Training Log Archive: CleverSky

Pawtuckaway Blue. Hot, hot, hot, so there was a fair bit of walking. Pretty clean, just one control where I had trouble in the circle and probably walked right by the control twice, one where I was a little sloppy on the route execution and had a slow attack through a bland area, and the last control, where I went right to the feature, found nothing, went over the hill to see if there was another cliff there, then thought that maybe I had pulled a Turbyfill, so I went to the registration to take another look at the master map, and a couple of people said that the control was higher than it was supposed to be, so I went back out there, climbed up on top, and spotted it on an unmapped cliff off to the south. So it looks like about 8 minutes on that one that wasn't my fault.

Seven consecutive weekends.

I just realized that I've gone orienteering six weekends in a row. I'm pretty sure it's been a decade since that's happened. (My longest streak is 14 weeks, which happened twice in 2001.)

This took 39 minutes on the bike. The bike has some catching up to do.

Warm and humid, looked to be a threatening storm when I was driving over, but the rain held off until a couple of minutes afterI was done. Bugs weren't bad while I was running, but they were pretty vicious on my cooldown walk back to the car.

Pearl Hill area. I had told myself that I'd get out and do something outdoors today, since I opted not to go flying (forecast wasn't great), and a bike ride was what I had in mind, though it took me a long time to decide where. I knew this twisty trail (the first part) existed because I've crossed it, but never bothered to explore it before. The climb was in unexplored territory. I used to be able to ride technical stuff like this without stopping, and if my friend Mike and I get around to doing a Moab trip as we've discussed, I ought to get my skills back up to it (though the steep climb might be beyond me). One dumb move was that although I brought my spiffy bike shoes, I failed to notice that I didn't have the clipless pedals on the bike, I had regular pedals with toeclips, which work okay, but not as good as the clipless ones would. It would be interesting to do this same loop (up to the split) on foot and see what my time would be. The last part was fast on the bike, but the technical and steep stuff would surely be faster without it.

No idea why the GPS got goofy at the end, coming up the road. It should end at the same place where it started.

Pond Mountain, Red. Very enjoyable course, nice open runnable woods. I was doing great for the early part, then on #10 I thought I was further along than I really was and waste some time before continuing. On #11I made great time but got a little fuzzy as to my location at the end and went kind of sowly trying to figure it out. #12 looked ugly, but the route around to the left was sweet. I was all set up to the last stone wall, but then I went too far to the left and low and floundered around there for a little while before realizing where I was. I spiked #15, but found only a ribbon, so I decided it must be missing and headed for the finish. Except I didn't head for the finish, I headed for a little tour of oblivion, and when I finally got my head straightened out, I decided to go to #15 again. Went to the same spot, but this time I did go to the finish. So the time registered between splits #15 and #16 (13:16) was my wanderings.

With Nancy at Bantam Lake in Litchfield (me orange, her yellow). A lot of this was exploring some shallow twisty backwaters, lots of fun. Got pretty close to a muskrat.

C • Getting close to where I sp... 2