Training Log Archive: CleverSky

Surprisingly, this is all you can get out of a Pontiac Vibe:

From misc

The car keeps going after that point, but not the odometer. It just stops at 299999. A little web searching verified this, and Canadian cars only go to 299999 km. Seems like Pontiac/Toyota had low expectations for their cars.

Carrying my stuff out to launch at Ascutney, two trips.

Climbing the NW side of Ascutney from the "Africa" LZ up to the summit parking lot where my car was. Normally there's either a designated driver, or enough people show up that we can stash a car near the LZ, or the pilot will hitchhike around the mountain and up the auto road. But I was the only one flying, and my mother told me to never hitchhike, so climbing seemed like the thing to do. The woods were actually quite nice, and I enjoyed the climb quite a lot, though some of the other pilots seemed incredulous when they found out that I had done this (I had been eyeing the possibility for quite a while). At first glance it seems interesting that, at a walking pace, I managed to do in 70 minutes what took me 52 in the race last year. On the other hand, I took a more direct route, though for serious climbing, the vertical is a lot more important than the distance. Turns out that the field I landed in is 300 feet higher than the base of the auto road, so I did only 2000 feet of climbing, as opposed to 2300 in the race.

Carrying my stuff out of the LZ to the car. Includes the time spent getting the slugs off the bottom of the glider bag.

Flight time was 10 minutes. Most pilots would have considered a day like this to be an unmitigated disaster, I think.

NE Canoe-O Champs at Bear Hole (Massasoit State Park in Taunton, MA).I did the Elite course in Aims's C1, and won, primarily due to the low turnout that meant I was the only one on the Elite course. Nice course on a map that had four distinct water bodies and easy trails connecting them. Total distance covered was 9.6 km, of which about 4.5 km was paddling, 3 km was carrying the boat, and 2.2 km was running without the boat (out-and-back legs that account for most of the additional distance above the straight-line route).

The one error was pretty comical -- I was carrying the boat across a peninsula, and couldn't read the map when the boat was on my head. I went to what I thought was the right spot to drop the boat, but I wasn't positive where I was. Heading in the diection that I expected the control to be, and primarily going downhill because the feature was a pond that I figured would be in a depression (no contours on the map), I found it without much trouble. Heading back, though, it seemed that I had taken a slightly roundabout route, so I headed back on what I thought was a more direct way to where I had left the boat. Before too long I had to leave the trail because it was going the wrong way, and then I found myself in somewhat thick woods wondering where I had left my boat (with the map in it). What saved me was the fact that I had cleverly left the boat on top of a hill, so I just kept going up until I found it. Not a huge amount of time lost, as the leg was only 7:38, which included carrying the boat the rest of the way across the peninsula and paddling to the next control.

Picking up controls with Aims at Massasoit, using the C2 Cruiser. This was a mixture of paddling, jogging separately from Aims, and pulling the boat on a very cool little two-wheel dolly.

Massasoit is an interesting place, pretty nice woods, but the park has been closed for a couple of years due to lack of funds. According to Aims, the death knell came when they had electrical power problems and determined that the underground wiring had corroded, plus they were having plumbing troubles. There wasn't enough money to repair the infrastructure, so they eliminated the staff as well. It still gets used by a lot of people, but it's more like a state forest than a state park now, and nature is just beginning to reclaim everything. It's a state ghost park.

Memory-O at Ahern, probably advanced difficulty, made more challenging by the lack of a map. Jim offered a map with course, to be carried in a pocket unless we ran into serious bewilderment, but I decided to do it "without a net". Three errors: at #1 I didn't look at the map carefully enough, and failed to see all of the knolls near #2, so I didn't know which one the control was on, and since it was a very short leg, I went back to #1 to look at the map again -- turned out I was less than 20 meters from the control when I turned around. On #5 I didn't pay close enough attention to what direction I was supposed to be going, and headed off about 45 degrees from the direction that I should have gone. Fortunately, when I hit a trail that I didn't really expect, I had the good sense to follow it, and it went to the marsh that I was looking for. And on #7, I drifted when going through the green, but I knew that I just had to hit the big marsh and the control would be on a cliff just past it. That's what I found, but when I looked at the code, I saw that I was at #8. I lucked out, because the map fragment had #7 on it, so I was able to use that to navigate back. Despite all that, I managed the best time, about five minutes faster then Ernst.

