Training Log Archive: CleverSky

Long-Sought-For Pond, me in orange boat, Nancy in yellow. I got the rudder pedals adjusted so she can use them, but she feels that it still takes a lot of rudder to get the boat to turn. I'm guessing that it's just because it's longer and tracks straighter, and I agree that the orange boat turns more readily. A little breezy out there, and there was a bit of chop at the downwind end of the lake.

From Groton to Ayer and back on the rail trail. This is nice because it has center bollards at the road crossings that are perfect for mounting. I took a fall shortly after starting, and I was near a bench and a piece of sculpture, so I tried using those to remount, but they were off the pavement, and I can't get this wheel going in the dirt. So I just went out to the asphalt and spent a while trying to mount in the open. Got it once, but I was too close to the edge and slipped off. A few more tries and I succeeded. I had two more stops, one at a road crossing, and the other at the turnaround (I thought about trying to do a 180, but that's beyond my current abilities in a space that narrow). I did the entire trip back without stopping. I think this is my longest ride to date by maybe a kilometer, though not my longest stretch without stopping. My cruising speed is up, I believe, thanks to the bigger wheel. I still need work, but I can toodle along without having my full concentration on balancing, and can think about other things. Like how numb my crotch is getting.

Some long-winded thoughts from my trip last weekend.

I have not done much flying in the past several years, and my tolerance for TSA malarkey is not very high. Logan was pretty oppressive, with a uniformed woman continuously announcing that everyone had to remove their belts? Seriously? What's that all about? Some would-be terrorist was wearing one? Fargo was considerably friendlier, being a smaller place with less traffic staffed by Prairie Home Companion characters. On the plus side, I had forgotten how much I love seeing the landscape from a plane at night, which I got to do at the end of the flight on the way home.

I had a long drive on either end of this trip, since it was a lot cheaper to fly in and out of Fargo than Winnipeg. Probably enough to compensate for the gas I had to burn. The rental car was a Chevy Cruze, which averaged 35 mpg, not too bad. One weird thing about it, though, was that it had no license plates, just a piece of paper taped in the rear window stating that the registration application had been mailed in. I was pretty concerned that they wouldn't let me into Canada driving a car like that, but they did. They gave me a little more trouble coming back into the US, but I figured they had to let me in eventually.

We were apparently supposed to get park access permits for our cars. The only specific place we were informed of where they could be purchased was at the campground office, 25 miles away by road (or maybe only 10 miles via a shortcut that we didn't know about and I think weren't supposed to use). They did say that the permits could also be purchased at various local businesses, but didn't tell us which ones (and it was hard to find anything open in the dinky little towns in that area -- this was really the middle of nowhere). The camp office closed pretty early, before I got there on Friday night, but I was able to snag a vacant campsite, which was next to a big RV that was running a noisy generator until late, near a beer party, and across the way from some guy who kept chopping wood until all hours. Saturday night there were no vacancies, and I ended up driving back to the meet site to see if I could just camp in the finish field. There was one meet staff guy staying there who said he was surprised that more people didn't do that. Very quiet and peaceful, and one of my few regrets is that I didn't go out once it got really dark to look at the stars, which were probably spectacular.

It was quite a small meet, 63 competitors on Saturday and 58 on Sunday. Still, they had some of the trappings of a larger event, some good, some seemingly needless. There was an arena-style finish area, and a vendor's tent. The start had three callup lines and a remote triangle. And they were handing out cluesheets at the second callup line, including in the rain, with no canopy, on Sunday: they took the clues out of an envelope and handed them to you to deal with quickly before they got wet.

As is common at Canadian meets, I believe, the map (without course) was available for previewing during the callup. But it was at the second callup line, so after dealing with the cluesheet, you had only the remaining time in a minute to look at it, which wasn't enough time for me to really absorb anything at all, other than the fact that the mapped area is quite large. That made it kind of puzzling why my Middle and Long courses together kind of consisted of three laps of the same area, two CCW and one CW, and I kept running past the same places. All of the starts, finishes, and controls for my courses (the next-to-longest) fit into about 2.5 sq km of terrain (I believe the Monday Sprint was in a separate area in the SW, and the model area was SE. But what's up with the rest of that big map? It could be largely crummy terrain (although that's not the impression I got from my quick glimpse, and if so why map it?), or it might be that they're holding a big chunk in reserve for a future meet (COCs?), but if that's the case, why did they put it on display?

