Training Log Archive: Sandy

So this was a total, total bummer. Went out with the TNT crowd, walked the road, started jogging when we hit the trail, but within a minute or two I could tell my knee (the brace one) just did not feel right. And it didn't get better - which it sometimes does as I warm up. Everyone went on ahead and I walked some and tried to run, but even walking was painful and running was a definite no-no. Limped to the bottom of the usual trail up to home (we had come down a different way intending to run the hillsides and not the drive) and remembered the last time it had hurt this badly running up the hill was fine. So I tried that. Running up was okay - not pain free, but not bad - but the back down was another story. Did that three times - 1:30 up and 3:00 down - but the last down really hurt. So called it a night and just stretched a bit and walked a bit and waited for others to finish.

So I can't think of a single thing that would have made it suddenly hurt like that. It's just totally depressing. Perhaps it was my bold comment that I haven't needed any ibuprofen in a while. ;) For good measure, I took several when I got home and iced for a while and it feels fine now.

Decent workout although I got sidetracked watching the end of a movie and didn't do the stretching or icing I had intended which is really stupid since stretching and icing are a perfect thing to do while watching the end of a movie.

C • movie 2

Hiking in the Wissahickon - tried to take a hilly route and keep the pace up.

More yard work. Tiring work, but boy is the yard starting to look nice! Need to do some more moving around this fall. Almost down to the last of the mulch from the ground-out tree stump.

Situps, pushups, weights, plus some stretching.

TNT Media. Ran with Harvey, Dasha and Eric while Clem, Tom and two newcomers, Steve and Ray, did their thing. A big crowd this evening!

Had to walk the big hills. :(

Knees very sore after Tuesday's run - probably because Forbidden Drive gets pretty hard packed in the summer and I just slogged through the 4 miles. Knees tonight felt fine. I have an interesting built in gauge on Thursdays - I usually change in the upstairs bathroom at Clem and Dasha's and I can tell by hard it is to get down the stairs afterwards how bad my knees are. I waltzed down the stairs this evening without a problem - that doesn't happen too often!

Got a "burn" on my leg from the ice packs; need to be better about putting a layer between the packs and my skin! But the regular icing and stretching seems to have improved things greatly - no ibuprofen for a while now.

A good session. Got a bit lazy down at the shore so need to get back in the routine.

TNT - met my goal of going non-stop for four miles. Time includes the walk down and up. Left my running watch at the shore so had to use another one and I'm not sure what I did, but I must have hit the wrong button since the time stopped and I missed several splits. Thus, the time is approximate. I was running 10-10:20 miles though on the splits I did get, so very slow.

The Jersey shore may be flat, but it was windy, and so the way out was too easy and the way back felt like uphill the whole way.

More running barefoot on the beach in the soft sand. Better than yesterday but still had to stop and walk a few times.

Running interspersed with walking on the beach. Stayed in the really soft stuff where it was really tough going but the hard packed stuff is on a real slant and uncomfortable.

TNT - ran the trails with Sandy A. Walked some of the hills but ran more than I thought I'd be able to when I started. The little bit we did on the drive getting from the trails on one side of the valley to the other seemed so much harder than the running on the trails and we weren't pushing it or anything - not sure what was up with that. We both noticed it; I wonder if it has to do with how hard packed the drive is compared to the trails.

The rest of the group - Clem, Karl, Ben, John, Alison - ran further and faster. Nice to see Alison keeping up with the boys!

Course setting at Hickory Run, mostly for the night-O in September. Three hours in the woods but lots of standing around changing my mind about suitability of control locations given how thick the woods were in places. Didn't get as much done as I hoped - had expected to look at more control sites for the Sunday courses.

Bruce Z. came along; not sure he got the "training" he was looking for but it was a very pleasant time.

Just had an interesting incident with my contacts. (The Hickory Run map is 1:15 so in order to see any of the detail I need help - reading glasses, magnifier or contacts all work and although I usually only wear the contacts for orienteering races I chose to wear the contacts today.) When I went to take them out a little while ago I couldn't find them. I had to rub my eyes and roll them around for a few minutes until finally the contacts made an appearance back on the front of my eyeballs, one of them completey folded over. Very strange. Both that they would migrate like that and that I didn't notice. I'm not sure if it's because of how long they were in today or if I rubbed my eyes or if it's because they were old and I probably should have tossed them a month or two ago.

Anyway, I think it is probably a very good thing that I chose not to wear them for the rogaine. And the purpose of this note is to remind me to not wear them in future ones. I may need to carry two sets of glasses though or count on a partner with better vision!