Sprint at Ahern. Went pretty well, though I wasn't breaking any records because my lungs aren't clear yet. Sloppy mistakes on the last three controls (ran right past the boulder on one of them, circled around the knoll looking at cliffs on another), still good enough for the best time. Stephen and Nancy did the course as well, and I was very pleased with how Stephen did, we had to kind of twist his arm to do the sprint instead of the Yellow, and he thought he did poorly, but he was only a bit slower than his mother, and I think he actually found all of the controls himself, though she had caught up to him at the end and I think they found the last couple of controls at basically the same time. Three or four of the controls were in my opinion too hard for an Orange course, so this was a nice job for a kid who's 14.

Went up to Cannon to fly, but when I got there and scoped everything out, I decided I wasn't comfortable with the whole situation and opted to leave the glider on the car. I told the other guys that I'd help them carry stuff, do the driving and pick them up. Pilots buy a one-way tram ticket, I and figured I might as well do the same, it's easy enough to come back down a mountain on foot. Right? There's only one trail from the top of the tram down to the parking lot, the Kinsman Ridge trail, because the ski slopes are off limits. So that's the way I went. Man, that trail really sucks. Not quite so bad up high, just narrow, then it's steep and rocky (by which I mean paved with very large off-kilter rocks), and lower down it's steep and loose. This is probably the worst thing I've ever been on that's considered an official trail. I can't in good conscience list this as more than level 2, because it had 650 m of drop. I've listed this as 2.1 miles because the sign at the junction past the tower said 2.0 miles to the parking lot, but the trail was twisty enough that I could believe it might be somewhat longer. I was trying to make good time, but there's only so much you can do when the trail is that rough, few people could have managed more than a very slow walk. I also had a camera in one hand and a radio in the other, and it's a miracle that I didn't fall (had a few very close calls).

Got to the airport just a few minutes after everybody landed.

Ratlum Summer relay, Team Dibs w/Becky Carlyle. Largely, though not entirely recovered from my respiratory ailment, so my aerobic capacity was reduced, and in particular I made an effort not to push hard enough that I would start coughing. I ran the lead-off on course A-1. Dubious route to the first control, though it worked well enough. Bobbled #3 when I popped out on Derby Rd. in a different spot than I expected after unnecessarily thrashing through the green. Tiny time loss on #5 -- I was in the circle, but it took me a few moments to locate the pit. Overshot the last control by a few meters because my addled brain had decided the knoll was on the other side of the trail.

Third leg of the relay (B-1). No trouble finding any of the controls. On #5 I took the trail, though going up through the open may have been better. Leaving #6 I went left (downhill) to get past a nasty patch of laurel, but going to the right of it would definitely have been better. Climbed through the woods to get to #9, which may have been fine (versus going a bit further to take the trail. All else was fine. Thanks to stellar runs by Becky, Team Dibs finshed 2nd to Joe and Pafi.

Went for a very, very slow walk around the neighborhood (down Gilchrest and back up through the Woodlands), to try and get a little fresh air after having spent the better part of four days basically in bed. Took nearly an hour, and pretty much wiped me out.

C • get better! 2

This really will be a rest day. I started feeling a sore throat yesterday, and am going to take it easy, especially on what looks to be a damp day.

Carrying my glider out to launch at Ascutney. Ryan took my harness, so I didn't need to do a second trip.

I realized that I had forgotten my phone in the car, so I jogged back to get it. Jake and John were starting the hike just as I got to the parking lot, so on the way back out I offered to carry their harness bags. So much for not doing two trips...

Carrying my glider and harness from the breakdown area in Africa out to Coaching Lane (two trips).

From Africa over to Kansas so I could hang out with the other guys until Ryan arrived to pick us up. (Could have sworn that I timed this, but apparently not, so the time is a guess.) Ryan knew where I had landed, so he went there first, but I wasn't there. He did find my stuff, though, so when he showed up, my glider was already on the roof of the car.

Too damn hot. Heavy thunderstorms when I woke up, and I'm going to take it easy, because the rest of the day is forecasted to be too damn hot.

I had a funny feeling that if I said I was going to take a rest day, that it wouldn't turn out that way, and sure enough, the body shop called and said Mom's car was ready. I could have just picked her up and driven her over there, but it was more pleasing to hop on the bike -- even a warm day isn't so bad when you've got a brisk breeze going. I was planning to ride home from Mom's as well, but when I pulled the bike out of the trunk, it inexplicably had a flat tire, so she gave me a ride home.

