Training Log Archive: CleverSky

15 pushups, 40 situps, 10 tableups, 15 pushups, 40 situps, 10 tableups, 15 pushups, 40 situps, 10 tableups.

Using the street directory from the Fire Department in conjunction with gmap-pedometer, I've come up with a total road length in Lunenburg of something over 104 miles. I can't tell exactly what is considered to be Round Road, and there are nine Fire Roads I haven't identified (most or all presumably short dead ends), and three other roads that I'll have to get out in the terrain to find, because GoogleMaps doesn't know about them. I've added the roads in the new Emerald Place condo development, as well as one other road I saw on the map that didn't show up in the street directory (and there could be others), and I tacked on the roads in the two cemeteries. The map also shows an unnamed loop road about 1.1 miles long that isn't in the street directory, which may be some private club or estate or something. Unfortunately, the street directory lists Manchester Drive, which I see as being 0.37 miles long. I had not thought that it was a street, but just the first part of the driveway to the North Leominster Rod and Gun Club (and access to Steve Violette's log landing when he clear-cut the big wetland and got in trouble with the DEP...). The reason it's unfortunate is that it's right down by Leominster Shirley Road, and I should have picked it up on my long run last week. I'll drive by at some point and see if it's gated, or has Private Property signs, and if it does, I won't feel too bad about omitting it.

15 pushups, 40 situps, 10 tableups, 15 pushups, 40 situps, 10 tableups.

I've been drafting Pound Ridge, and right now I'm working on contours. I drafted contours all day today, and I did seven of them. Each one took 50-60 minutes, and they average well over 20 km long each. I still have a fair bit to do on the map, but right now there are over 35000 objects (20000 of those are stony ground dots).

Game 1: 07 7- 8/ 8/ 71 X X X 81 7/7 = 160
Game 2: 72 33 8/ 8/ 9- 9- X 71 53 6- = 110
With Nancy in Lowell. The first game was my second-best ever, which ain't bad considering I started with a gutter ball. There seemed to be something weird about the lane, as both of us almost tripped on the first few approaches, and I was dissatisfied with the ball I had initially grabbed and switched to a different one after a couple of frames. I think this may have been my first-ever turkey, and I was too excited to look at the scoring screen to see if it had an interesting cartoon to note that. It hadn't even occurred to me that it would show cartoons based on multi-frame events (I'm all too familiar with the open frame, split, and "fence" cartoons, and I've seen the spare and strike ones from time to time), until the guy named Bob in the next lane open with four strikes. We had high hopes for him, but his game then fell apart, although all the rest of his frames were spares, ending up somewhat north of 200. Nancy bowled 101 on the first game, and I think 134 on the second.

15 pushups, 40 situps, 15 pushups, 40 situps, 15 pushups.

Sezalb Yretsym. A little icy, a little slushy, a little wet. Didn't have too much trouble finding my way around, just a couple of pauses. The one hitch was that by going CCW, I reached Muplus Brook near the end, and found to my dismay that it was flooded. After picking my way through a laurel thicket, I found a log that got me to an island, and from there I was able to use the usual fallen pine (which was almost submerged) to get to the other side. Still had to detour around some submerged spots after that. Temps in the low 40s, long sleeve shirt was fine.

C • .yteirav rof tsuj semitemos... 4

15 pushups, 40 situps, 15 pushups, 40 situps, 15 pushups, 40 situps, 15 pushups, 40 situps, 20 pushups, 40 situps, 20 pushups.

