Training Log Archive: Spike

WTWT. Feeling better but still not normal. Walking to/from work was just about the perfect amount of physical effort.

My current plan is to sleep without medication tonight and do an easy MTB ride after work tomorrow. I made it through the entire work day without any cold medicine.

Feeling better and better, but not normal. I decided I needed to break a sweat, so a perfect thing to do was to row, row.

I'll go to sleep early and try walking to work tomorrow.

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Still sick. But, definitely feeling better than yesterday (and that was a little better than the day before). Yesterday my chest felt sore from coughing. Today it is still sore, but not nearly as sore and I've hardly coughed at all.

My current plan is another very easy day with plenty of rest, then I will do WTWT and see how that feels. WTWT = Walk to Work Thursday.

Meanwhile, I'm having fun with the new 2015 Lidar and some trip planning/day dreaming.

Not healthy. So I tried to do a lot of resting.

After sleeping well and fairly late, I looked out the window and saw snow! A bunny in the backyard was looking cold and wet - not the usual image of the easter bunny. The temp warmed up and by a bit after noon the snow was melted.

I spent some time playing around with the 2015 lidar data. The tiles are huge at 5 x 5 km. The point density is a lot higher than the 2006 data. I compressed the data from LAS to LAZ which makes the files much smaller and seems to be easier to work with. I also tested Lasthin to see how that works. It seems to work well and even the much smaller thinned files look to give plenty of detail for a decent O' map.

Sick. Didn't sleep so well last night becuase my breathing wasn't very good and my throat was a bit scratchy.

I don't like being sick.

MTB on the river trails after work. I spent some time on the sandy parts of the Sugar Loop. I don't understand how best to ride through deep sand.

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Work commute. Kind of cold in the morning (mid 30s) with strong wind and light rain.

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Work commute. Wonderful tail wind to get to work, but a tough head wind coming home.

Joggging on West Campus. I felt pretty crummy and slow. Not sure why.

The weather was interesting. It was warm (mid 70s) and windy when I left. 5 minutes later, the rain started and the temp dropped quickly. The water was cold and with the wind I figured I might get cold. But, after about 5 mintues, the rain stopped and the sun came out and it got warm again.

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Walk To Work Tuesday.

Orienteering at Harriman. Fun. I jogged around picking out features to go look at.

Running felt good, better than expected. Navigation was smooth with 2 exceptions. On one leg I drifted when dealing with some Mountain Laurel. On another I made a little parallel error.

Here is a taste of today's training:

https://instagram.com/p/BDMIiwiQ0zY/

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Memorial for Nick today. The memorial mass was nice. At one point when the priest was talking I couldn't stop thinking of this scene from a Gavin and Stacey:

http://youtu.be/GOvaJNcmaGE

After the mass we drove by Mary's old home in New City and visited a local park.

Next up was a reception. Around 90 people. Very few of Nick's generation. He outlived most of them.

An Air Force Honor Guard came, played taps, folded a flag, and presented the flag to Patricia. It was very moving.

Finished a long day with an Italian dinner in Pearl River, followed by watching the KU game.

Travel day. We went for a short hike at a little county park.

Work commute followed by laundry, packing and organizing.

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Work commute. Temp in the upper 30s in the morning and the mid-60s for the trip home.

Jogging on West Campus. My legs felt better than I'd expected, but I also wasn't out for very long.

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Walk To Work Tuesday.

On my lunch hour walk I spotted Bryce, the county GIS guy, and chatted with him about the 2015 lidar. It was done at a higher quality (not sure that's the right term) than the 2006 lidar, which means the files are very big. The tiles are also larger. Larger files is a pain. The 2006 files are 1x1 km. That means most maps end up using several tiles put together, but the individual files aren't so big that there is any problem. The new tiles are large (maybe 5 x 5 km?). I'm worried that I won't be able to open them and cut out the area that I need to use for a map. The problem is bigger because the quality is higher so the files are already bigger.

I'll see what I can do. The first step is to talk with the GIS folks and find a good tile or two to download and test.

Work commute. Dense fog on the trip to the office.

Most students are out of town for spring break, so the trip in was nice and quiet.

MTB on roads and gravel on West Campus. Easy and just sort of mindless. But, it felt good to move around and break a sweat.

My legs are a bit dead but not sore. My ear hurts.

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The first part of today's adventure race at Milford.

Orienteering on a USGS map with bingo controls.

My strategy in the beginning was to not waste time hunting around for markers if I wasn't absolutely sure I was in the right spot. The course I'd planned went out and back. I had trouble at the first marker. I looked for a minute or two, then just moved on (knowing that I could give it a second try later in the course). I don't know if that was a wise strategy, but it kept me from getting too frustrated.

I'd been out 47 minutes before I actually found any controls!

When I got up at 4:45 a.m. to meet Sandy and drive to Milford, Mary reminded me "it is an adventure race." Even in a very sleepy state, Mary had good advice - it is a reminder that the map and control placement might be sketchy but don't get frustrated.

I wacked my ear on a stick in some thick and crappy forest. It didn't hurt at the time, but it hurt after the run.

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MTB orienteering section.

The way the controls were set, I thought the best route was to pick up all of the controls going out and then just bike back on the main roads. That was a good decision, I think, but the pure biking back was a chore.