"Peak" bagging the highest point in Connecticut. I had wanted to do this for some time, and finally got an opportunity. Although some state high points are very close to (or maybe even on) the state border, I think they are all local maxima, with this one exception. The highest point in Connecticut is located on a slope that continues uphill into Massachusetts. (Seems to me that it would be a fine idea for Massachusetts to offer to transfer ownership of a few acres of state forest to Connecticut, so that the latter would own the summit of Mt. Frissell, but maybe it's not so important.) I think this makes a whopping four state high points for me: NH, RI, MA, and CT. I ran the first part of this loop (going clockwise) and hiked the rest. It would have been much better to do it in the opposite direction, because the descents from Frissell and Round were awful, and I'd rather do awful on the way up than the way down. But I probably would have left the map in the car and gotten lost if I went that way.

From misc

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C • I think I've got the highes... 2

Dropped Mom's car off at the auto body shop, then ran to her house, largely through the woods. My initial plan had been to take the old railroad bed to the center, but I decided to go down Meetinghouse Road to take a look at Pat Ties (the old swimming hole). The bridge has been out for half a century or so, but there was a tree down across the river that I could cross on, allowing me to go on familiar trails that I occasionally used to use to come home from school. I opted to go via the old horse racing track (doo dah, doo dah), which I guess was a 4 furlong deal, and terrifyingly narrow. Dad used to say that if you could figure out where the stands used to be, that would be a good place to go with a metal detector, in hopes of finding very old coins that had been dropped by bettors. He may well have been right, but he never got bored enough to do that sort of stuff, and I hope I never do either.

Townsend State Forest, western section. I got in the car intending to drive up to Windblown and run on the Wapack Trail, but then I asked myself why I should drive so far, rather than run someplace closer. It's probably been at least 20 years since I've been in this section of forest, and my memory of it was dim. I had completely spaced out on the fact that a railroad line goes through here until I got to the tracks, and I decided to run on them. Even though I made a point of waiting until the green light on the GPS stopped blinking before I started running, for some reason it didn't record anything until I got to the border (the first part of the run looked roughly like this). I remembered some exposed granite out there, and I managed to find the quarry and the large bare rock area, which, curiously, has what looks like a huge steel crucifix bolted into the rock. The railroad bed is very runnable, because fallen pine needles and such have filled in between the ties, resulting in a firm, smooth surface. There are also no trees growing between the rails, even though there are a lot of saplings on either side. I found this strange, but then I saw a hand-lettered sign reading "Caution - Narrow Rails" just before a stretch where one of them has come loose and drifted a foot or so toward the other. I suspect that enough snowmobiles go through there that it beats down the seedlings. On the way back south, I was mostly on old footpaths, with a little bit on larger old roads, or skidder tracks. There's still a big chunk of terrain to the east that I should explore. The area is steeper that I remembered, and the woods looked pretty thick overall, not too appealing, plus there was a dense patch of laurel just east of the quarry that might be a taste of what to expect. I think I remember looking at aerials that showed that the laurel wasn't as bad as on the TSF map, though.

Further examination of where I went indicates that I wasn't really in the State Forest for more than a couple of minutes.

Mystery Blazes loop, making a conscious effort to take it a bit easy, staying at a pace that I could have maintained for a long time. When I was at the spot where I found the down vest, I saw something that looked like a huge pumpkin, orange and roughly spherical, sitting on the ground. Turned out to be a Chinese flying lantern.

There are some really nice woods out there, and I should make an effort to do some running off-trail from time to time. I also ought to try mountain biking this loop, I think it's doable.

Walking around Burlington Landlocked Forest with my friend Mike, who is a scout leader, and will be making a map and setting up a trim course in this area. It looks to be about 1.2 sq km, with a pretty extensive trail network and open woods, so it should work out nicely.

Mystery Blazes loop. Strange run, I was feeling kind of blah, but figured I should get out and do something, and just cruising around the standard loop was the easiest option, not expecting to put a lot of effort in. I felt like a zombie out there, kind of spaced out, with the terrain looking vaguely unfamiliar. Some of that was the seasonal vegetation changes (like the ferns in the flats before Mulpus), but I also found myself surprised by coming to turns before I was expecting them, and early on I was seeing serious spots in front of my eyes. It turned out to be only 14 seconds slower than my best time for this run. Go figure.