Lunenburg Project #03. The Hickory Hills Landowners Association got permission last week for an ambitious project to combat invasive weeds in the lake (fanwort). The weeds in question are at the moment just about entirely confined to the boat launch cove, and previous efforts including "benthic barriers" (lining the bottom of the cove with tyvek) did not work. The new plan is to construct coffer dams at the inlet and outlet of the cove, the latter by chainsawing through the ice and dumping about 75 yards of fill into the lake. There will be a pipe to carry water through the cove, which will then be pumped dry, and the hope is that freezing will kill the weeds. They said that they wanted to get started immediately, and I wasn't sure how quickly they'd be able to mobilize. There are a bunch of stones at the top of the cove where the stream comes in that I assume is the start of the upper coffer dam, but no sign yet of a pipe or work at the mouth. Anyway, I knocked off a few streets while I was at it:
trails
-> Island Rd.
<-> Horizon Island Rd.
<-> Williams St.
<-> Island Rd.
-> Smobile trail, etc.
It occurred to me while I was going down the Parallel trail, after passing the Lane trail turnoff, that I had rarely if ever gone down in that direction, and it all looked unfamiliar. In fact, of my two standard trail runs (Mystery Blazes and Willard Brook SE), I've run them only clockwise. I should try them widdershins and get some fresh scenery.

The GPS track looks particularly flaky today (the first and last mile should be identical, and the stretch leading up to mile 4 was on Island Rd.), and the distance is therefore probably too high. The pace was lethargic.

15 pushups, 40 situps, 15 pushups, 40 situps, 15 pushups.

Lunenburg Project #02. Ha!

Two principles in play today:
1) When the weather is terrific, make the most of it. 48F when I left the house, 44F when I got back, O pants and a long-sleeved T-shirt.
2) When you've set yourself up for a silly implied challenge, don't let it gather dust for too long.
Northfield Rd.
-> Turkey Hill Rd.
-> Oak Ave.
-> Main St.
-> Lancaster Ave.
<-> Gibson St.
<-> Leominster Shirley Rd.
<-> Pioneer Dr.
<-> Fort Pond Rd.
<-> Leominster Shirley Rd.
-> Reservoir Rd.
-> Page St.
-> Lancaster Ave.
-> Main St.
-> Oak Ave.
-> Turkey Hill Rd.
-> Northfield Rd.

Lunenburg borders six other towns, and I hit three of them. Leominster three times, and none of those had any signs at the line. I turned around on the first one when the numbers on the mailboxes changed abruptly, and on the other two when the pavement changed. There were nice signs for Lancaster and Shirley. It may appear that I missed Gitto Dr., but that's bogus, it's just the driveway for a company, not a real road (no street sign). The other unnamed roads that show up in GoogleMaps down there are things like driveways and hard hat areas.

I had aspirations of doing this in 2:30, but that was definitely not in the cards. At least I almost broke three hours (and it was longer than I had been thinking anyway, probably because I forgot to include Gibson when I was planning it). I definitely walked some stretches on the way back. I'm not positive, but this might be the second-longest run on pavement that I've ever done. A marathon would take me a very long time at this point, but would be doable. It remains to be seen whether this will have done me more harm or good.

gmap-pedometer had this as 15.66 miles, but the GPS says 16.19, and I'm going with the bigger number.

C • So how many miles of roads ... 4

15 pushups, 40 situps, 15 pushups, 40 situps, 15 pushups, 40 situps, 15 pushups. Resting up.

15 pushups, 40 situps, 15 pushups, 40 situps, 15 pushups. (Plus some shoveling.)

15 pushups, 15 pushups, 15 pushups. Lame. But I kind of ran out of time at the end of the day, in part due to rearranging my schedule to attend an unexpected funeral. And I did some snow shoveling, so that makes up for some of it.

East Boston Camps, went some places I hadn't been before. Couldn't find my gloves, and my hands were cold for the first few minutes, then fine (temps in the high 20s, thermal top and Descente jacket, no hat). Some of the trails were bare ground, but a fair bit of this was on an inch of fluffy snow over ice, and the spikes on these shoes were pretty ineffective.

C • I did that route before.. 2

15 pushups, 40 situps, 15 pushups, 40 situps, 15 pushups. I think I did the last set of pushups, but I'm not positive. This would have been the day to try and get some ice skating in, but the evening snow has probably put an end to any hope for that this winter. It's fluffy enough that it could blow away if it got windy, but there's more in the forecast for Saturday.

It happens every winter to some extent, but... this has been the worst January yet for mosquitoes in my house. They seem to be too dopey to bite, but I wish I could figure out where they come from...

