Training Log Archive: CleverSky

Baldwin Hill (southern part), In The Dark. I think this was good for me, even if it wasn't very intense exercise, and it was successful in the sense that I made it back alive. I'm fortunate that I've got a map nearby with a chunk of sand terrain that looks vaguely like the interesting part of the Jukola map. The main way in which this was useful was in getting used to how big this stuff looks in the dark. The conclusion was that it all looks very big, and it seems like it takes a very long time to get anywhere. I had the original version of the map, and there have been trail and vegetation changes since it was made, which slowed me way down in some places. Challenging stuff in the dark, and I definitely made use of the stone walls as catching features. I didn't do a course of specific control points, just navigated around a vague loop, although I did seek out specific features here and there. I used Mom's headlamp, and didn't particularly find it to be better, so I'll probably go with mine. I did find that it was much better for reading the map when I had it on the bright setting (the overspill was then enough for me to see). I need to try using a separate light for reading the map. Wore my new ActiveAnkle, to make sure it fits okay.

It won't get this dark at Jukola. But I think it coud be very hard.

Mountain Lakes Park, Team Trials Long Blue, 11.8 km, 465m, 30th (out of 37). I was mistaken about being the oldest in the race yesterday, as Vitali Tulchinski is actually a couple of years older than me, and he beat me yesterday, but I got him today. And other than that, the next oldest was five years my junior, and there were a few others today who were 5-10 years younger. There will come a day when I'll be dead last in these things, and will have to consider moving down permanently. But it is not this day.

Not too bad a result. I'm clearly pretty slow, but my navigation was quite a bit better, with only eight people losing less time than me. The errors that I did make were fairly small, a couple of them being deals where I stopped at the correct distance and had to decide whether I had missed left or right, one where I passed within 10 meters of the flag without seeing it and took nearly two minutes to recover, and several fishhooks. I was pretty pleased with the fact that I was still moving at a decent clip all the way to the end.

Nice weather, fantastic terrain, and quite a nice course. The map lamination was a weird experiment, but the printing was quite good, as compared to the previous meet I'd been to at this park, when that was the main shortcoming. An excellent weekend, all things considered.

splits

To Cedar Point Light and back, from the snack bar (with Nancy, of course). Pretty easy going on the way out, with a strong wind at our backs and maybe a tiny bit of drizzle, the only issue being that there wasn't a lot of space between the high tide and the fenced off plover nesting area. The return trip was a different story, as the rain picked up and the wind maybe even intensified. I had an umbrella with me but figured that opening it would mean enough drag to beat me to a standstill at best, and more likely the instant destruction of the umbrella. Fairly drenched (on our fronts only) when we reached the car.

A better day for lighthousing, as we touched another, visited the lantern room of a third one, got another (bogus) one from a distance, and picked up one of the ones we had failed on yesterday from the moving car, thanks to some help from Winston, who is still waiting for his seal reward.

Westmoreland Sanctuary, Team Trials Middle Blue, 5.4 km, 280m, 32nd. Not an auspicious day, but I managed to not (quite) come in last. SA shows something like 10 minutes in errors, which is way too much. Lost time on #3 just trying to figure out which bump was which, and on #4 I ran practically right by the control, but I was focusing on the green on the map, and it didn't look like I wsa expecting, rather sloppy recovering from that. On #10, I hit a trail that I mistook for a different trail, because it was mapped as significantly bigger than it really was. Ran on that for a bit, realized that things didn't make any sense, and stood still on the trail while three people ran by me, until I came to the conclusion that I really was on the big trail and it was pretty simple from there. And few small time losses, not errors, just moving slowly. Very warm day (in the 90s, I ran in shorts), and that took some of the fight out of me. Apparently there was some info at the prestart about there being unannounced water at one of the controls, but I didn't get the message and didn't see the water, so I had nothing to drink until I got to the finish. I think I was the oldest person on Blue by a good 10 years. In contrast, Nancy did quite well today.

This was followed by a lighthouse hunting excursion on the north shore of Long Island with mixed results. There's a lot of Keep Out stuff there, some for reasons of it being private property, some for reasons of it being public property. We got distant pictures of four, and then as it was getting dark we finallygot close enough to touch one (by venturing past a sign a couple of hours after it said not to). And I guess we only failed on two, though it seemed ike more (because we had some cases where our initial approach failed and we had to try something else). We drove down from Massachusetts this morning, so it was a lot of driving.

splits

Townsend State Forest, up at the north end, In The Dark. Hard to know if this was useful or just silly. Found a vetting map from 2014 and did a little night-O practice, much of which consisted of stumbling through moutain laurel. I did navigate pretty well, though it's anybody's guess whether I actually went to the designated control locations. I'm hoping that the forest in Finland is a lot less green. Probably would make sense to do more of this in the next couple of weeks, though it's likey more productive to drive a bit to get to some nicer forest. I should try my other headlamp to see if the beam pattern is better for reading the map. I ought to try a magnifier, too. And possibly a second light for the map.