We were lucky with the lack of wind. March in Kansas would normally be windy, but we had light wind and a little bit of light rain. No sun. Mid/upper 50s. Very nice conditions.

The control placement was a bit sketchy in a few places. It helped a lot to have a good idea of the trail network in Milford State Park (the trails aren't on the USGS map). One control was especially hard to find. It was tucked in a bunch of evergreens in an overgrown flat field. Really the only was to find it was to just get in the general area and search and hope. I spent ~20+ minutes before I bumped into it (and that was because I saw someone leaving the control).

My legs were shot on the trip back. I was working hard but moving slowly. I'm not a strong cyclist. Maybe I'll work on that a bit more this year.

Kayak section.

This was simple - just paddle along the shore to the next cove, take the control (which was on a tree and easily visible, and paddle back.

I had some hassles with gear. I grabbed a lift vest, but it was way too large. So I had to shuffle back up the beach and find one that fit. I was also moving pretty slowly because my legs were shot. Moving the kayak down to the water was hard.

Another solo competitor came up behind me and passed me. Having some competition helped me push a bit. I wasn't going fast, but I was working hard. In the end, I didn't catch him. I recognized him from the AR in Salina. He was on the team that beat me in the short race. This time he was racing alone.

He beat me to the finish, but it turned out that he had decided not to get all of the biking controls, so I finished ahead of him.

It turned out I was the only person to sweep the course.

Afterwards, I had a short chat with the 2 Army Rangers from Fort Riley who are training for some sort of national Army Ranger compeition in April at Fort Benning. They looked fit. I told them how much I struggled with the sketchy map and that as an orienteer the map was so rough. They thought it was pretty good, compared to military maps. I guess your perspective makes a big difference.

Interesting story about doping

http://www.nrk.no/sport/latvisk-vm-vinner_-_-som-a...

C • meldonium 9

No training, but I did some organizing for Saturday's "adventure race" at Milford. Sandy came by with her new bike rack and we got both bikes on it, so that's one less thing to do early Saturday morning.

Jogging on West Campus. I felt pretty good. I took a short stop at the cemetery to look at graves.

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Walk To Work Tuesday.

A bit over an hour each way, with just a few drops of rain each way.

Podcasts on the walk were Skidskyttepodden and Generation Anthropocene

I saw 8 deer on the last bit on West Campus.

MTB on the river trial.

I felt strange most of the day at work. Just not feeling right and having a hard time concentrating. I started feeling a bit better around 4 p.m. and decided a little river trail ride would be worth a try. It was and I'm glad I went.

A bit of my bike fell off during the ride. There is (or was) a little plastic shield on the outside of the chain ring. I don't think it serves any useful purpose. It definitely made it harder to clean stuff off the chain ring.

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A photo posted by @okansas on Mar 7, 2016 at 5:11pm PST

Trails at Rockcrusher and a little bit in the terrain.

Temps were warm (low 70s) and the sun was out. It felt hot. The wind helped, I guess. It was quite windy. We were lucky we didn't hold the event today as the dust from the gravel road at the start/finish/registration area was a pain.

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MTB on the river trail. I tested out a bit of stuff that I'll need for next weekend's adventure race at Milford - map board and Camelbak. both worked fine.

There were a lot of cars at the trail head, but I didn't really see many people out on the trails.

Things are really dry. Parts of the trail are getting sandy that don't usually get sandy. I think there's a chance of rain tonight. That'd be good.

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Jogging around to put out controls for today's event at Rockcrusher.

The event seemed to go well. The weather was a bit warm for running, but nice for organizing. We had our usual turnout (29 starts with about 40 people). Two of the starts (and 5 of the people) were from the Wednesday night Ad Astra clinic.

I had a bunch of help from Blair, Mary, Gene, and Paul.

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Work commute with an extra trip to get the maps for tomorrow's Rockcrusher orienteering. I hope we get a good turnout. I hope we don't get more people than we have maps.

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.@BernieSanders gets a haircut in Lawrence, KS; via @joshbhaskell pic.twitter.com/u2FPwQ5RgB

— ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) March 3, 2016

And this one features some video: https://twitter.com/DannyEFreeman/status/705540504...

Work commute. Big headwind heading to the office, big tailwind heading home. The tailwind made me feel strong going up the Mississippi Street hill.

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OK hosted an intro-to-orienteering clinic at Ad Astra Running. It seemed to go ok. We had 8-9 people with very little publicity. Several of the attendees said they plan to come to Saturday's event at Clinton Rockcrusher.

One of the attendees noticed that the map we were looking at had a credit to the basemap of "lidar from www.kansasgis.org." It turns out she works there. That was cool. It also turns out that she is Paul Jordans grand daughter. Paul talked me into going to my first ever A-meet after I'd done two local events. That trip got me hooked (1981 US Intercollegiate Champs at Touch of Nature in Southern Illinois).

Walk To Work Tuesday. Temp was about 30F when I went to work. That's a good temp for walking. But, there was a strong north wind and that was cold.

On the walk home I listened to a Jonah Keri podcast with an interview of Dan Harren. Interesting and just the right length for the walk home (right about an hour).

Also, here is the "trailer" for this weekend's orienteering at Rockcrusher:

https://youtu.be/57exnEbTZms

C • Rockcrusher video 2