Training Log Archive: CleverSky

Snow dealings, round 4a. Had to shovel around from the front door to the garage door to clear the first few feet of driveway, because there was no way to get the garage open with all the snow that was drifted up against it. There's also about 75 minutes of snowblowering on top of that. The antique snowblower came through like a champ and handled everything, despite the fact that the snow depth was just about exactly the height of its maw.


Even did the mailbox, and all without having to refuel. (I wonder how this snowblower got here. I know I got it from my parents, but I have no idea how I transported it.) The honest depth that I measured on the lawn was about 21", and in the driveway 17.5". Those numbers are less than the snowfall total, because I didn't go out until the sun appeared at 11 AM. In fact, while I was using the snowblower, it looks like it settled an additional inch. If measured by the official method, where you measure it every hour (or less?) and then sweep the surface clean, it would be a lot more.

The nice thing about the travel ban was that I didn't have to worry about cars coming when I turned the snowblower around in the street at the end of every pass (or when I was doing the mailbox).

C • I didn't know you had a bas... 3

Bah. I had great aspirations of putting on the giant antique leather and wood snowshoes and going for a tromp in the woods. I could have sworn that the makeshift bindings worked fine last time I did this, but today they kept loosening up, and I spent at least as much time fiddling with them as I did moving. And then it turned out that a bunch of people had already snowshoed on my intended route, which made it a lot less fun -- the whole point of these huge things is to break trail in deep snow. So I gave up and went back to look for more suitable footwear.

I was going to grab the medium snowshoes, but since somebody had packed the trail for me, I decided to look at my ski collection to see if I had anything suitable. I turned up a mystery pair of waxless skis, with a price tag (ductape and magic marker) indicating that they had been marked down from $50 to $20. I dimly recall having bought them out of the junk bin at Windblown, I think just because they had bindings that fit a weird old pair of boots that I had. So I dug out the boots, and some random pair of poles, and headed out again.

This went okay. Going downhill in the showshoe tracks wasn't bad, though they stopped after not too long and doubled back (which is why it looked like so many people had been through there. From that point on it was like slow snowshoeing, often couldn't even see my ski tips in front of me, hard work. A bit easier once I turned around, going through my own tracks, which weren't even recognizable as such. But once I got back to where the snowshoes had been, it was packed down well enough that I was able to move at a decent clip despite the fact that it was uphill.

And then relaxed with one of my favorite beverages, a pint glass packed with dry powder snow, with orange juice poured into it. Same idea as a Slurpee, but really good.

The plant officially closed at noon, I left at 12:30, and the roads were still fine, so I got home quickly and had ample daylight left to go out for a run. It's a blizzard, right? Might as well exercise outdoors! There was still little enough snow that my footprints were down to bare ground. Crossing the brook was a little funky because that whole area was hanging ice, where the water froze over while it was high, and it then subsided, leaving a flat surface that I would just crash through. Not a big deal, really. This felt like hard work, the whole latter part I was just wanting it to be over, but at least I got it done. I really expected it to be over 50 minutes, and was somewhat pleasantly surprised to see the time.

50 situps. Stayed at work late, figuring that Friday I'd be doing limited hours, and I dozed off before doing my intended exercises.

Mom has almost burned through the two cords of wood that she had delivered at the start of the season, so she ordered some more. I think this was the first of two truckloads, and I had to get it out of the way before the snowstorm so that her driveway can get plowed. Filled up her indoor woodbox and got most of the rest of it into the shed. Assuming more comes, it will go in the woodpile in back yard.

While I was there, I rummaged around in the attic and recovered a few items of Dad's, primarily the skate-sharpening jig and whetstones, which I'll have to try and figure out how to use. But I also acquired the interesting bits of his accumulated armaments.

None of these could be used to inflict harm, other than by bopping someone on the head with one. The lower right is a starter's pistol (I need to look some more to see if there's any of the noisemaker ammo left), the grenade is a practice training device, and the two items on the left are the realistic type of toy guns that were made in the 1930s.

10 pullups, 25 pushups, 50 situps, 25 squats.

10 pullups, 50 situps, 25 pushups, 25 squats.

I was talking with Stephen recently and mentioned that I had rings in my garage. He asked if I was going to train to do the Iron Cross, which he remebered seeing in the Olympics, and I told him no. But what was interesting was how he misremembered the Iron Cross. Not having the name handy in his brain, he described it, and in his version, you started from a dead hang, and keeping your arms straight, you raised you body to the Iron Cross position. Anybody who could do that would be in a pretty good position to get a medal, I think.

C • Cross 9

The part before the battery ran out. I tried to charge it last night, but it wouldn't do it; looks like the problem was that the power strip I had the charger plugged into is flaky.

But I was clever enough to have a second watch on, which I started to record how much longer I was out there.

This was sort of the fulfillment of a dream I've had for over 40 years: the iceboats were there. I initially was not going to skate, because the lake was covered with snow, but there were some people playing informal hockey, and I saw a sail, and there were clearly folks ice fishing, so I decided to give it a go. Turned out the snow was only about two flakes deep, enough to hide things but not enough to impede skating at all. The iceboaters warned that there were thin spots (yesterday one broke through, which doesn't mean that the sailor gets wet, but the craft suddenly slams to a halt, potentially from high speed, and I guess the guy got thrown out and got pretty badly hurt), so they were wary about venturing very far out onto the lake, but I did a tour of the eastern half, stopping to chat briefly with ice fishermen who all reported thicknesses of 6"-9". There could very well have still been thin spots, though. The warm rain mid-week also smoothed this lake out nicely, and the surface was great, even better than yesterday. After my tour, I hung out with the iceboaters, and the time includes some time (maybe 5-10 minutes) of standing still chatting with them while they were becalmed. There wasn't enough breeze for them to really get going, though they were able to sail intermittently. I really wanted to see them moving fast enough that I couldn't keep up, but that never happened. Still pretty cool skating alongside them.

They're parked and empty in this picture, the sailors were off marking cracks in the ice while they waited for the breeze to pick up.