Training Log Archive: CleverSky

Last day of being a slug, activity will pick up tomorrow. I expect there will be some substantial changes in 2012.

C • substantial change 1

Really trivial statistics: I looked at which days of the year I have orienteered on throughout my career (1241 races total).
January and February each have several days on which I have not competed in orienteering: January 3, 6, 7, 8, 18, 21, 25, and 31, February 1, 3, 5, 7, 12, 21, 22, 26, 27, and 29. In March I'm missing 2, 6, 7, and 12, and in December, I don't have 14, 16, 17, and 20-31.
But between March 13 and December 13 inclusive, I'm missing only five dates: June 15, August 29, and September 2, 4, and 5. So I've orienteered on 324 of the 366 possible dates. If I did the calculation correctly, there are 49 of those dates on which I've orienteered exactly once.
Mildly interesting that I have not orienteered on either Stephen's or Nicole's birthdays. (Nor the birthdays of Jim Baker and his father.)
However, the other interesting question is which days I have orienteered on most often. I would have expected that it would have been some day when I picked up five courses in a single year, but that's not the case. I find the answer to be surprising: I have orienteered 13 times on June 28 (in '87, '90 (x2), '92, '94, '95, '98, '99, '00, '03, '04, '08, and '09). Runner up with 11 is June 26 ('88, '91, '95, '98, '99, '01, '02, '04, '10 (x2), and '11). There are three other dates with 10 each: May 16, June 6, and October 20.
Not surprisingly, February has been the least busy month, with 33 races, and June turns out to have been the busiest with 153. May (148) and October (147) are close behind.

Mystery Blazes. T-shirt and O-pants on the winter solstice, gotta love it. Almost 50 F.

C • T-short and shorts for me (... 1

Mystery Blazes. Not quite as warm as predicted, so I wore two shirts, though I probably would have been fine with one. Slight wheezing. Anything under 50 minutes would have been okay with me, so this was fine.

The predicted sore calves do not seem to have occurred, at least in my case. I do have some DOMS, but it's more in the butt, thighs, and abdomen. Calves are fine.

Meanwhile, there seem to be a lot of hits on that "Anybody lurking..." flag counter. I'm not sure how it works, and if it uses IP addresses, then a given person might show up multiple times if they log in from different places (like Peter at his mother's house), but even so, 30 unique users implies that there are some lurkers out there beyond the known nancy, Charlie, PG, PBricker, Rosstopher, and jjcote. Who's out there? Step forward and fess up!

C • irony 7

Not actually chucking wood, but dragging tarpfuls of leaves up a hill and dumping them in the woods (after raking). Close enough. Wild guess on the time.

Gympa followed by some yoga (aka the RHIN-O post-event participant abuse program). I guess I missed the opening yoga warmup. Strenuous enough to leave me a little dizzy.

A rare case of flying and orienteering on the same day (no exercise associated with the former in this case, though my arms got a bit of a workout). I think had happened only twice before.

RHIN-O Long. Went out after dinner, since I had been late arriving. Probably a little colder (no big deal), and also more moonlight. I have misplaced my orienteering glasses, and was at a loss as to how to proceed, but somebody (Jeff?) suggested that I just run without glasses, so that's what I did. Screwed up #6 pretty badly (drifted to the left, I think, and then wandered in circles for much too long), and #8 (which I actually spiked, but I also spiked #9 on the way to it).

RHINO-O Short. My only goof was on #11, where I went much to far to the left, and didn't correct until I saw the barn looming ahead of me.

Walking trails at Crane Beach with Nancy. Time is a guess, but the distance is pretty much spot-on, amazing how well the trail shows up in the aerial photos. Pretty interesting piece of terrain, would make for some cool orienteering, maybe at night. Great parking, too. And it was pretty awesome to be able to be at the beach in 60F+ weather in December.

Sessions Woods, Red. Lost a bit of time on each of the first two controls because I had a thorn in my sock and had to take off my shoe (thought I got it the first time, but I was wrong. On the third one I changed my mind on my route choice about 30 seconds into it and backtracked right past the control. One error due to being off on a compass leg (didn't lose too much), and my routes were probably not that great on the two legs that went past the big hill. Biggest issue was that I was just pretty tired from all the orienteering yesterday, and I wasn't moving all that fast.

Cemetery Hill, Sprint short. Screwed up in the open field on the way to #6, thinking that I was looking for thickets on the far edge of the open area -- got past the control and came in by the back door. Also lost a little time checking various small rocks for #12. Otherwise okay, breathing didn't really act up until I was done.

Cemetery Hill, Sprint Long. Waited around in the car long enough for the wheezing to subside (an advantage of a multi-part race), so I wasn't too hampered in my running. The only real time losss was #7, where I got too far to the west before dropping down the hill, and had to hook back along the bottom of the slope to find the rocks.

Cemetery Hill, Sprint final. One doozy of an error (180 out of #10, made it all the way through the thorns to the big field and then realized I was in very the wrong place), and a little hunting around for #16. Chase start, and I think I neither gained nor lost any places (never saw anybody until SGB at the end, maybe he got ahead of me? or maybe he was in the Green group?), but I definitely lost in terms of time.

Retrieved the six controls in the NW corner.

Night-O at Mt. Tom. A little confusion regarding trails on the way to #2, but everything else was clean. I did hesitate at #8 because there were no codes on the controls, and I thought I was at #8, but I could also see a light well off to the west, and there was the possibility that I was being dumb and was actually at #9. Nope, I was where I thought I was, and it was the owner of the light who was confused.

Across the street, loose variation of Mystery Blazes. Mulpus Brook was high due to the Tuesday night rain, making it hard to find a place to cross. I went far enough downstream that I just went up through the woods to the Enigma Road, and by then my breathing was not so great, so I took the shorter MB route. Unfortunately, it's blazed in red, and I had a lot of trouble following it (I've most often done that route with snowshoes, which makes following the trail kind of trivial). After some back and forth, I eventually gave up on trying to find the blazes, and just bushwhacked through some pretty decent woods. I eventually found the trail again (or some trail, at least) just before where it merges with Main.