3 more days of twice a day icing and stretching. Now to add in a few pushups and situps...

Nice long hike with Valerie on the Fair Hill map. I very much like the fact that she considers Fair Hill a "meeting in the middle somewhere" place.

Some lingering rogaine effects - feet were sore by the end.

Thinking about setting a mini-rogaine/long score-o there next year some time. Will need to put out lots of controls to make at least the route planning challenging as nothing much else will be. I think 6 hours but Vadim says 4, otherwise too many people will be able to get them all. And there could easily be a solo category. And even a bike category.

Regardless, I think a lot of people would have a lot of fun and it's a way to use up those 1:15000 maps!

C • Sounds fun! 9

A ton of yard work the last couple of days and more to do tomorrow. But things are starting to look pretty good and my flowers are blooming like crazy. And while it's not training, it is tiring ... and it must burn more calories than sitting in front of the tv, right?

TNT - Clem, Eric and Dasha ran back and forth at various rates to stay with me while I ran. I was pretty slow and had to walk up many of the hills. Still, it was a good workout and I tried to walk fast when I did walk. Time includes some slower walking at the end when I was back on pavement.

Left big toe is still tender; I drilled a hole in the nail the other night to relieve the pressure and that helped but it still bothered me on the downhills.

Have been very good about icing and stretching for four days in a row. Yay. Let's see how long I can keep it up.

C • yay! 3

TNT - on my own although Bob and Clem were off doing their own thing as well. I walked down to the drive and then alternated running half miles and walking. The running splits were 5:05, 4:33, 4:17 and 4:34. The walking splits were 7:44, 7:30, 7:38. Surprised I was able to move that fast. Did a couple of minutes of stretching and then walked the hill home.

C • I'm hoping that dad and I will... 2

The only thing still sore is one big toe. I frequently get a blood blister under the nail during rogaines and have lost the nail at least three times. Not sure how to avoid this - I think it's just from hitting the top of the shoe, not the front. I already wear a gel cap on the toe to avoid blisters. Wonder if taping it would somehow help.

One good (bad?) thing about rogaines is I always have rogaine food left over afterwards that I get to eat. And so tonight I'm finishing off the jelly beans and still have pineapple and cashews.

C • food 1

Hiking on the trails at Hammond Hill at the Leonards. Easy pace.

Feet and bad knee a bit tender but not really sore. Everything else, including my other knee, feel great. Go figure. I guess the next time my good knee hurts, I need to go on a 12 hour hike.

I have to say that doing 12 hours at a rogaine is really interesting. I've done 6 hours and 24 hours before but never 12. For the 12, the route planning seems to be really key - we didn't bother with lots of controls since we had so many to choose from. Knowing we couldn't come close to getting them all it didn't make sense to sweep an area if leaving controls would get us to other sections of the map with more points - so hunting for routes that maximized points was critical. We didn't run except for about 100 meters on the way to the finish, so our route must have been pretty optimal. And although 12 hours is tough on the feet and we certainly wanted to sit down when we finished, we weren't hobbling around the way you are (or at least I am) after 24. It all felt rather civilized.

CNYO rogaine - with Cristina

C • Yes, and....? 3

CNYO Finger Lakes Rogaine - 12 hour

Oh so close to a perfect race...or at least one where I'm not second guessing any decisions. Ended up with 1150 out of 3300 points which put us 3rd in the 12 hour category behind two all male teams.

Cristina and I worked well together - never more than a few words needed when discussing routes or changes in plan. She was a great partner and if my knees could have handled it, she would have been willing to tow me a ton more than she did. The best news is that feet, knees and hips all hurt less than I feared: feet and bad knee no more than usual and hips and good knee not at all. Very, very pleasantly surprised. Cristina's feet got to her a little after dark but it took a long time before she let on and she didn't let it slow her down. We never stopped or sat down. We lay down a few times but that was so we could get under the incessant barbed wire fencing around every blankety-blank field.

For once, I actually had an intelligent strategy for a rogaine! We got (or tried to get) pretty much every control in a long narrow swath that resulted in such minimal climb that the few times we did have to climb, it actually felt good to use different muscles. And although our plan was designed to leave us lots of options for skipping controls at the end, it also gave us options to add on when we covered way more distance than I thought possible. (Will have to measure to figure it out but I thought 3 km/hr was my absolute max and we're pretty sure we did more.) And the best part is that it wasn't our first idea. We mapped that out and felt pretty good about it and then I said, just for kicks, since I never do and I always regret it, let's sketch out another loop so we can feel confident our choice is better. And we were astonished to find that the new plan had more points and left us a much richer set of options at the end. So we went with this second plan and had we executed it just a tad better, we would have been 2nd overall in the 12 hour instead of 3rd. (No way we could have caught the first team - some young Canadian dudes that had over 1600 points.)

