Training Log Archive: CleverSky

There's a funny thing about my training this past year. If you look at the "hours by intensity" graph, it's well off from recent years. But the "hours by activity" graph is the highest by a slight margin, and "kilometers by activity" is tops by a lot. The difference was the large amount of alpine skiing, which I tracked by GPS, but I believe I logged entirely as zero intensity. Training was off due to a combination of time that I was spending on getting Mom's house together for sale in the first part of the year, and because I did something to my knee in August and decided to rest it for a while.

Ten A-meet races, of which I ran M35 at eight and M21 at two (Team Trials). Team Trials was so-so, M35 a bit better. I won the Long race at the US Champs, and it looks like I ended up ranked #2 behind biggins. Those are both kind of bogus, since there are plenty of other people over 35 who ran Red and are ahead of me (20 of them in the rankings), but they were on M40 or M45. Still, since I was 57 this year, I'm 20+ years older than some of the people in my category (yeah, the good M35s ae running M21).

Thirty-seven races overall, up a bit from recent years, Two DNFs this year, one because I showed up without my stuff, ran without a compass, and was on a tight schedule, the other because the meet crew failed to supply me with a map at the map exchange. Billygoat, the Harriman thing, and Traverse all went okay. Two races where I turned in the fastest time, and one where I had my lowest placing ever by a large margin (1663rd).

The interesting thing was that I added two new countries to my list: Finland (Jukola) and Spain (Gran Canaria). That brings me to a total of ten. (The Canary Islands sure look like they would geographically be associated with Africa, but politically they're part of Europe.) And I added three dates (December 27, 29, and 30), bringing me to 334.

Last day on Gran Canaria, with a lot of driving on crazy roads and sightseeing. First, the prime natural landmark on the island is this:

The bigger looking thing to the left of center is Roque Bentayga, which is significant, but the more distant thing just to the right of center is Roque Nublo (Cloud Rock), with its smaller partner La Rana (The Frog). We drove up there and went for a hike to the rock, out and back about 1.5 km each way. Up close, you realize that it's bigger than it might seem at a distance:

A couple of years ago, PG posted a picture of a trail that he and Gail were on somewhere in Europe, and it got too exposed and scary to continue. But I think there was mention that J-J would have been willing to hike it. Everyone has a limit, however. I decided that it would be interesting to try and go around the base of Roque Nublo. The first part didn't seem too bad, then it got a little technical. I called it quits and backed out when I got to here:

For perspective, the ledge under the overhang is probably less then two feet wide, certainly less than three, and yeah, just before that it's more or less zero. I'd probably be willing if I was on a rope, but it was a really long way down. That was the only truly tough spot, though -- Nancy and I got to essentially the other side of that, and I could see people from where I was.

The Roque Nublo trailhead was very close to the map (Llanos de la Pez) where there was a training event that day. Since we were there, we strolled out in the (quite nice) terrain and found four controls (streamers with QR codes that we could have scanned if I had bothered to download the app).

One thing that I had hoped to accomplish in terms of sightseeing, I hope somebody out there can help me with. Is this a canary? Or some kind of finch, at least? (Hmm... wrong kind of beak? Well, I saw some other little birds, maybe some of them were canaries.)

C • Canaria vs Canary 7

It appears that the split button on my FR10 has quit working. The watch is otherwise functional, and I think I can get around the other things that the button is used for, but I can't take splits any more. Retired to training purposes, I guess.

Aldea Town (Gran Canaria), M55, 1.9 km, 20 m, 13th out of 18. This was the Sprint, not that different from the "medium", right in the town where we've been staying, so some bits were a little familiar. Mostly fine, save for one leg. I got to #4 okay, and ran right past the control because it wasn't where the map showed. I think the guy washing his car had moved it away from his gate and up to the intersection, opening his gate in the process. I was looking for the dead end, and so ran past him while he was pointing me to the control. Then on the following leg, I guess I miscounted one intersection and got myself off by 90 degrees, leading to some serious confusion until I made myself settle down. Other than that, just a couple of places where I didn't have the best route. Looks like I managed 10th overall for the three-day competition.

Winsplits
final results