Training Log Archive: CleverSky

After a somewhat tiring day of house renovations with my brother, a short run in the woods while he went for a bike ride. I probably should have done a bike ride, but whatever. Sort of the Esker loop, but with a couple of shortcuts to speed things up and run through the woods a bit more. Warm and humid. Felt like I was working hard, but it was all kind of Wagon steps, so I wasn't going very fast. Somewhat mosquito-y.

Baldwin Hill (southern part), In The Dark. I think this was good for me, even if it wasn't very intense exercise, and it was successful in the sense that I made it back alive. I'm fortunate that I've got a map nearby with a chunk of sand terrain that looks vaguely like the interesting part of the Jukola map. The main way in which this was useful was in getting used to how big this stuff looks in the dark. The conclusion was that it all looks very big, and it seems like it takes a very long time to get anywhere. I had the original version of the map, and there have been trail and vegetation changes since it was made, which slowed me way down in some places. Challenging stuff in the dark, and I definitely made use of the stone walls as catching features. I didn't do a course of specific control points, just navigated around a vague loop, although I did seek out specific features here and there. I used Mom's headlamp, and didn't particularly find it to be better, so I'll probably go with mine. I did find that it was much better for reading the map when I had it on the bright setting (the overspill was then enough for me to see). I need to try using a separate light for reading the map. Wore my new ActiveAnkle, to make sure it fits okay.

It won't get this dark at Jukola. But I think it coud be very hard.

Mountain Lakes Park, Team Trials Long Blue, 11.8 km, 465m, 30th (out of 37). I was mistaken about being the oldest in the race yesterday, as Vitali Tulchinski is actually a couple of years older than me, and he beat me yesterday, but I got him today. And other than that, the next oldest was five years my junior, and there were a few others today who were 5-10 years younger. There will come a day when I'll be dead last in these things, and will have to consider moving down permanently. But it is not this day.

Not too bad a result. I'm clearly pretty slow, but my navigation was quite a bit better, with only eight people losing less time than me. The errors that I did make were fairly small, a couple of them being deals where I stopped at the correct distance and had to decide whether I had missed left or right, one where I passed within 10 meters of the flag without seeing it and took nearly two minutes to recover, and several fishhooks. I was pretty pleased with the fact that I was still moving at a decent clip all the way to the end.

Nice weather, fantastic terrain, and quite a nice course. The map lamination was a weird experiment, but the printing was quite good, as compared to the previous meet I'd been to at this park, when that was the main shortcoming. An excellent weekend, all things considered.

splits

To Cedar Point Light and back, from the snack bar (with Nancy, of course). Pretty easy going on the way out, with a strong wind at our backs and maybe a tiny bit of drizzle, the only issue being that there wasn't a lot of space between the high tide and the fenced off plover nesting area. The return trip was a different story, as the rain picked up and the wind maybe even intensified. I had an umbrella with me but figured that opening it would mean enough drag to beat me to a standstill at best, and more likely the instant destruction of the umbrella. Fairly drenched (on our fronts only) when we reached the car.

A better day for lighthousing, as we touched another, visited the lantern room of a third one, got another (bogus) one from a distance, and picked up one of the ones we had failed on yesterday from the moving car, thanks to some help from Winston, who is still waiting for his seal reward.