The map was a bit sketchy in a few places which resulted in our wasting a lot of time on our first control (#77) but eventually finding it, being 100% sure that a control was misplaced (#45) and so deciding to move on but then not getting credit for it since most teams found it although many agreed that it was not in the right place, and not getting a control at night (#75) that you could apparently see from the trail but you wouldn't know it since the trail wasn't mapped correctly but we hit it at night and couldn't read the subtleties of the terrain and my "spotting" flashlight wasn't working so we didn't get lucky. And because we lost time on these controls, we didn't have the time (although in fact we probably did since we finished with 8-10 minutest to spare but I was nervous about how fast we could get in) and so didn't hunt up the reentrant far enough for #55. So we missed out on 40+70+50 points and we were 100 points behind the 2nd place team. But a bit more rogaine "savvy" would have gotten us #45 and #75 and a bit more pushing would have gotten us the extra time to get #55 so hopefully some lessons learned. For #45 I have to admit I was tired and had somewhat turned off my brain since the control looked so easy on paper. And when it wasn't where we expected it, I couldn't pull it together to suss out what might have happened when it was hung to figure out where else to look as many other teams did. And for #75 we knew the trail wasn't mapped correctly since major turns we were taking weren't on the map, but it was 10pm by now and I didn't have the discipline to use all the information I had and use a safer attack. (In hindsight, I knew we hadn't dropped any contours so the trail couldn't have been where it was mapped. Ah well.) We navigated pretty well to most everything else - I can only think of a couple of other places where we didn't just go pretty much right to the control.

Anyway, it was great to have had a good strategy, to have navigated cleanly for the most part, to have held up physically and to have convinced Cristina in the first place that doing a rogaine with me was a good idea!

C • Congratulations, well done! 4

TNT - my sister Judy was in town and she joined us. Judy and I ran (while Eric walked) a shortened loop at a slow enough pace that I could talk the whole way. It was just the right workout - enough without being too much.

Had another classic Tom meal complete with wine; despite the mostly O talk, Judy had a great time.

Knees hurt. :-(

C • knees 4

TNT - with Sandy while Karl ran the trails on his own. I'm oddly pleased with this run...

10:01 down to the drive (walking the road part)
10:01 first mile
9:23 second mile (4:46 and 4:37)
10:01 third mile (5:16 and 4:45)
10:43 fourth (6:00 and 4:43)
20:00 stretching and walk back up the hill

Could have pushed harder during the fourth mile but things were starting to hurt so I jogged very slowly and then even walked a bit before picking it back up again.

Control pickup. Thanks to Clem and Tom who drove up and helped. We got them all in less than 2 hours. Another 15 minute trip across the boulder field and back.

I liked the race format: a rafting section on the Lehigh River, some biking, some river crossing with bikes and tow lines, more biking, a run up a huge hill and back down, more biking and then more biking (a combination of single track, canal towpath, huge uphills and downs, and some road) eventually ending up at Hickory Run where they had 4 controls on the land adjacent to the O map and 17 controls that I set on the O map. These last 21 controls were rogaine format - get as many as you can before the 24 hour time limit. The race started at 3:30 pm and teams starting coming through for the O section around 1am. Three teams got all the points. Some teams got a handful and called it quites at 11am, other teams got as many as they could right up to the 3:30 cut off. The nice thing about the format is that the top teams don't finish and then 6 hours later other teams are still straggling in. Here the top teams were finishing around 1pm right along with other teams that had decided they'd had enough. But unless you got them all you didn't know how you did until everyone was in so most of the teams stuck around until the very end.

They had an interesting way to make sure all team members visit controls. At a few controls, there were bags of nail polish with instructions on which fingernail on which hand was to be painted. There were different colors at different controls and everyone on the team had to paint the designated nail. At the finish there was a check that everyone had red, white and blue nails on their left hand. (There was a Fourth of July theme - the race is called the Cradle of Liberty AR.) It wasn't announced which controls were going to have the nail polish - the boulder field was the only orienteering control that did - so if not everyone went to the control you risked having to go back for your team mate and back to the control.