My new ActiveAnkle arrived today. I didn't use it. No problems.

I appparently hit the wrong button at one point, because the watch was stopped for a little while instead of just taking a split.

Found a dangerous-looking arrow out there and brought it home. I guess somebody missed a deer.

High Rock, Red, 6.9 km, 16 controls, DNF. Temperature in the low 70s, very humid, a little buggy, and some pollen. Arrived at the meet site and realized that I had somehow forgotten to bring my bag of orienteering stuff. Hmm. I had my shoes and Active Ankle, so that was fine. I could use a loaner epunch. Cotton T-shirt - OK. Jeans - not ideal, but I certainly did a lot of orienteering in jeans back in the mid 1980s. But on a whim, I saw Jeff and asked if had an extra pair of pants with him, which he did, so I borrowed those. Didn't have my compass, could have gotten a loaner, but figured I didn't really need one. And I didn't have the right glasses, so I wore ones that I can't see under to read the map, and figured I'd manage.

Well, not exactly my day. There was no sun, so I couldn't use that as a reference, and I made a couple of errors that I wouldn't have if I'd been using a compass. I think if I'd either been able to see or if I'd had a compass, things would have gone better. Picked a route to #2 that didn't look too bad, but it required passing through some green between a couple of marshes, and the green turned out to be fairly nasty smilax. Eventually the glasses fogged up and I had to push them up onto my head, and the weather and air had me feeling pretty lethargic and not moving very fast. I had a self-imposed deadline in order to get Nancy home in time to meet Rachel to see a show tonight, so it was pretty easy to decide that the halfway point was a good time to call it a day, before the course headed further from the finish. Even doing only half of the controls, I was two minutes slower than Tim (the leader as of when I came in), and my timing was great in that I arrived a few minutes before Nancy, so she didn't have to wait around for me.

In The Dark, with the Howl variation. By the time I finally got around to going out, the temperature had dropped to 40F, so I wore a LS shirt and a jacket, which was maybe a bit much, but I was able to adjust with the zipper. I don't think I've done the long version of this in quite some time, since before the addition of the bridge, so this is somewhat longer but more civilized than it used to be. Figured I ought to do a little more than usual because I hadn't done much all week and tomorrow is supposed to be all rainy. Kept it to a pace that I ought to be able to maintain for a long time, probably the speed that I should be doing the Jukola so that I can keep my wits about me. Wore the Active Ankle again.

I had borrowed Charlie's Lupine Wilma to try it out, with an eye to bringing it to Finland, but when I tried it in the yard the night before, I was underwhelmed, as it didn't seem noticeably better than my cheap Chinese ebay lights, and the only difference seemed to be that the Wilma gets pretty hot. Certainly not enough of a difference to be worth 50 times the price. So I used one of my own lights for this run, and will probably stick with that. What I really need to start doing is getting out in low light with a map, to make sure that I have the combination of headlamp and glasses worked out so that I can read.

Site of the future rail trail in Townsend. Started at the plaza and went east almost to the Cooperage, then on the way back I took a little detour to avoid a spot with poor drainage. Construction hasn't started yet, so the rails and ties are still there, and the path is next to them, occasionally switching sides. I was pleased to see that the encroaching abutters, including the auto body shop, have moved their stuff off the right-of-way. Although I spent some time loitering in this area as a teenager, I'd never gone down the railroad line (it did still have active trains in those days). West from the plaza wasn't so interesting, except that I did visit the trestle, which was a popular swimming hole back in the day (kids would jump off the trestle), but which I had somehow never been to. The structure itself is barricaded now, with police warning signs (though it's easy enough to walk around the chain link fence), but you can still go down to the river. Any question of whether the rail trail could continue across the river there were answered when I saw that the trestle no longer reaches the west bank.

Billygoat, Blue Mountain, 11.2 km, 29th. 32nd shirt for me. Not too bad a result, pretty clean overall. With a pretty big crowd through the first nine controls, including a little hiccup on the way to #7. We passed very close to #8, close enough that a few people went and looked at it and called out, "This is number 8!". (No kidding.) But a few of us swung pretty wide to the right after that, and came at the control from the SSE. As I was coming up the broad reentrant, there were a lot of people standing around looking kind of confused, but I knew exactly where I was. The pack thinned out some from there to #11, maybe because some people skipped #9? Behind Alex and a few others going to #12, and they were out of sight by #13. On my own through #14 (though I could hear a few people), and I saw a bunch of folks up ahead as I approached #15, but only Daniel was with me for the next few controls. He and I were at #19 together, and were both skipping #20, but he went on the small MTB trail while I backtracked to the road and took the larger trail around. I think it was probably a decent skip, but I maybe didn't execute it optimally. Our paths merged about 60% of the way to #21 -- I was behind, due in some part to the fact that I stopped briefly to fiddle with a shoelace. He wasn't aware that I was behind him, and he missed #21 high and to the left, while I spiked it, arriving with Dave Pruden and Alex. The three of us were together for the short leg to #22, then Alex went straightish toward #23 while I went left and around on the trail. She ended up ahead of me by almost two minutes. Don't know if Dave went the same way I did, but he was close behind me at #23, then he skipped and was gone while I went to #24. Pretty smooth route to #24, and spiked it, and nobody else in the vicinity as I came into the finish.

