Training Log Archive: CleverSky

Kayaking on the Squannacook from West Groton up to Vose and back. Orange boat. I've wanted to do this for quite some time, and was worried that it might be too shallow or choked with snags, but it was fine. Had to turn around because of the dam, and I didn't bother to try and find a portage route. On the way home, I stopped by David E. Ross and found a plausible looking put-in that will allow me to try the Nashua between 2A and somewhere (I think there's an underpass that can only be done going downstream that will stop me), as well as the lower section of the Squannacook. Oh, and the map shows that there's a canoe launch in West Groton just below the dam.

Okay, I'm back. Haven't had the time/motivation/energy to do any exercise for the past week or so. Hot day, decided that a bike ride would be more pleasant than a run, but I couldn't find my regular pedals and the shoes for my other pair disintegrated last time I used them. So I went old-school and grabbed a pair of pedals with toeclips and went for a ride with running shoes. And it was pleasant.

Highland/Holman figure 8. Came off four times. The first was on the climb on Northfield heading toward Highland, and it was steep enough that I walked about 50 m to a flatter spot and did a mailbox start. Then twice on the second pass down Holman, and finally on the steep part of the climb back up to the house -- clearly tired, so I walked it in from there.

Attended this fine and happy event:


At the party afterwards, my team (me, Rachel, Stephen and Dan) defeated the Italian family who brought the balls at a game of bocce (21-13).

Nothing, really.

Up the Skinner road pulling the cart (with Jon, two gliders on cart with us wearing harness backpacks), then two trips out to launch with the gear.

C • I'm guessing you didn't kno... 2

Wind was gusty, I managed to bend a downtube while ground handling and not even trying to launch. Jon flew, and as soon as he got out of the slot it was clear just how cross it was, and he was on the ground in about five minutes.

Two trips back to the summit with gear, then down hill with the cart (mostly holding it back). This gear schlepping is reasonably vigorous stuff, and gets me breathing hard. Kayaking, in contrast, seems like a pretty good effort, but does not make me breathe hard. I suspect I'm doing it wrong.

So, an interesting encounter with people who inhabit a very different world from mine, and one that must be pretty scary. When we we starting the hike from the end of the paved road to launch, we encountered a young couple, probably about college age. Very easy to recognize, because the woman was wearing a vivid pink shirt. Out for a hike in the Holyoke Range (maybe a date), and I think they had small backpacks. They asked for directions to get back (maybe they said to the parking lot, I don't remember). I asked where they came up from, and the guy said they parked by the houses. Umm... not a lot to go on. And the woman said, huh, what houses? There was some discussion about houses that he said nobody lived in any more. And he said there was a gondola there. (A what?) I asked if they came up from the river side, and that question seemed to leave them bewildered. I asked if they parked by a gate. Yes! they said, a gate. I asked if they drove uphill to the gate, and the gate was to the left. That sounded familiar to them. It was a T-junction, and the gate was to the left? Now they weren't so sure. Several times during this, the guy mentioned that they came up from "the other side", but couldn't explain what that meant (and since we were basically at the summit...). Anyway, when we started down the trail toward launch, I pointed at a right hand-turn (the Halfway Trail, or whatever it is) and said that it would lead down to the Ranger Station, but said that we were going left. After a little bit, I realized that they were still following us. When we got out to launch, I wondered if they had followed because they wanted to see us fly, but no, they were looking to get back to their car. (They knew what we were carrying, and it should have been pretty obvious that the route we were planning to take down would not work for them.) I directed them down the ridge and said that if they went that way and stayed to the right, there would be a steep, twisty trail that would lead back to the road. And off they went.

Jon and I went back for the other glider, set them up, preflighted them, I went to launch and then had to move back to the setup area, Jon launched and flew down the LZ, I packed up and did my whole hike back down, while Jon packed up, walked up to get his truck and fetched his glider, then drove back to the gate and walked up the road and met me by the Ranger Station, then we walked back down to the gate when my car was. And just after we got there, the couple arrived.

By police car.

