Training Log Archive: Spike

No running. I might try tomorrow if my ankle feels a little better.

I did a good walk of about 1:20 in the afternoon. The ankle felt ok.

Work commute. I got caught in the rain on the way home. The rain made me change my plans to do some yard work when I got home.

I also managed to hurt myself today. I was walking down the stairs this morning and slipped and turned my ankle. It was a bit uncomfortable but I can stand on it ok. There's some swelling. What a bummer. And, kind of ridiculous that I was orienteering, hiking and climbing up waterfalls with no trouble, but I hurt myself walking to my oatmeal.

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Work commute plus an trip to the grocery store on the way home.

I was sleeping very soundly when my alarm went off this morning. I had a few sleepy/tired moments are work in the morning. But, for the most part I feel good. I've been following a jet lag schedule from:

http://www.jetlagrooster.com/

In the past I've used the British Airways jet lag calculator with success.

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It is still Wednesday.

I walked through a permanent course at Centennial Park in Sydney. Fun.

I spent some time looking for a control that wasn't in the center of the circle and lost a few seconds at a control where the cliff was hidden by vegetation.

Early in the course I went through and area with amazingly loud and interesting birds.

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Hiking an easy trail along a hillside on the lake in Queenstown. Fun.

A couple of short walks in Fiordland NP (fiord not fjord?). The day's highlight was a cruise at Milford Sound. It lived up to the hype. It was cool (~5C) and rainy with some wind. I was mostly prepared and spent the entire trip on the open deck except for twice ducking into the main floor to get a cup of hot tea.

Some photos on Instagram

Lots of short walks in national parks today. All but one was in the rain. See Twitter and Instagram for a couple of snapshots.

Map walk at The Groynes' permanent course. I had two little bobbles. At one control I stopped and didn't see the marker, looked at my map, and then saw the market. At another I looked at my map and walked into a low chain and bashed my shin.

C • Lots of... 2

And another map walk at another permanent course. This time it was a place called Spencer Park. Mary and I took turns leading legs.

The terrain was cool - sand dune forest along the shore.

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An unexpected map hike with Mary. We took turns finding permanent controls at Whakarewarewa. We went to the park to see the redwood forest. When we arrived I thought, "this seems like the kind of place that would have a permanent course with a map you could buy at the park office." Turns out I was right.

We also did the tree walk. They've basically build a series of tree houses in the redwoods. They're connected buy suspension bridges. You wander along a 0.5 km trail suspended in the trees. Fun.

We also spent a bunch of time at Wai-O-Tapu (a thermal area).

Post orienteering we checked out the Rotorua museum, walked along the water seeing thermal features and Black Swans.

A good day.

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Hiking along the Tongariro Crossing. Instead of the point to point crossing we started from the west parking area and hiked up to a bit beyond the high point (where we could see the Emerald Lakes) and then retraced our route.

Lots of people on the trails, but the return trip was empty.

Plenty of climb ~900 meters.

We ran bits of the return trip.

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Ruakuri Cave tour.

We started with 35m abseiling to enter the cave. The tour included a zip line, a bit of swimming, paddling in inner tubes, crawling around, walking in the water, and scrambling up a few 3m waterfalls. All of it good, but light exercise.

The highlight was silently floating downstream with headlamps off, but light from glow worms.

The other highlight was that Mary seemed to enjoy it. She's not usually a big fan of caves and 8C water.

I think Cristina recommend this (though both Mary and I had it on our lists).

C • More recommendations appreciated 1

Interesting and difficult today. Some misty weather meant I had trouble seeing the map. So I mostly navigated by stopping to read and then running. Most of the run was ok but slow. But I had one giant error where I wasted loads of time before bailing out.

I posted a bit of the map on Twitter. It doesn't look as tricky as it is. The visibility is low and the forest is hard to run through in a straight line.

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C • Otakanini Topu 1

Orienteering at Hedley Road.

My body wasn't really ready for this. The hills were tough.

Loads of fun despite my physical effort. It was probably too much to expect better.

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Changing planes in Sydney. Feeling good. Next flight in a couple of hours.

Thursday, April 14 seems not to have happened.

Travel. Had some difficulty with dehydration and some electrolyte imbalance. It sucked and I felt terrible. But, Mary worked hard to solve the problem and I felt terrible but not too terrible to get on the plane.

Work commute on the bike even though it was WTWT. I decided not to walk to work because tomorrow is FTNZWTF.

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C • FTNZWTF 2

Work commute. I pulled some weeds in the backyard when I got home. My shoulder is sore (not from pulling weeds but from falling yesterday).

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PTOC red course at Blue Springs Lake Marina.