15 pushups, 40 situps, 15 pushups, 40 situps, 15 pushups, 40 situps, 15 pushups

Lunenburg Project #01. Inspired by Joe's endeavor to run all of the roads in Bethel, I'm embarking on a similar attempt to run all of the road in Lunenburg. I have a vague notion of doing it all during 2012, but that may be overly optimistic or ambitious (or I might get sick of pavement long before I finish). The general idea is to do it all on foot from home, though I'm open ot the idea of eventually getting some far-flung areas by riding my bike over to a remote starting point. The opening salvo is the easy stuff close to home:
Gilchrest Street
-> Valley Road
<-> Brookview Terrace
<-> Cliffview Terrace
-> Valley Road
-> Primrose Drive
-> Royal Fern Drive
<-> Wintergreen Court
<-> Iris Court
<-> Trillium Court
-> Mocassin Flower Drive
-> Northfield Road
Looks like the GPS was prettty flaky on the way down the hill, but settled down later. I wore my crappy hang gliding sneakers, because I figured it would be sloppy out there. I think it was in the mid 30s, and drizzling a little. Synthetic top plus a t-shirt, no gloves or hat. At least I got out the door.

C • Hard for me to believe you ... 4

15 pushups, 40 situps, 15 pushups, 40 situps, 15 pushups. First case this year of an, "Oops, just about bedtime and I haven't done any loggable exercise yet today!".

Cell phone course A (with Charlie navigating) on the map behings the DeWitt's house (Bald Rock). No significant problems, just a smidgen of hesitation on #2 (some mismatch between what I was reporting seeing in the terrain versus what Charlie was seeing on the map), and a bobble at #6 where I first looked at the cliff on the southern edge of the circle. Temperature about 22F, and the same clothes as the day before, but with wool socks, and a hat (which was there mostly to keep my Bluetooth headset in place), and I was comfortable.

Of all of the epunch events that I've run, this one seems to have been the worst in terms of splits accuracy. The start and finish punches appear to have been pretty well synchronized, but the others were off by random amounts, maybe due to the cold temperatues, as compared to my watch, which I'm assuming is correct. The absolute value of the error in split time is about 21 seconds. Note that if half of the controls were off by 21 seconds, and the rest were spot-on, this is what you'd see, as each faulty control would affect the legs preceding and following. The biggest error was 38 seconds on leg 5 (2:03 on a leg that actually took 2:41), though percentagewise the finish chute was worse (0:48 on a leg that actually took only 0:18). There's also what appears to be a programming error: my times for legs 1 and 2 show on the split sheet as 0:50 and 2:59, but the elapsed time at #2 is 2:49. (All subsequent totals also appear to be off by a minute.) Seems peculiar, no? I think what's going on is that due to the clock on control 101 being off by about 30 seconds, my 0:20 split got 0:30 subtracted, and I appeared to have arrived 10 seconds before I started. So the split should have showed as (-01):50, but the software presumably considers negative minutes to be nonsense, and changes the (-01) to zero.

C • split accuracy 5

This was followed by my navigating Charlie around course B, which was without hitches other than his missing a trail bend and going a few meters past a control -- fortunately, he reported crossing a ditch, which I was able to have him follow it directly to the control.

Could have sworn that I had orienteered at the DeWitts' house a couple of times, but there was nothing in my spreadsheet of orienteering courses that I've done. Am I really losing it, a la Gagarin? A look through my folder of maps from Connecticut turned up one map from 2004 labeled "training run" that looked like a more or less normal course. I think maybe there was one other time when I went out for a map walk with Nancy.

My Connecticut map folder is getting fat enough that I need to subdivide it. I've already done this for New York (separate Harriman/West Point folder) and Colorado (separate 1000-Day folder), plus Massachusetts and New Hampshire are both divided by region (three regions for MA). In this case, Ratlum Mountain will be getting its own folder.