They were parked right next to me.

Apparently after a multi-hour wilderness expedition they finally got to a road and flagged down a cruiser (or maybe dialed 911?) and somehow explained where they needed to go well enough for the officer to be able to get them there. We drove off while they were doing some kind of paperwork.

If it was a date, I wonder if there will be a second one. Pink-Shirt-Girl did not seem overly impressed.

C • amusing story 3

On the Nashua, this time from Rte. 119 upstream to Rte. 225 and back. Yellow boat. I hadn't realized that the river made that big bend, it's surprising how easy it is to not notice that sort of thing if you don't have a map or compass; the only reason I knew was because the setting sun kept appearing at different angles to my direction of travel. At noon, I would have been clueless.

Took the yellow boat this time, and a fancy paddle borrowed from Aims. If I decide to get one like it, it will take some getting used to. Quite noisy, but that may just be my poor technique. I tried to focus on using my core muscles rather than my arms, and I don't think I did too badly (my elbows aren't sore, anyway). A bit faster than last time, though there are lots of variables (longer boat, better paddle, less current, more practice, less futzing, etc.)

AOWN: a number of birds of the various expected kinds, plus several beaver, which was less expected. And the surface of the water had a whole lot of pollen on it. Nice warm evening, glad I left work a little early to do this.

11 pullups, then fell asleep again. It's interesting how when I get to my limit on these, there isn't any struggle to try and get one more; as soon as I move even a smidge, it's completely clear that the next one simply isn't going to happen.

11 pullups. Planned to do some more stuff, but I fell alseep.

A day off that included driving up to West Lebanon to fetch my mother, so three days in a row that included a lot of driving.

US Long Champs, Camp Wakpominee, M35. 2nd place in category, 15th place on course. What a contrast to the day before! Steep, rocky, thick, and largely unpleasant, with myriad unmapped trails, some of them huge (recent logging). Navigation not so bad, really, just a couple of small mistakes, and one moderate on on #5, when I wasn't payng enough attention to direction when I came off the top of the hill, dropped too low, found a marsh that I thought was my attack point, but when I went to the other side, it looked totally wrong. I found the marsh that I was actually at, but I had to climb a few lines though some thick rocky stuff, and that cost me about four minutes. The other notable screwup was on #11, which should have been a cinch, but I drifted left, dropped too much, and ended up sidehilling on the slope down to the lake (at a walk), when the proper route would have been nearly flat. Kind of demoralizing when I was leaving #9 to realize that enough time had gone by that I was already over 10 min/km for the course and I had only been to half of the controls (but the last bunch of legs were short and fast). Stopped my watch late, but at least I managed to get splits at all of the controls. And AP SA has me as having lost only 40 seconds on #9, but either I was really flying when I wasn't screwing up, or else a lot of other people screwed it up, too, because I can point to several minutes of time loss there.

So, a silver medal to go with my gold, I guess. At the finish, another of my friends expressed disapproval at my choice of categories. I said that the championship wasn't actually that important to me, and that my placing as far as I was concerned was my placing on the course. Yeah, I was ducking people like Joe and Sergey, so it goes. But that's not the point, I was told. The issue is that the "real" M35s were getting pushed down a place and deprived of the medals they deserved. I had several hours to think about that on my drive home.

Many years ago, I once went to the International Human Powered Speed Championships. This is a series of races for people who build bicycle-like things that are generally disallowed by the rules of the UCI from regular bicycle races. No limitations or restrictions on the design, it just has to be human-powered, so you get all variety of recumbents and such with elaborate fairings, some of which can go very fast (the current record for the flying-start 200 meters is over 83 mph). But some of the machines are half-baked or overcomplicated or not really finished, and don't do so well. There was a guy I met there who I guess had a habit of showing up for these things, and he had a machine called "Dream Police" (which was the title of a popular song at the time). It was... a standard bicycle. Now, make no mistake, it was a state of the art time trial bike, with streamlined components and disk wheels and whatnot, but it was completely UCI legal, and he was in a normal riding position. His point was that if you had made some outlandish device that was very fast, that was great, but if you couldn't beat him, then it was back to the drawing board.

