Training Log Archive: CleverSky

Unexpected pleasure. I went through my mental schematic map of Willard Brook and came up with a loop that I thought would be pleasing. The Pearl Hill parking lot was open, and I hadn't even remembered my wallet to pay the fee, so I found somewhere else to leave the car. I thought there was a way onto the trail network by the lake, but there wasn't, so I went back to the place where I usually cross the road, and on the way found the place where the park staff apparently dump deer carcasses (very smelly skeletons). Then I started on my loop, but at the top of the hill I decided to make a little variation on what I was expecting to be a short connector trail, but which was actually the entry to a space-filling curve of singletrack that started out mellow and got increasingly technical, through a feature-rich hillside. There were other side trails that are yet to be explored. Unlikely that I ever would have spotted the lower end of this. The next trail was heading for a back yard, so I went through a little meadow, then through the woods to another trail that I knew, back to the campground, and back toward the car. Nice night to be out. I also went by a young porcupine, and if I'd been wearing a sticky blue hat, I would have picked up a few victims.

C • Pearl Hill 2

I'll be damned -- I looked at my route with the OOM-O, and it looks like the MTB crowd has put in the trails, and they match my GPS track quite well.

I can remember exactly where I was and what I was doing when I met some of my friends. A few examples:
I met Charlie DeWeese at Northfield Mountain, near the end of the Billygoat in 1984, when we had both already gone overtime.
I met Dana Glow in Health class in 7th grade, fall of 1974, when we were supposed to pick a classmate we didn't know and introduce ourselves.
I met Hutch just before the mass start of a Long-O at Saylor Park.
I met Guppy Youngren when I walked into a lab at MIT and he was sitting on an old car seat that was being used as a couch.
I met Eric Weyman on Sunday of the US Champs in 1987 when he came up to me and said he liked my Grateful Dead bumper sticker.
And 20 years ago today, I was handing out meet packets for the 1000-Day at the Lake George picnic shelter until the registrar could get there, and I met Nancy.

On the Concord River with Nancy, upstream from Muldoon Park and back. Seemed like a good idea, smaller river close to where we work, but the water was kind of nasty (there were some spots where it positively reeked), and for most of the time we were within earshot of the traffic on I-495. Saw a bunch of wildlife, though.

Ratlum Mountain summer relay with Nancy. Leg 2, Sprint B course. The only really tiny errors were running a couple of steps past the controls on #5 and #6.

Leg 4, Sprint A, mass start with (I think) Jeff Saeger, Glen Tryson, and Lyn Walker. Went out first and stayed ahead, and almost caught up to Peter Gagarin at the end, having made up two minutes. SA shows me losing 20 seconds on #6, which is a little surprising, and doesn't show me losing any time on #5, though the whole time I was going straight over the hill, I was thinking that I was being dumb and that the trail around the left would have been better. No other troubles.

Ten weekends.