Training Log Archive: CleverSky

Walked home from Seeley in the dark after dropping off Nancy's car -- didn't time it. My legs felt pretty good in the morning, but after driving home from Vermont they were pretty stiff, so the walk felt good.

My brother runnning leg 2, using the watch that I lent to him.

Vermont City Marathon Relay (Burlington), leg 4. I was recruited to run with my brother's family, Team MAGjC, using a leg order chosen so that our initials woul spell something almost pronounceable, which resulted in everyone being on the leg where they belonged: Meghan (my sister-in-law), Alan (my brother), Geneva (16-yo niece), me, and Celia (14-yo niece). Three of these people had never run in any sort of race whatsoever. Geneva is an accomplished runner at her high school, and I've obviously done a little bit of running and a lot or orienteering, and though Alan has never done any running, he's raced extensively on bicycles and some on nordic skis. Meghan and Celia are both active, but have never raced at all, and they aren't runners.

Everything went fine with the exception of a couple of spectating hiccups: Meghan and I somehow blinked and missed the handoff from Alan to Geneva, and after I finished, Meghan and I hopped on bicycles and tried to spot Celia at a couple of places along her course, while Alan and Geneva waited at her for at the finish, but she was faster than expected and everyone missed her. The results:

start delay: 1:30
Meghan: 34:00 (3.49 miles)
Alan: 44:36 (5.63 miles)
Geneva: 53:19 (6.72 miles)
J-J: 48:38 (5.49 miles)
Celia 52:12 (5.23 miles)
total (gun time): 3:54:15

226th team (out of 779)
161st Mixed Open team (out of 553)
A splendid time was had by all.

(Yes, that is a lighthouse in the background.)

As for me personally: old, fat, and out of shape. Not exactly a ringer, I just kind of filled out the team as both the mean and the median, but it did take the efforts of all five of us to break four hours, which I don't think anyone expected was a particularly achievable (unstated) goal. I started out nice and quick, passed a bunch of people, then settled in at a sustainable pace, and by the end of my leg, that pace was such that quite a few people were passing me. Despite my general dislike for running on pavement, I kept moving, didn't stop for anything and got it over with. I'd been looking forward to this event for months, and it was great to do it and have the smiles all around.

Work party at Greylock. We lost the landing field that we used to use at Mt. Greylock because somebody bought the farm. I don't mean that somebody died, nothing like that, I mean that somebody literally purchased the farm where we used to land, and the new owners didn't want people landing on their property. So after a bunch of negotiations, a group of pilots came to an agreement with the state rangers about a new place to land, on publicly owned property. There was a minor problem, though, in that pilots are really fussy and want to land in a field, and that's not what this new piece of property was. At best, it was rough semi-open with some denser patches. But the officials were okay with the idea of our installing a piece of open land. So we showed up with one. Open land is funny, because when it's packed up for transit, it doesn't look anything like you might expect, it looks like a bunch of chainsaws and work gloves and loppers and a tractor with a brush-hog trailer and an excavator and a chipper. There was a two-day work party scheduled (moved from last weekend because of inclement weather), and over 50 people showed up, so we made rapid progress and were pretty much done by late afternoon. My role was mostly dragging felled trees out to the dirt road, with a little bit of trimming with a bow saw when they were too big to move in one piece. And a little bit of dragging them over to the chipper to shove them in, but it quickly became clear that we had way more people than we needed doing that job.

To be honest, "multisport adventure" is kind of a euphemism for "this really didn't turn out the way I intended".

I had my mountain bike in the car with the idea of stopping in Lancaster on the way home from work for a little mellow ride. Everything started out fine, just tooling along, nothing too strenuous. I've run here a few times, but I was enjoying it more on the bike. Some of the trails look like they've gotten very little use lately, as they were getting a bit overgrown, and there were a number of spots with fallen trees that I had to dismount for. I was able to go farther than I had been on foot, and I was up in unexplored territory when the chain fell off. Or so I initially thought. Closer inspection revealed that the rear derailleur had snapped off, rendering the bike completely unrideable. 5.75 km from my car, no phone, and it's not like I could think of anybody to call anyway.

Well, no point in panicking. Going back the way I came seemed like it would be a pretty dreary trip dragging the bike, so I headed for the highway. Fortunately, I was just barely north enough to be able to go though a back yard to a residential street. Once on pavement, I was able to go a little faster by using the bike like a scooter, standing on one pedal and pushing with the other foot. Once I got across I-190, I ditched the bike behind a stone wall and set off walking. No map, no phone, so I had to wing it, mostly just following my shadow in order to keep moving eastward.

I went down what looked like a future residential area, crossed a field, and got to another residential street. When that turned the wrong direction, I headed down a dirt road into what looked like a random dump, that turned out to be sketchy cattle farm. The farmer was there, friendly guy maybe in his 30s, and I asked for directions to Rte. 70. He pointed me in the direction I was heading and said it would lead to Mass Youth Soccer -- perfect. The road took me along the edge of a gravel mining operation, and had I been able to go on the internal roads though there, I would have been about halfway back at that point. But I didn't know that, and it turned out I was probably already trespassing in a hardhat area.