So, do I feel bad about depriving M35s of their medals. Nah. Not a bit. Championships are not an entitlement, you need to earn them. And if somebody under 40 can't beat a mediocre 52-year-old, then they don't deserve one. Do some more training.

C • M35+ 11

US Middle Distance Champs, Moreau Lake State Park, M35. 1st place in the category (though 7th on the course). Drowsy after the long drive, had to wait a long time for the bus, and started the 1.6 km climb to the start with 16 minutes to go. Decided that I was going to make my start, and I did, but by the skin of my teeth (I do know where that expression comes from), getting waved through right up to the map boxes with barely enough time to clear my epunch and not enough time to grab a cluesheet. On the one hand, a vigorous warmup and a flying start, but not the way most people would choose to start a big race.

Did I really spike them all? Close enough. Winsplits has me with no red boxes, while AP SA shows two controls with time lost, adding up to less than 90 seconds. I was pushing as hard as possible without losing contact, and if I had slowed down enough to be less shaky at the end of those two legs, I would have lost more time than I would have saved by being cleaner. The closest I came to a serious error was on #10, where I thought everything was going okay, but then things stopped matching between map and terrain, and it became clear that I must have misidentified some features and now had no idea where I was. I stopped and tried to figure out how I was going to relocate, then looked up and saw a control right in front of me, whcih turned out to be mine. Bullet dodged. I even managed one best split and two second-best splits.

When I signed up for West Point and this meet, I was feeling pretty out of shape (still do), so I decided to take myself out of the "pressure" of M50 or M45 by running M35. At West Point, I got my butt kicked (although I think I managed to get 3rd place on the combined sprints), whcih was fine. But maybe this M35 field was softer (more M35s running Blue?), and I managed a national championship. Kind of silly, in a way; if I were in charge, I would have been 7th in M35, because M35, M40, and M45 would all be one category, and Joe would be M35 champion. At dinner, in the process of congratulating me, one of my good friends called me a pot-hunter, and another called me a trophy whore (which I thought was quite excellent) But it was a damn good run, I brought my A game, and there's no way I could have gotten the half-dozen guys who beat me. I'm very pleased to only about 30 seconds behind Sergey Velichko (and he didn't lose much time to errors either). Moreau continues to be one of my very favorite maps.

Tough week at work ended with a trip with my mother to a wake (husband of a college friend of hers), which had the result of solving my dilemma about when to drive out to the meet: it would have to be Saturday morning, leaving ASAP after 5 AM, ensuring that I'd be in kind of rough shape for the race. Considered skipping the Saturday event.

And the work week gets crazy once again...

Aspirations of some sort of exercise came to naught.

Mom can rake leaves, but she can't do anything with the piles of leaves she crates, so I went over spent an hour raking the piles onto a trp and carrying them up to dump them in the woods.

A year since I started this job at Autoliv. Still haven't done any firrmware work.

Lately when people see me, they say I look tired.

12 hours door to door, for 5.5 minutes of airtime at West Rutland. The first two guys to launch managed to get up to 7000 feet and flew for a couple of hours, but the rest of us didn't get much. I might have had the shortest flight. Didn't even jog over to get my car, I just walked. Probably should have gone orienteering, but you take your chances on these things.

Got out in the evening, nice running conditions. Ran without the ActiveAnkle (took it easy), and had no discomfort despite a couple of footfalls that would likely have been problematic before, so I think I'm mended. This seems to be a very dry Spring -- normally this run woudl have a number of wet spots, and the power line section would be an obstacle course of mud puddles well into the summer, but now even though it's still early May, there are just a few patches of soft soil. But we could yet get lots of rain.

Highland St. loop. I wanted to get out and do something, and this was just right. Pretty sure this was the first time I've been on the unicycle since I fell off and hurt my wrist last year. Managed to mount on just teh second try, and made it around the loop with no stops.

12 pullups. At least it's something.

nuthin'