Training Log Archive: CleverSky

Callahan State Park, with a half-dozen twentysomethings from work. Probably 30 minutes of this was stopped waiting for the group to recondense or resting at the tops of climbs or whatever. An assortment of abilities, I was somewhere in the middle, definitely more cautious on the descents than the hotshots. There were two others with hardtails, but they headed back when we got to the road and skipped the southern loop. Only three of us had clipless pedals, the other four were just using platform pedals and sneakers, which seems pretty nuts to me on trails this rocky and rooty. I was kinda klutzy at first, not having been on a bike in months, but once I got warmed up I did okay, and I was able to make most climbs, but on the craziest ones I gave up and walked as soon as it got uninteresting. I don't often do stuff like this with others, and it was okay, but I'm probably more inclined to going out solo in the future.

Rattlesnake Hill, conveniently close to work. I armed myself with the town trail map, which was adequate to get me to a trailhead, and pretty hopeless while I was running, providing a rough schematic of the trail network. At one point I passed a posted map with a You Are Here on it, but it was a different version that what I had (I'm guessing the posted one was newer -- the one I was carrying is something I printed out sometime last near and hadn't gotten around to using). Wore the Active Ankle again.

Quite a nice piece of terrain, though. Good location, easy to access from Rte. I-495. Open woods, extensive trail network, interesting contour detail, a sufficient but not overwhelming supply of cliffs, boulders, and stone walls, water features here and there... I was thinking that it had everything but parking, but there may be ways to get around that. Old Sugar Road is a dead end, and if it were possible to get permission to park on one side of the road...

Ahead of The Dim, wore a headlamp but never came close to needing it. I also wore my ratty old Active Ankle. I've been stressing my right ankle repeatedly, so I decided to give it a rest and dig out this brace that I've had for over 25 years, and is barely serviceable. I did have at least one moment when I thought, "yeah, that one might have hurt". Quicker than last time by quite a bit, probably mostly because there was enough additional light that I lost a lot less time trying to figure out where to go. Mostly dried out, except for Old City Creek. Did the whole loop including the esker part.

Curiously, this was only 9 seconds slower than the one previous time that I did this on foot. The GPS tracks appear to match (although maybe I continued all the way back to the car the other time, an extra 100m), but the distance came out as 400 meters shorter this time, don't really know why.