Training Log Archive: Swampfox

I have mentally divided the Granite Planite map project into thirds, and I finally finished off the first of those thirds--the northern third--today. There's only a little bit left with the middle third, and the southern third is the smallest piece, both by area and estimated mapping time, so hopefully it goes quickly from here.

After mapping, ran intervals. Warm, but breezy, and effectively pleasant. Beautiful summer day from start to finish.

And things are drying up quickly, with no real rain for nearly 2 weeks now.

On the way home, I stopped at the grocery store, and saw 2 groups of 4, all of whom were obviously football players--obvious partly because they all had UW t-shirts on, but mostly because they were all monsters (all linemen and maybe a linebacker or two sprinkled in.) And, surprisingly to me, they all looked like very fit monsters--not a trace of a big gut on any of them, which is more what I am used to seeing. If it's indicative of the rest of the team, the program must be making some real strides in the right direction.

Total summer, legs still somewhat sore but trending towards a more refreshed state. Picked up middle-ish controls at a middle-ish pace. This could have been written just as well for yesterday, minus the control pick-up part.

The grasses are *already* starting to turn towards a yellowish, ripening look, headed towards mid-summer brown and thence senescence. All this is early, too, though it can't hurt that we haven't had hardly anything in rain now for nearly 2 weeks.

Read an article in yesterday's WSJ about the ongoing gymnastics scandal. The sordidness of it all aside, it's fascinating to wonder: 1) why the allegations were not taken extremely seriously right from the outside and handled with the highest priority, 2) if they were taken seriously internally, then why weren't the corrective steps that most would expect taken immediately, 3) and then, at what point did things pass so far over the edge that trying to cover it all up looked like the best way to go?

C • And 4... 4

Middle-ish distance training, with controls, at East Pelican with guest orienteers from near and afar. Some of the controls were even in the right spot--bonus!

Then a quick hop to a nearby area, to run a short,twisted loop at a brisk pace to look at some pretty pink streamers in a section of work-in-progress (Granite Planite) to check out secret sections of bare rock and narrow passages of very large pieces of granite.

Felt 100%--quick illness, quick recovery. Oddly, however, upon finishing, my legs immediately became sore, like they had just done something they had never done before. But legs, we do this all the time, right? Right?

Well, sometimes legs have other ideas.

Unfortunately, there was one serious casualty. When I got back and looked at my compass, there was a large bubble that had not been there before, and a nearly perfectly circle that had been punched out of the top of the needle housing. It looked like it had been drilled. I must have used my compass hand for some added support when I was running through some granite stuff, completely unconsciously, and not thinking about the compass either. Oh well, another boost to the O' economy.

By the time I was heading for bed last night, I had some fever, and instead of going to never-never land, I went to in-between land and started hallucinating. The problem (why I was sick) was somatamee, which meant that something had gone haywire in the system and the 3's were now 4's, and so nothing worked properly. The usual solution was to go to sleep, which, if you were lucky, would prompt they system to reset itself and all the 3's would go back to being 3's again, and you would wake up okay. But mostly it was the word somatamee endlessly repeated.

But I guess it worked, because when I woke up, the fever was gone, and I gradually felt better during the day, with only a mild headache and slight cough to mark that anything had happened at all.

Given the circumstances, I judged that it would be better to pass on any running or biking, but I did go out in the afternoon and do some mapping, and saw a yearling moose.

Ponderosas started sending off big clouds of pollen yesterday, and more of the same today. And bitterbrush has been blooming for several days. Both of these things are 2+ weeks earlier than they used to be not all that long ago.

C • Numbers 1

Felt good most of the day and for some biking, but once out in the woods and mapping, I started to sag. By the time I finished off and got back to my truck to do some running, it took a whole lot of effort to get going--what I really wanted to do was to stretch out and nap. But I ran anyway, I had stuff to get done.

Back home and in the evening, definitely not feeling well. However, if I am coming down with something, then as long as it isn't related to tick-born pestilence, virulent mosquitoes (oh, yes they're starting to appear), whisky, whiskey in bars, whisky with cowgirls, whiskey with frisky cowgirls, poison ivy (you never know), rattlesnake bite to throat, vicious elk attack, or ingestion of loco weed, I'll probably survive. Otherwise, I am doomed.

C • Laramie Super-Storm 3

Has nothing to do with anything I was doing today, but a few days ago I was looking at a map somewhere on line, and even though it looked like a good map, there was something kind of rubbish about it. I realized it was the form lines being drawn in a thinner width that full contours. That may be the new spec, but rubbish is rubbish and I'll keep my form lines the same as it ever was. Oops! Talking Heads reference! ; )

On my way out to mapping, 3 vehicles passed me going the other way, somewhat bunched together but nothing unusually so, especially as they were going up a big hill making it a tough place to pass. I didn't pay much attention, but after I went by the last vehicle--a large white pickup--I realized it was probably an official vehicle and probably Forest Service at that. It was too late to see if there was any lettering on the side, however. Then I thought back: the first vehicle had been a medium size flat bed truck, and it was hauling a vehicle with somewhat splayed tires; the second vehicle had been a regular tow truck. And I put it all together: it looked like maybe a crew had been out to take care of the abandoned sub-moron vehicle I had discovered and reported some weeks back!

Since the abandoned vehicle had been very close to where I was mapping, there was no way I wasn't going to check it out after mapping. And so I did.

I was amazed. Sure enough, the vehicle was gone, and I could hardly find any traces that anything had been there at all, which was substantially more amazing--because that spot had been filthy with debris and trash and broken auto parts, the van itself, and large amounts of broken glass everywhere. I have no idea how they cleaned it all up so well, but I do know that it could not have been easy.

I knocked off another small hill area on the map today, and even though I couldn't begin to justify it to anybody, I added on a number of too tiny bare rock dot knolls. There should be a special mapping hell for people who do this, and yet I did it anyway--definite map porn. It's going to be a pretty crummy map, but I guess it won't matter so much since it's only for an NRE and not an "A" event.

Tomorrow if I think about it, I will try to find some tiny, Finnish style cracks in the rock and map them as reentrants. That will be so much fun!!!

C • Map porn 4