Training Log Archive: CleverSky

Mystery Blazes (via the Smobile trail, since Howl is now dead). My original plan was to go to Willard Brook SE, but when I drove over there, I saw a couple of pickup trucks and guys with orange hats. Oh. Might not be the best day to be out in the state forest. Did I have my orange shirt in the car? Nope. Ummm... maybe go climb Watatic? I didn't know if hunting is allowed there, and so opted to just go home and run across the street. Got my orange shirt from the closet just in case. I did hear one gunshot while I was out there, not very close by.

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While I was flying on Saturday, it occurred to me that one of the real joys I get from that is being over a hardwood forest when the leaves are off, and having the opportunity to look down through the trees to the forest floor from a couple of hundred feet up. There are places I can fly over where I suppose people really never go, far enough from trails that they really are wild. Seeing the shapes of all of the different trees is pretty neat. I get a similar feeling when orienteering sometimes, though it takes quite a bit longer to get out to the remote places on foot, and a lot of the places where we orienteer are somewhat heavily trafficked.

C • You certainly get the sense... 2

Harold Parker. The woods weren't so bad, but the map wasn't especially helpful. In particular, the trails were not reflective at all of what's out there, and the green might as well have been omitted, because it had no relationship to the current state of things. Big time loss on #2, when I got into the correct area but didn't loot at the base of the cliff where the control was because it didn't look anything like what the map showed. Instead, I convinced myself that I was somewhere else, and headed off looking for wild geese for a while, before returning to the original area and looking at the cliff only because I saw Audun head down there. I'd say at least 12 minutes lost. The other errors were all comparatively small.

This map needs to be completely redone, maybe from scratch.

"Only" two ticks, both crawling.

C • #2 2

To the start after getting dropped off at the skating rink. I was a little late arriving due to construction on Rte. 128, so I didn't dawdle, in order to make sure I had time to clear and check and whatnot. Had plenty of time.

Blue Hills Traverse. Wheezing a little bit early on, enough to slow me down noticeably, though that had cleared up enough by halfway through that I was able to jog along okay, if not exactly run fast. My biggest errors were early on, due to following crowds that had no idea where they were going. One led me to the top of some dangerous cliffs, another to some unmapped features where people were just milling around, and the third down the wrong trail until I spotted a stone wall and knew that we were not where we belonged. I was able to correct all of these without too much fuss. After that, I was in a loose crowd for a while that included Phil, Marie, Meg, John Hansman, and some others. Things thinned out shortly before we got to Rte. 28, then I caught Vadim and was with him from about 14 to 21 (we also passed Jim Arsenault in there). He cruised by me after passing the finish area, but when we hit the climb across the road, he slowed way down. Magnus was up ahead, and I slowly closed in on him until catching him at 22. We were neck and neck from there, until I turned on the jets after the last control and finished ahead of him.

I was quite surprised when I downloaded to see so few names on the result list, and wondered if a bunch of people hadn't downloaded yet. Nope, I took 9th place, which ain't too bad as these things go (I've been 5th once, 7th once, 8th three times, and now 9th four times, with I think 10 more results below that -- the last four years have been considerable lower). As with my 5th place finish, this can be attributed in part to a weak field, though there are a couple pretty respectable names behind me. There seemed to be some opinions floating around (including some of the meet crew) that the course was somewhat too tough, though it seemed fine to me. That said, I've only run two Traverses slower, and those only by a couple of minutes: 2009, when I was apparently feeling ill and walked it, and the frigid rainy death march of 1993. It was nice that the weather today was so beautiful -- had it been a crummy day, I would probably have sought alternate entertainment. (Speculation was that the DNF rate today would be very high, due in part to the presence of a substantial number of underqualified competitors.)

Lots of ticks -- not nearly as many as Nancy's nightmare experience, but almost certainly the most I've found crawling on me after an orienteering course, maybe the most in a day. I didn't count, but it was probably about 15 or 20, none having taken a bite.

C • Traverse 1

Beaver Brook, Red/Blue course. Not too many problems, making sure to be cautious enough whe n it was called for. Lungs were pretty much fine. I was with Jim Arsenault for the middle part of the course (wasn't sure who had caught whom), but I got away from him down around the south end. The only significant time loss was on one control that is near the edge of an area that was logged at some point, and the changed vegetation can be misleading (but I knew in advance what that area would be like, so I should have been prepared and more careful -- but I was paying too much attention to what Jim was doing).