But the road swung north to get to MAYSA. When I got to the first field, I tried to see if there were any trails leading out of the back, but there was too much water in the way. Once I got to the fields that fronted Rte. 70, I thought I was home free, but I was actually fenced in. Had there been nobody around, I would have climbed the fence, bt it seemed inappropriate in the circumstances. I couldn't find any way out (turns out the cars come in from the north most of the time), but I finally found a way through some thorny fight behind a detention pond and got out to the road. And then it was just an easy walk back. I didn't do any running during any of this, in part because it was hot and in part because running in mountain bike shoes and bike shorts didn't seem particularly entertaining.

When Kimball's opened a new ice cream stand on Rte 70 several years ago, it seemed like a really weird location. But now that I understand just how many soccer fields there are in the neighborhood, most of which are not visible from the road, it's clearly a brilliant move.

I ended up with several large scratches on my legs, and once I got back to the car, I started removing crawling ticks, I think eight in all. These were some of the biggest ticks I've ever seen, which makes them quite a bit less scary. But still not the size of a small frog.

It was a pretty good AOWN outing as well. On the bike, I passed within a couple of meters of a beaver who was relaxing in the bushes, and he took off at a gallop for the water, startling me. I saw quite a few birds, most of which I couldn't identify, but I definitely recognized the turkey as it passed overhead. And on the road between the gravel pit and the MAYSA fields, I came around a curve and say a coyote in the road about 20 m away, who quickly skedaddled into the woods.

C • TFBIP 1

Was intending to go for a mountain bike ride on the Mason rail trail, figuring that wouldn't aggravate my lingering maladies very much, but when I pulled the bike out of the car, not having used it since last fall, the rear wheel wouldn't turn, disk brake was stuck in the on position. Couldn't stop to figure out how to fix it, because the blackflies were insaaaane. So I headed home, callled my brother for advice, and got it working tolerably again.

Bringing the boats back to the canal, first just carrying the orange boat with nothing in it, then walking back to the house with nothing, then pulling the yellow boat on the cart with my (reduced) luggage in it, accompanied by Nancy.

Paddling back to Knott's Island, in the yellow boat, towing the orange one. Slight delay early on because something really didn't feel right, it was way too much effort to paddle, and when I pulled in the tow line, I found that it had picked up about a half a peck of milfoil (the upper part of the canal had a lot of it). Also a couple of pauses to snap pictures of wild horses. I had left the house as soon as the rain seemed to have stopped, in hopes of getting across the bay before the headwind got too strong. It definitely slowed me down, just about strong enough to start to form whitecaps, but wasn't really a problem. Then the long drive home.

Another walk on the beach with Nancy, southward and back this time, probably 4 km round trip. Weather getting less sunny.

Another attempt at kayaking in the surf, orange boat again, time is a guess. This time at low tide, so there was a sandbar to attenuate the waves at the water's edge. No problem getting in, and I got the skirt set pretty quickly as well. A little fun excitement crashing through the waves on the way out, then I paddled north parallel to the beach to the next car ramp and back. From the ocean side, the waves were looking pretty big, and I was apprehensive about trying to get back to shore. I waited a bit until it looked like there were no big ones coming, and then skedaddled. One wave went under me and that went okay, then I kept paddling and could hear another breaking behind me, and I got a little crooked as it approached. I'm sure that it would have been fine with adequate skill, but I got flipped. No big deal, the skirt came right off the coaming, and I was in thigh-deep water, so no big deal, though it took a little work to dump the water out of the cockpit so that Nancy and I could carry the boat up the beach.

Then I spent the rest of the afternoon tossing the Frisbee around with Stephen, and warding off rickets while accelerating melanoma.

C • reminds me 3

Two walks up the beach with Nancy, one not quite to the Virginia line, one a bit past it, so maybe about 8 km in total. In the evening, a first attempt at kayaking in the surf, using the orange boat. I spent quite a while standing at the water's edge, watching the wave patterns, and looking for a good opening. When I finally decided to go for it, things went pretty well except for the fact that that the back of the skirt ended up under my butt, and I had to spend a bunch of time skootching around until I could get it free so I could snap it around the coaming. I didn't paddle around too much before heading in, and that was a little exciting. I caught a wave and got a nice express ride to the beach, where I had to scramble to get out between waves and also not lose the boat or the paddle. It all worked out fine, though it does seem like capsizing in those conditions away from shore wouldn't exactly be the most fun. I'll probably try again when it's a little less rough, and it would also probably work better at a different tide level.

Okay, to resume the travel itinerary from Saturday:
21) Get back from Billygoat, go with Charlie and Rhonda to see folk music concert in Hartford.
22) Get up as early as manageable, and drive from Connecticut to Knotts Island, NC (~10 hours in the car).
23) Arrange to park at the marina for five days.
24) Load up the two(!) kayaks with my luggage, and hook up the tow line.
25) Paddle the yellow boat across the bay, saving me ~2 hours of travel time compared to going around (and my car isn't qualified for the requisite beach driving anyway).