Both days had a run to the start triangle. On Saturday they mentioned this, and I must have run right past whatever marking they had for it. On Sunday, what with the rain, I believe they neglected to say anything about that, and I forgot that it was going to be the case. If there was any marking for it, I again must have run right past it. Maybe it wasn't actually marked? I'm pretty sure the route to it wasn't marked in any way. I really dislike remote start triangles, and may launch a crusade against them.

The maps were held over Saturday night, which is always annoying. One of the finish crew was defending this, saying, "You'd have the whole thing memorized by tomorrow". Seems dubious, though I wasn't expecting so much terrain overlap.

No splits on the meet site for me on Saturday, because I used my SI6*, and their software wasn't up to the task of dealing with it, though I did get the splits on my watch. On Sunday my watch did something really weird. It has this dopey bezel thing, where you run your finger around the perimeter of the watch kind of like a laptop scratchpad mouse, to select various functions. You can lock the bezel, which I always try to remember to do before I run, so that it won't get activated if I brush past leaves or whatever. I forgot to do that at the start on Sunday, and on the way to the first control, I found out that the bezel goes into spastic seizure mode in the rain. I somehow got lucky and was able to corral it into a state where I could lock the bezel after a minute or two.

The terrain was mostly terrific, and the map was probably okay. There were a bunch of times when what I was seeing on the paper didn't seem to match what I was seeing on the ground, but I was evaluating it under pressure, and my opinion is therefore not to be trusted. It's also tricky because this kind of terrain isn't necessarily something that can be mapped objectively. For one thing, the look of the contours can change dramatically if you push the contour level up or down a meter, as opposed to BAOC or SLOC terrain that would look virtually the same. And there's really kind of a continuum from rough open to rough semi-open to white to light green to dark green, and exactly where you transition from one color to another can sometimes depend on what direction you're viewing it from. I also have a disadvantage in that my colorblindness means that I can tell the difference between light yellow and light green, but I can't tell where the transition is. That means that I sometimes can't see open routes through thick stuff. This is something that has gotten worse with laser printing -- with offset, light green and light yellow were dot patterns of the full color, which was easier to distinguish.

If they do hold another major meet here in the next couple of years, I would recommend it very highly, with one caveat: not for people who are sensitive to poison ivy. I think this is probably in the top three of poison ivy infested areas where I've orienteered, along with the Ganaraska maps we went to in 1999, and the preposterous World's End in Hingham, MA. This park is pretty overrun with the stuff, as well as with a lookalike plant that has five leaves, but you can't tell them apart at speed, so you just have to bash through and deal with it later. They did have a big tank of wash water at the finish, along with soap and dishpans. I'm not especially sensitive to it, though I have had a few nasty outbreaks in my life. In this case it was limited to my ankles (the place where it usually gets me), which have been red and itchy this week, but they didn't break out in oozing blisters. A few sprays of benadryl kept it under control.

By the PG criteria, this trip would have been an utter failure. I interacted with virtually nobody the whole time. I saw only two people I knew at the meet (Mike Minium and Guy Olsen) and spoke with then only briefly, and didn't really talk to anybody else. I spent four days essentially alone. But I was quite content.

To the ConComm meeting.

Home from ConComm, in the dark, with the hatlamp. The times on my watch don't actually make any sense, so I'm not sure how long I was riding yesterday and today.

My new ride arrived over the weekend, and as soon as I took it out of the box, I had to adjust the seat, pump up the tire, and go for a ride. It's going to take some practice -- I can't mount without something to hold onto yet, but once I get going, I'm... not so bad.

Here's the current stable. First, the one my father bought back in the 1970s, which is what I've been riding. Then one that my friend ARt found in the dump and gave me, which needs some work in terms of the height and quality of the seat (seatpost is seized), so I haven't ridden it much. And then the sleek new 29" Bedford. I'm stylin' now!

Western Canadian Champs, Long Distance, Hog's Back, Spruce Woods Provincial Park, Manitoba.

In contrast to the day before, this was embarrassing. I came to Manitoba for difficult orieenteering, prepared to get my butt kicked by the terrain, and that's exactly what I got. Despite my knowing better. Dead last.