Breakheart Reservation, Red. I was wheezing in bed last night (unusual), so I was concerned about how things would go today. I was wheezing a little during the first part of the course, so I kept my speed down to a level where I didn't make it worse, which also allowed me to navigate almost error-free. Other than some hesitations here and there that cost only a few seconds each, the only goof was when I was a little off to the right on #14, but I corrected without much delay. Pretty much all the difficulty I has was due to the bungled drafting of this map, wherein a lot of the symbols (trails and roads in particular) are sized as if for a 1:15000 map, rendering them nearly invisible to anyone over the age of 40. So, pretty clean, but also a pretty slow pace.

I had a fun little adventure doing yard work at Mom's today. Here's a picture of me cutting a limb that got damaged in the snowstorm:


And here I am after successfully cutting through the branch:


Why so triumphant? Well, for that, you need to consider the big picture:


The story here is that the branch was about 40 feet up (based on a little sighting and triangulation) and about 40 feet long, so that when it splintered, the end of it was just dragging on the ground. It was in an unfortunate spot, close to where Mom walks to hang out her laundry and to get firewood, plus it was close enough that it seemed like if it fell, it might pivot and land on the house. The original plan was to go up on an extension ladder and cut it with a pole saw, but it was too high to reach. After adding a rake handle to the pole saw I could just barely reach, but couldn't do any cutting at all. My brother and I came up with a number of harebrained schemes, none of which really got off the drawing board, but we did cut off half of the limb from the extension ladder so that the hanging piece was a little less hazardous. Then I remembered that Charlie has this cool tree stand that can skootch up a trunk. I borrowed it on Sunday (with some misgivings on Charlie's part) and brought it over to Mom's today. She was originally skeptical, but when I demonstrated it on another tree (just a couple of feet off the ground) and showed her how the safety harness worked, she was reassured.

It's a pretty substantial piece of wood (which will probably contribute to heating her house, eventually).

C • Very fine 2

Mystery Blazes loop, not pushing all that hard, plus stopping here and there to move small to medium sized branches out of the way. There were a few spectacular limbs down, but the loop is still basically passable. I did lose my way completely going up the hill into Townsend, and the Howl trail looks like it's now completely dead. I'm probably the only person who has used that trail in a few years anyway, and it was kind of faint, but now it's really blocked. In getting around some of the lumber, I popped out on the S'mobile trail, and just took that instead. There are some fallen limbs there as well, but I'm sure Tom Bertand and the other S'mobilers will clear them out in short order. I may need to do some clearing of my own in some other places.

AOWN: While driving today, four turkeys took flight and crossed the road just ahead of my car. Everybody made it through safely, but that's a lot of poultry to have at windshield level.

John Read Middle School (WCOC), Sprint #1. Started wheezing badly as soon as I started, which made me both slow and stupid. Not enough oxygen in the brain to think, and I has several disastrous legs, as well as time lost near controls. PG thinks he's losing the ability to orienteer, but his failings are nothing compared to this kind of thing. Ugh.

John Read Middle School (WCOC), Sprint #3. Faced with my infirmity, I pretty much just walked this one. (I did #3 before #2 because the former was longer, and I figured that if I didn't do it second, I'd likely not do it at all.) The one "error" wasn't really much of an error, I just had to turn and climb a bit to get to the control. The highlight of this course was crossing the ruined "bridge" between 6 and 7.

John Read Middle School (WCOC), Sprint #2. Breathing clearing up somewhat by this point, so I was able to go a bit faster. The one mistake on this one involved coming down the wrong side of a complicated outcropping, so that I had to climb back up a line and contour across some steep stuff to get to the boulder. No question about where I was, but not a very efficient route.

And then a nice surprise party at a local restaurant afterwards, courtesy of Nancy.

C • Party 1

Up the West Rutland access road to retrieve PK's car, after flying. It's a little funny to call this "running", because very little of it was done with a running gait, but I was probably going faster than if I had stubbornly kept "running" and wasted energy bouncing up and down. The powerwalking that I did instead was probably more efficient. Normally I take shortcuts or just go up the front face when I do this, but I decided to actually follow the road in order to map it out with the GPS (see track). My speed was pretty much limited by the oxygen I could take in, I was breathing very hard the whole way (and having a bit of trouble, some minor wheezing). I didn't time how long it took me to drive down, but it was probably a substantial fraction of the time running up. On a happy note, despite the fact that I had a short flight because I forgot my vario in the car and had trouble locating lift, I did manage to stay in the air for longer (35:29) than the time it took me to hike up.