Decided to wear the Active Ankle, and I don't regret it. A little bit of rain near the end, no big deal. Quite a fine event.

C • Wow 1

Callahan State Park, with a half-dozen twentysomethings from work. Probably 30 minutes of this was stopped waiting for the group to recondense or resting at the tops of climbs or whatever. An assortment of abilities, I was somewhere in the middle, definitely more cautious on the descents than the hotshots. There were two others with hardtails, but they headed back when we got to the road and skipped the southern loop. Only three of us had clipless pedals, the other four were just using platform pedals and sneakers, which seems pretty nuts to me on trails this rocky and rooty. I was kinda klutzy at first, not having been on a bike in months, but once I got warmed up I did okay, and I was able to make most climbs, but on the craziest ones I gave up and walked as soon as it got uninteresting. I don't often do stuff like this with others, and it was okay, but I'm probably more inclined to going out solo in the future.

Rattlesnake Hill, conveniently close to work. I armed myself with the town trail map, which was adequate to get me to a trailhead, and pretty hopeless while I was running, providing a rough schematic of the trail network. At one point I passed a posted map with a You Are Here on it, but it was a different version that what I had (I'm guessing the posted one was newer -- the one I was carrying is something I printed out sometime last near and hadn't gotten around to using). Wore the Active Ankle again.

Quite a nice piece of terrain, though. Good location, easy to access from Rte. I-495. Open woods, extensive trail network, interesting contour detail, a sufficient but not overwhelming supply of cliffs, boulders, and stone walls, water features here and there... I was thinking that it had everything but parking, but there may be ways to get around that. Old Sugar Road is a dead end, and if it were possible to get permission to park on one side of the road...

Ahead of The Dim, wore a headlamp but never came close to needing it. I also wore my ratty old Active Ankle. I've been stressing my right ankle repeatedly, so I decided to give it a rest and dig out this brace that I've had for over 25 years, and is barely serviceable. I did have at least one moment when I thought, "yeah, that one might have hurt". Quicker than last time by quite a bit, probably mostly because there was enough additional light that I lost a lot less time trying to figure out where to go. Mostly dried out, except for Old City Creek. Did the whole loop including the esker part.

Curiously, this was only 9 seconds slower than the one previous time that I did this on foot. The GPS tracks appear to match (although maybe I continued all the way back to the car the other time, an extra 100m), but the distance came out as 400 meters shorter this time, don't really know why.

Down in Virginia for this guy's college graduation last night:

Woke up before the rest of the house, and decided to get some exercise before the rain moved in. I drove up to the nearby hang glider launch, checked out the improvements that had been made since I was here before, and went for an out-and-back on the Massanutten Trail. Surprisingly flat, but moderately stony underfoot. At the turnaround, I went up to the top of the ridge, hoping to find a small trail, but it was just rocky with a lot of deadfall, so that didn't keep me entertained for too long. Overcast and a nice tempertature, with a few sprinkles as I was finishing up.

While on a stroll in Shenandoah Natl Park, we encountered a playground that included what we used to call "crossbars". Maybe some people call them monkeybars, but at my elementary school that was a different piece of equipment. This is kind of an overhead horizontal ladder that you hang from and work your way rung by rung to the other end. Stephen hopped up and did it, though he was doing it half a rung at a time, moving the left hand forward a rung, then the right to the same rung, and repeat. The cooler move was to do first one rung, then each hand would skip forward to the one beyond, basically the way you normally go up or down stairs. So I stepped up to do that, and I did, but it was way harder than I expected. I was pretty good at it in sixth grade, because I worked at it a bunch. The limitation seemed to be grip strength. I guess I am a bit heavier now than I was in 1973.

Esker loop, In The Dark. Waited until the temperature dropped to the mid 70s (it had been in the high 80s earlier). Kept the effort to a comfortable jog. A little clumsy for a while in the middle. Somebody cleared the blowdown in the flats with a chainsaw, so that was nice. One little bit of doubling back because the trail didn't look right, because a stream meander moved.

25 pushups, 9 ring pullups, 100(!) situps, 25 pushups, 6 ring pullups.