenced OCAD file into OOM on the Mac, and added a PDF of the all-controls map from Condes as a template. I adjusted the template to match the map. Then I made the map invisible, leaving the georeferenced template of the all-controls map. I exported that to my Android phone. It was brilliant. Every time I got to a control location, I turned on the phone and verified that my position dot was right in the center. A few times I was off (too low in a reentrant, wrong depression, obscured trails, the missing rootstocks), and I easily found the right spot. The phone battery lasted all day, although I had some spare batteries in my pack.

Around the Goddard perimeter road and antenna range.

Rain in the forecast, but it wasn't raining when I got up this morning, so I took the slot. There was a little drizzle in the air but comfortable running.