Training Log Archive: CleverSky

Never got around to exercising, so I guess it's a rest day. But at least I got my taxes done (by a professional preparer). Weather conditions this year were not particularly conducive to going out for a run in the woods with him.

An idea for an interesting outing in good weather: go out on the bike and visit (and photograph) the boundaries of the town. Boundaries in this case would fall into two categories:
a) Every place where a public road crosses the town line. There are probably 40-50 of these.
b) All of the "corners" of the town, where the boundary changes direction (this particular town being a polygon with no coastline, river boundaries, or watershed divide boundaries). There are at least eight of these, though some of the sides that appear to be straight lines might actually be several nearly collinear segments. But even some of the major corners (the SE one on the edge of the gravel pit, and the one on the edge of the swamp behing Massapoag Pond) might be inaccessible.

C • You might not know a Massac... 3

Got out of work with the sun still well up, dawdled a bit when I got home, and wanted to get some exercise but I wasn't motivated to run the roads near home or venture into the snowy woods. So I got in the car and headed over to run some back roads in West Townsend. By the time I finished at 8 PM it was a starry sky with distinct shadows on the ground from the bright moonlight. Managed to get out of my funk a bit. The last southern excursion on Vinton Pond Rd. wasn't interntional, but I couldn't remember which way went back to the main road (no dead-end sign), and I guessed wrong. I think the road actually goes through, and it would have been more fun to go that way, but I think it turns to dirt and in any case it wasn't plowed. I didn't realize how close I was to my car, but it didn't matter because there was a swamp in the way. I ought to go out there sometime and see if there's a monument at the NW corner of the town, though.

Snow dealings, round 7b: clearing the top of Mom's driveway, hopefully enough for her to be able to turn the car around. The pile that the plow has created is pretty impressive.

There is some possibility, depending on how things work out, that this year's orienteering Opening Day could be the Billygoat.

13 pullups.

Snow dealings, round 7a: about 20 minutes snowblowing the driveway, about 8" deep, and the radio said Lunenburg had gotten 11" at that point (probably about right, taking the settling into acount). The only hitch was that some asshat plowed me in. I don't mean just the stuff that gets kicked up when the plow drives down the street, I mean somebody with a plow drove into the foot of my driveway at a 45-degree angle and deposited a waist-high pile of snow there. Getting sick of snow, so I cleared just enough to get the car out and left the rest. Pretty thin crowd at work today, and it kept snowing all day. When I got home, I just rammed through what was at the bottom and drove the rest of the way up and into the garage, and didn't deal with it. I'm not really worried about it freezing or anything, so I think I'll just see if it melts.

12 pullups, 70 situps.

Didn't do any explicit exercise today. My whole afternoon at work was spent lugging equipment out to the parking lot, setting it up, and doing data collection, so I was standing around in the cool temperatures instead of sitting at a desk, then I did some equipment schlepping after work to get the orange boat and associated stuff home from Nancy's, and in addition my lower back was a little sore from the skiing, so I decided to take a day off.

Nancy found a good deal -- $29 for noon-4PM at Loon (apparently good every Sunday afternoon), which sounded just right for us. Conditions were okay, some trails had a nunch of icy spots, but most had adequate coverage. We did 14.5 runs (including every lift at least once except the kiddie lifts), so that's $2/run, which is pretty good these days. The reason we're counting it as a non-integral number of runs is that Loon has one very weird chairlift that goes sideways, with no net elevation change, and you have to ride it in both directions. There was a short ski run to get there, but no run to get back to it for the return, so I'm counting the return as half. The weather was not exactly what we were expecting. Nancy had been skiing a week earlier at Sunapee, when it was 45F, but it was somewhere in the mid-20s at Loon, and there was about a 30 mph wind blowing straight up the slope, drifting the snow uphill. Black diamond runs were very manageable, just point your skis straight downhill and the wind held you back without really making any turns. We took a break for a half-hour to warm up, and I went to the car to get my facemask and warmer gloves, and put on an extra shirt. We also skied more sheltered trails when we went back out, and that helped. Didn't have to wait in lift lines at all except for the one ride on the gondola, and even that one wasn't so bad. The one weird thing is that the lifts close at 4PM despite the fact that it's mid-March and DST has started. We were in the lodge, taking off our boots, and outside it was bright and sunny and it seemed baffling that they were already shut down.

Several people did comment on my antique (1986) ski equipment, though they seemed to do so admiringly, rather than disdainfully. Still all works fine as far as I'm concerned.