Training Log Archive: Swampfox

I have just received some extremely distressing news: the Black Beast is on its way to Laramie! For some of you reading this, there may still be time to save yourselves and cancel plane reservations and motel bookings, etc. But for me, alas, I fear it is too late. I will prepare to meet my fate and chant my death song.

Spent the very pleasant early afternoon putting out the first controls for the Rocky Mountain O' Festival. Always a nice feeling from being out in the forest and hanging those early controls.

Plus--total bonus--there were cattle everywhere: in the woods, out of the woods, on top of the woods, dangling from cliff faces, on the trails with the mountain bikers--you name it.

It's just not the same without cattle.

Another beautiful day, did some easy running to, among other things, streamer some barbed wire I found while setting the Moose Outlet course. My biggest concern these days when putting on events (as opposed to what I worried most about many years ago) is having runners get hurt, and while the risks are inherent to the sport, when it's a matter of finding some old fence that is hard to see on the ground along a course, then the obvious thing to do is to make the effort to mark that hazard. Hopefully others would do the same for courses of theirs that I might be running.

The weather is looking really good for the next week through Saturday--sunny, with highs in the 70s. Couldn't be much better than that! And probably Sunday and Monday will be more of the same, once the calendar rolls through those dates.

In the end, many more runners registered for the first 3 (non-sanctioned) days than I had imagined, and we will have considerably larger fields at the start lines for each of these 3 days than we've ever had before. Should be fun races both to see and for the racers!

I had a hip x-ray today. The doctor looked at it with me and began pointing out that everything looked good, no signs of wear and tear, nothing looking arthritic and so on, and while he was doing that, I noticed something off to the side and asked: "what's that?" I don't know else to describe what I saw except that it kind of looked like a small gerbil.

He stopped talking and stared for quite a while at what I was pointing to and then said: "Well, I'll be damned, I didn't think I'd ever see one of those. I've heard about them, but I never thought I'd see one. You've got a gerbil in your hip."

So that was the diagnosis. He said there really wasn't much he could do about it, maybe we could try a couple of weeks of physical therapy--though realistically that was unlikely to accomplish much--and that I should just feed it alfalfa pellets and make sure it didn't run out of water.

On the bright side, at least I don't need a hip replacement!!! : )

And I'll just say that out of all the possible things that I thought could be the problem, that one was not on my list.

Afterwards, I ran a little bit, taking the Headquarters Trail up from the east side, with the objective being to take a look at the place where the last remaining snow at Happy Jack would be, if any snow was left.

Let it be known that as of the late afternoon of the 24th of June, there was still snow left at Happy Jack. But not much--maybe a few more daze worth.

Test ran the Day 1 Moose Outlet course. Very different forest and running from the other days the O' Fest will have.

After finishing, I took the best look I could from below at the overlook to the west where the last snowfield lingers. I didn't have a clear angle into the accumulation zone, and at least from what I could see, there was nothing to suggest any snow was left. But it would really take an on site inspection up top to know for sure.

Mostly biking today, with a short run up top late in the day.

Looks like it's going to be a record high for the day here, the second of the year.

C • hot 8

It looks like officially it got up to 91F today, which is enough to have broken the old record high, and fully qualifies as hot. Around here, this time of year, and reading beginning with a "9" is well into hot territory, and it doesn't happen much.

At times the valley was quite hazy and smoky from the fire off to the SW. Given the heat and haze, I opted to do some biking, and tacked on some extra time on top of running (biking) errands. When I stopped biking and stepped into air conditioned offices, sweat would start pouring off and people would start rushing at me with mops--which is kind of frightening at first, until you figure out what they're doing.

I wasn't going to do any running, but more or less at the last moment I decided to go up to Happy Jack for a short, easy jog, and I'm glad I did. A local evening mountain bike race was underway, and it's always fun to see other folks out exercising and luring off the mosquitoes. Plus, dodging the bikes adds extra interest to any run!

The most interesting part though was running up to a younger guy with a dog at an overlook. He was addressing a small dead sapling, or so it appeared at first. Actually what he was doing was trying to position his phone for a shot of him and his dog, so I offered to help him out. I thought I recognized the dog and that maybe we had passed each other a few days ago. We started talking and it turned out he had been a 4 year runner on the XC team at UW and had just finished grad school there. When he told me his name, I recognized he had to be a brother of one of the Wyoming "Eight"--the 8 Wyoming XC runners killed in a vehicle crash (drunk driver crashed into their vehicle) shortly after 9/11. He told me his brother had not only been his brother but his best friend. What a loss, and so completely unnecessary.

After saying goodby, I completed the run by falling on a completely innocent stretch of trail and skinning up one knee pretty good. It's funny--it always seems like it's those "easy" trails stretches that get you, and not the most difficult, rockiest stretches. And in some way, it makes sense: it's easy to take the smooth, flat stretches for granted, and your attention wanders. And yet, there's almost always a stub or a root or a little bit of rock poking out, waiting to trip up the unwary...

Test ran One Cowgirl Relay course, and am happy with how it looks. Of the 6 days, this will be the best chance for cowgirls to enjoy some sage. Another beautiful day in what is becoming a long stretch of beautiful days.

It looked like big clouds were billowing out of what I would have guessed to be a forest fire to the south in Colorado, but I haven't seen any mention of anything of that sort in the news, so it's a bit of a mystery to me. There is a smaller fire 20 or so miles NW of Walden, and I could see smoke from that, too (it must be that fire I saw smoke from while biking yesterday.)