The map has a lot of green, but it wasn't to bad.

I took a hard fall on the way to the 2nd control when my foot slid on a rock and I fell on my left hip.

I felt a little slow from yesterday, but I was also mentally lazy and didn't do a good job of keeping a good steady effort.

When we arrived I was surprised to see Fritz. He finished a marathon yesterday. Fun to see that he felt good enough to do the orienteering.

http://sprintseries.org/doma/show_map.php?user=spi...
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The MTBO section of the Ft Leavenworth Adventure Race.

My plan for the day was to keep an easy/steady effort and spend about 3 hours on the course. I would skip the extra challenges. The paddling was already cancelled due to some problems with getting the boats to the race with high winds. Except the paintball. I figured I'd shoot the paintball guns because that wouldn't take much time.

The biking section was ok. I had some trouble with a few markers, but that's par for the course when you're navigating on old USGS maps.

Orienteering section of the race. Fun to get in some areas around the hunt lodge. I haven't been there for a very long time. The course was good - you could navigate to the controls and the markers weren't too hard to see. Once control in the bottom of a gully was a bit hard to get to.

At the transition area I chatted with a guy helping at the event. He was interested in my MTBO map holder and we started chatting. He was a West Point orienteer in the late 1990s. It is cool how many former W.P. orienteers you bump into at the Ft Lev Adventure races.

I spent some time in thorns and poison ivy. I tried some Tecnu. I don't know how well that stuff works, but it seems reasonable to test. I also have the Walgreen's version of Zanfel in case things get bad. The Zanfel-like stuff is expensive, but I've had good luck with it. Maybe I should try Goop?

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10940115

After the orienteering and before I biked back to the finish I did the paintball shooting. I was rough, taking maybe 12+ shots to get 6 hits. I think last time I had one miss.

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Work commute after a busy day at the office.

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Some time on the river trails.

I drew a quick course on the river trail map and biked it at an easy effort.

During the course I encountered three fallen trees. I was able to move one off the trail, but the other two will take some chainsaw work. My guess is they'll be gone by the weekend. The folks who maintain the trail do good work.

The trees fell becuase of the afternoon wind. The weather service said the wind speed reached 52 mph in Lawrence. I fought the wind for about 800 meters when I took a levee route on one leg.

I had one good mistake. The leg would have been cake with controls. The control location was a trail bend along a trail with lots of bends. I lost track of my location and had some trouble understanding where I was. I stopped to relocate, then went to the location carefully.

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Work commute. The rain stopped just before I left for work.

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Today was Walk To Work Tuesday. I wonder if Mook remembered?

My left knee feels a little sore. I think I was walking a little bit differently because my left calf is sore from smashing it with my bike on Sunday.

I listened to a podcast with Gary Fischer (early MTB poineer). He seems like an interesting person.

MTB on the river trails. Fun. I had my map board and the river trails MTBO map with me and looked at it occasionally. I might set up a practice course and put out some tapes. There might be a few people who'd use it (Gene? Sandy? Fritz? Blair?).

I felt better physically than I've felt in a while.

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Same as yesterday but longer. I kept the pace easy and took walk breaks. I made a few notes on the map, too.

Temps were warm - maybe low 70s and plenty of sun and wind.

The new lidar map needs some work on the KP vegetation. I'll do some experiments to see what settings work best.

Lots of leaves are out, noticeably more today than yesterday. I'll probably do some orienteering next weekend and will discover that there were too many leaves (and poison ivy) out to be pleasant.

Lots of climb.

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After running I headed over to West Campus to watch a bit of the bike race. I also had a strange little accident where my bike tipped and hit the back of my left calf, leaving a small but uncomfortable gash. I took a few photos. I liked this one.

A photo posted by @okansas on Apr 3, 2016 at 1:37pm PDT

Easy "kartlek" with a KP map from the 2015 lidar at Clinton State Park. I took frequent short breaks to walk a little bit and/or make a few notes on the map. I was checking out the vegetation and looking for rockwalls. The vegetation is accurate but a bit too dark green. I can play around with the KP settings and see if I can come up with something that looks a bit more reasonable. I can also do something really simple like just change the darkest shade of green to a middle shade of green. I found a few rockwalls and I'll check the lidar to see if I can see them. I think I'll be able to see most of them.

I took it really easy. I'm still lagging a bit.

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MTB on the river trails after work. It was colder than I expected. I was also caught in a minute or so of rain (despite a mostly sunny sky).

I felt awful in the morning at work. By lunch I'd decided not to ride after work. But then as the day went on I felt a lot better.

I'm still not fully recovered from being sick and felt tired on the last 15 minutes of the ride.

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