Unlike the beautiful weather of Saturday, Sunday opened with overcast that had me scrambling to throw my tent in the trunk of the car as it started to shower. As that turned to a steady rain, I went over to the vendor's tent and bought my first magnifier. With the dim light and a 1:15000 map of intricate terrain, I figured I'd need all the help I could get. I was hoping for one of the separate-item kind, but all they had was the type that bolts onto a Moscow thumb compass (which, fortunately, is what I use). Maybe in the long run I'll make good use of it, but all it did for this race was occasionally get in the way. I think I need to put Rain-X on it if there's any chance of it getting wet, and I have to figure out how to look through it -- I had to close one eye to see anything under it at all. But as it turned out, I didn't have any trouble reading the map when I swung it out of the way.

Making use of the map was a different story. And here is that story:
1) Forgetting that there would be a remote start triangle (more on this later), I think I may have started with a misconception of where I was, and turned right into the woods at the wrong spot. Or, at a reasonable spot, perhaps, but exactly how to thread the maze depended on knowing which path you were trying to go on. I suspect I wasn't where I intended to be, because I ended up thrashing through a lot more woods than I expected before reaching the trail. Fine after that.
2) Everything goes to pieces. The first third of the leg, to the road, was fine. Then I took a conservative choice to stay in a yellow area to reach the trail. The rest was supposed to be reading my way through patches of yellow, but when I thought I might be there, the copse I had my eye on had no control. And nothing else really looked quite right, either. I was in a big open area, which kind of looked like it might be near #10 (which it was), although I couldn't get the contours and stuff to line up. But I headed off on that theory, and tried to correct. I found a control, which I hoped would be one of mine so that I could relocate, but it wasn't, and I couldn't find anything that looked right on the map. (Turns out I was about 300m from my control). So I backtracked to the big clearing. Thought I had it figured out, and took a shot at crossing some green, knowing what I'd expect to see on the other side. It wasn't what I got. Damn. Nothing good in any direction as a backstop to relocate on. But I saw someone coming the other way, and made a move of desperation. I started following faint elephant tracks back in that direction, on the theory that elephant tracks have to come from somewhere, and if I was lucky, maybe they would come from some control on my course. They kind of got too faint to reliably follow, but they did lead me to a tall enough feature that I was able to find my place on the map. About 200 m from my control. And I read my way directly to it.
3) Short leg, just a couple of hundred meters, through light green. When I popped out, I was looking at a distinctive depression, I found what I thought was it, and went toward where I thought the control should be. I didn't find it, and I started circling and circling, convincing myself that I was recognizing features, and repeatedly thinking that the control out to be in the same place where I hadn't found it. I clearly had to be in some other place, and was making some kind of parallel error, but I couldn't find anything else that looked right, and I hadn't come far from #2. I almost went back through the green to #2 to start over, but I finally looked at the clue and saw that the feature was clearing, not reentrant. There was an insignificant fleck of yellow in the circle, and I went back to the same spot and found the control.
4) Things still were not going well, as I couldn't manage to exit the circle, I just kept going the wrong way and hitting green. Once I escaped the delayed gravitational pull of the control, I read my way through the big field, easy peasy.
5) Kinda sloppy getting to the road, and I made it to the arena field okay, but had to think a little to find my feature. The fact that there were two finish chutes, one leading from my control, helped to confuse matters.
6) Paused to eat gel, no trouble getting to the control.
7) I had already been right by this without seeing it. Still circled some before I realized I was looking for a fallen tree, not a standing one.
8) Well, I had seen most of this leg already, so that helped. At the end, it woudl have been better to have stayed right and in the open, but I went left and had to kind of come in the back door to get through the green.
9) Spike.
10) Went ny yesterday's #3, quite close to #2, right by the control I had found while looking for #2, and finally to the field I had gotten to when I lost contact on the way to #2, but this time I knew where I was.
11) Much too casual approach to getting past the green to the trail, and I ended up by the clearing that had #7 in it yet again. Oh well, at least I knew where I was, and did the rest of the leg okay.
12,13, F) Held it together for the rest.

So, #1 was kind of bad, #2 was a huge disaster (lost over 10 minutes), #3 should have been a 2-3 minute leg, but I took over 15 minutes (the best was 3:44, and the best in my class was 9:03), but then I kind of held my own for the rest of it; the other two guys in my class only gained 2-5 minutes on me for the remainder of the course. But then, that may be cherry-picking, as I had my difficulties early. But I am a 52 year old running in M35-44 against guys who get a lot more opportunity to orienteer in this kind of sand terrain, and the field was small because not everybody was up for 9.4 km of this stuff.

C • Manitoba 1