Mystery Blazes, a couple of inches of crusty snow on the ground. Surprising (maybe it shouldn't be) how much the surface slowed me down. I took a little extra time to cross Mulpus Brook (and managed to not quite fall in), then at some point after that I realized that the crunching through the snow was increasing the effort enough that I needed to back off a smidge. Temperature about 26 F, and I was comfortable in synthetic top, Descente jacket, O-pants, neoprene socks, and 180s gloves (no hat). Some snowmobile tracks, but none on the Smobile trail. I passed a couple out walking their dog early on, each with YakTraks and a pair of poles, which really seemed like overkill to me.

15 pushups, 40 situps, 15 pushups, 40 situps, 15 pushups, 40 situps, 15 pushups, 40 situps, 20 pushups, 40 situps, 20 pushups.

I used to do these in pajamas, I think, which are lighter. This was all in clothes warm enough for a house with the thermostat set not too high, and the last set of pushups with with keys, wallet, and phone in my pockets, which makes a slight but noticeable difference.

C • Noticeable 3

15 pushups, 40 situps, 15 pushups, 40 situps, 15 pushups.

15 pushups, 40 situps, 15 pushups, 40 situps, 15 pushups.

Mystery Blazes. Temperature just under 40 F, I think, I think, comfortable in the Descente jacket with no gloves.

15 pushups, 40 situps, 15 pushups, 40 situps, 15 pushups.

15 pushups, 40 situps, 15 pushups, 40 situps, 15 pushups.

Willard Brook SE. The thermometer at the house said 52F when I was getting ready to go out, but when I got in the car, that thermometer said 38F. I figured maybe it was just cold in the garage, but on my drive over, it climbed to only 42F. I had a jacket with me, but when I got out of the car, it was clear that it wasn't needed, and a shirt-sleeved T-shirt was fine. On the drive back to the house, the car thermometer got up to 47F, but the one at the house still said 51F. At least one of these instruments is suspect.

No wheezing, though my lungs felt "small", like I wanted to inhale more deeply but I was already full of air.

What I really wanted to do today was to go flying. The only other New England pilots who wanted to go live out west or in CT and were heading for Ellenville for the weekend. I'm busy tomorrow, and didn't want to drive that far and back by myself. Or I could have tried going to fly with some paraglider pilots, but that would have required a lot of hiking with gear. I'll be curious to see how the day turned out. Nice and warm, with west winds, though the wind forecast at 3000 feet is scary strong, so it could be blown out. Around here it doesn't seem breezy at all, and the sky is a gloomy overcast, doesn't look like a particularly good day for flying at all, though I'm not where the flying would be.

C • lung felt small 7

Watatic, walked the steepest bits. Up the normal way, hung around at the top for a few minutes, then north on the Wapack and back on the Midstate. Lungs fine on the way up, a smidgen of wheezing on the way back down, but it was downhill, so no problem.

C • walked the steepest bits I... 2

Mystery Blazes, late afternoon, thermal top, light blue jacket, O-pants, 180s gloves, wool socks, and new shoes. Temperature just below freezing. Shoes seem to be fine. I was a little overly conscious of them for the first few minutes, but then I forgot about them. Not sure I'm too impressed with the dobb spikes, they seem to be not very numerous and they don't stick out very far, but these shoes aren't necessarily for O competition (though I'd like it if they were good on ice). Lungs were fine today.

First job interview in a very long time.

15 pushups, 50 situps, 15 pushups

C • substantial change 2

Back to the car, via the Maine Hut Trail, carrying the big pack, with a detour to the lake to take a few pictures.

C • pix 1

South from Flagstaff Lake Hut, initially on the Birch Trail, then the Shoreline Trail until the cutover to the Maine Hut Trail, because the narrow trails were icy and treacherous. Continued south to the point where the trail crosses Long Falls Dam Road, then back via the road to the parking lot. We drove up to look at the dam from there, and afterwards hiked back to the hut on the supply road (no GPS track for that part).

From the trailhead to Flagstaff Lake Hut with Nancy, carrying my big frame pack. We started on the Maine Hut Trail, then decided to check out the Shoreline Trail, and when we went down to the lake, the water was low, so we started just on the edge of the lake itself, though we eventually wound up doing most of the hike on the ice. Arrived before it got dark.