The paddling went fine. It took a bit longer than I had expected, in part because there was a late-breaking change of destination because Nancy had scooped out a more convenient landing than the public boat ramp that I originally had in mind, and also because I spent some time screwing around with the tow lines (at the beginning because one got snagged on a piling at the put-in, and later when I tried unsuccessfully to haul in some line to shorten the trailing distance when I went into the canals). But out on the bay, everything worked great -- I did keep glancing back to make sure the tender was still with me.

26) And finally, the last leg on foot to the beach house. Everybody came over to meet me, Rachel and Nicole took my gear back in the truck, Nancy pulled the yellow boat on the trailer, and Stephen and I carried the orange boat. Everybody else arrived Saturday night, and we're here until next Saturday, unless I have to hightail it sooner on account of weather.

Billygoat, Ward Pound Ridge, 43rd place. My watch unfortunately seems to have forgotten about this run (and everything that preceded it, though the rest was already downloaded). Very clean run, but not very fast, so well down in a tough field. Clean in the sense that I pretty much always went where I intended to, although in a few cases where I intended to wasn't the best choice.

Just kind of with the crowd as far as #3. By the time I got to #4, I was with Marketa, Yevgheni and Yekaterina. On #5, I didn't like the looks of the green on the straight route (although in review it looks fine), so I took the trail route around to the left, came through the complicated stuff, and nailed it, arriving at the same time as Y&Y, so it didn't seem like too bad a route choice, though SA says I lost time. I still saw them off and on for the next two controls, and Marketa was pulling away. #8 was another time loss, because I didn't climb soon enough, and got caught up in some pretty dense laurel, but the going was great once I got to the marsh. Trail run to #9, and I decided to skip #10. This was a mistake in two regards. One was that #14 was a much better skip, to the tune of nearly eight minutes. The other was that I exited the way I came in, which did give me a view of some other people on their way to #9, but it would have been faster to go NNE through more woods. I passed Janet as I got close to #11, which was a little disconcerting since I had been seeing a lot of her (yes, she was on the Pygmy, but I was seeing her at consecutive controls of mine). Jeff was leaving the clusteras I came in, and I spotted a group containing Phil and Glen not far ahead of me, but I had already skipped and they were about to.

SA didn't show lost time going to #14, but it probably should have, because my right-hand route that came in the back door was surely worse than the left-hand one. #15 was basically a straight shot, and I did spot Marketa up ahead at one point, but she pulled away again. I spotted her and oxensd ahead of me on the Saeger loop after the water stop, and got just ahead of them at #21 because they appear to have gotten a smidge low and caught in the barberry. It was my turn on the way out, I should have stayed above the thorns instead of wandering through them to get to the trail. The three of us were together until shortly before #23, when Marketa dropped off the trail much too soon. I got there first and was out on my own until #24, when Marketa came in right behind me. She passed me when we hit the trail going to #25, but she stopped short and looked at a distinct tree in the picnic area before the road. I was charging ahead to the correct tree, and she had enough oomph to get there ahead of me, and I definitely wasn't able to stay with her on the run in.

My back was still a bit sore, and I suppose that slowed me down some, but mostly I was just slow. Nice weather for sure, fantastic woods and map, and a nice course, though it looks like the skip choices were pretty limited. A splendid time was had by all.

splits

Yesterday and today was the complicated logistics for starting my vacation:
1) Load kayaks on silver car.
2) Go to work in red (spare junker) car.
3) Leave work, drive red car to Alewife and park it in the garage.
4) Subway to Harvard Square to have dinner with some old friends who were in town.
5) Subway to the airport to retrieve Nancy's blue car that she parked in the garage when she flew to Virginia earlier in the evening.
6) Drive home in blue car and go to sleep.
7) Wake up and do some packing.
8) Drive blue car to Ayer and park in commuter lot.
9) Take commuter rail to Porter Square.
10) Take subway to Davis Square.
11) Take shuttle bus to Alewife because the trains aren't running past Davis.
12) Retrieve red car from parking garage and drive to Lexington.
13) Pick up Cindy and drive to Porter Square
14) Park red car at supermarket and walk to Cherry Street for AltRoast.
15) Eat a big lunch and borrow drybags from Mike.
16) Walk back to Porter Square and drive red car to Ayer.
17) Leave red car in commuter lot with a note on the dashboard that it isn't abandoned.
18) Drive blue car home.
19) Finish packing vacation stuff into silver car.
20) Drive silver car to Ratlum Mountain.

more to come...

I brought a magnifier with me last weekend, because Sunday's map was 1:15000. I found it not very helpful when using the model map in the warm up area, but I was hoping that was just because it was a poor print from my office laser printer. However, on the course I still found it not particularly useful. I wasn't really able to deal with the fact that I have two eyes and have never been very good at closing just one of them, so I kind of had double vision whenever I tried to use it. I had used the magnifier (the kind that attaches to the compass) only once before, when I acquired it a few years ago, and I have a dim memory that it didn't work out very then either, but I couldn't remember the details. If I have a need for this in the future, I think I might be better off wearing a pair of small reading glasses in addition to my distance glasses, like DIY bifocals. But the good news is that I was still able to read the 1:15000 map adequately without magnification, despite the dim overcast day.