Training Log Archive: CleverSky

This is the loop I've had in mind on my earlier forays this year, doable now that the snow is gone (just a couple of flooded spots on the trail). So now that the property across the street is finally publicly owned, why am I driving up to West Townsend to go for a run?

On the Vandenburg Esplanade from the boathouse to Marbles Brook and back, with Nancy.

West Point Blue, Black Rock Forest, 8.4 km, 220 m.

Busy weekend, so I originally hadn't even signed up for West Point, but then one of the things I needed to do was pick up my hang glider for which I had arranged a ride back from Florida, and which had ended up near Ellenville. So, I signed up for West Point for Sunday only, figured I could run Blue, then go over and get the glider and maybe fly as well.

I was invited to stay with Charlie and Rhonda, but my schedule would have gotten me to their hotel much too late, so I made backup plans to crash at either Clint's place or with the DeWitts. As it turned out, things ran later than I had planned, and I stayed at Nancy's place and got up at 4 AM. Not doing too well on the drive down, pretty sleepy, lost time by making a wrong turn, then I got dressed and fell asleep on the bus from the parking to the meet site. When I got off the bus, Mark Domine wanted to talk to me and came into the registration building. I gave the cadet my name and he found my packet and looked at my start time, and said, "Your start is 9:16, you can try to make it if you like, sir". (That was over 30 minutes away.) And I looked at him for a moment, then said the obvious, "Well, you going to have to hand that packet to me first". I took the bib number out, handed the rest of the packet to Mark, and said I'd talk to him later. Got to the start without hurrying, with five minutes to spare.

Didn't end up wearing the ankle brace, and it didn't matter (I didn't do a lot of running). I'm told that Saturday's course was worse, so I'm glad I missed that. I wasn't impressed by this one. Two of the controls (#1 and especially #16) were pretty easy controls located way up at the top of a hill that we then came right back down. #4 was interesting, supposed to be "boulders, between", 1 meter each, but there were no boulders in the circle, just a spur with stony ground, and that's what was in the terrain as well. And on the leg from #11 to #12, I went off the south edge of the map, but in doing so I was thinking that the best route choice might involve going even further off the map, but there was no way to tell. A really bad cropping/layout job, especially since there was an ample margin of unused terrain on the north edge, so the whole map could easily have been slid south a centimeter or two.

On the way to #15 (I think), I felt something on my hip, and reached back to find what felt like a tick that was unable to crawl past the waistband of my underwear and had decided it was a good spot to set up housekeeping. I was able to pluck it off without even looking, confirm that it was what it felt like, and discard it, never stopping forward progress.

Split analysis shows me losing more than a minute only once, on the last control, but that was less a matter of the small mistake I made at the end as it was my running out of gas and walking while others were presumably putting in a final kick. But by the same token, my error on #9 should probably have been bigger (I sat and drank water for a bit at #8, and missed #9 and had to back up), but I went faster on that leg because Andis and Hannah caught up and I hung with them for a bit. In general, I was cleaner than I expected given how drowsy and spaced out I was. When on Blue, I always figure there will come a day when I'm dead last and will have to consider not doing that any more, but that day hasn't arrived yet: 16th out of 22 starters.

After a nap, I went over to get my glider, then checked the wind forecast, and realized that I was hoping that it would look unfavorable so that my decision would be easy. Sometimes it's not obvious that when you're looking for an excuse to not fly, the right thing to do is to just not fly. So I went and got something to eat and took a nap, then drove to Danbury and took a nap, then drove home and went to bed early. Just as well, the reports I got in the morning said that although the day had been predicted to be epic, it turned out that a big crowd of people waited around a long time and eventually launched into light conditions where they had shortish flights that didn't get very high.