Training Log Archive: Swampfox

Day 2 of training; Neal was the course setter today, and he set a hilly-ish course at the hilly-ish Antenna Hill, for nice contrast with yesterday. After distributing maps and hanging around a little, I headed over to Granite Planite to finish up the last bits of tidying up the course for tomorrow.

Where I parked, there were unending droves of ATVs and such; I'm not sure I've ever seen so much traffic up there before. And of course it was incredibly dusty with all the traffic plus extremely dry conditions plus wind.

I got home in time to do some biking around town.

It looks like yesterday it was warm enough to *tie* the existing record high locally. But getting ready for a big time "presto-chango".

Day 1 of training weekend; I set today's course which was at Twin Boulders. Warm and dry. Right at record warm in fact; the old record was/is 90F and two sites I checked showed a high of 89F, while a third showed 93F. I'm guessing the old record stands, but records fell up and down the Front Range.

Looking south, you could see a huge plume of smoke from the Cameron Peak Fire, which looked like it got going again today. It was reported the plume was over 35,000' high, which is higher than me (not even 6' high), or Laramie (7280') or even Longs Peak, which is something over 14,000' So that's pretty high.

Re-checked all the control locations for Monday, which was good because 1) one set of streamers had vanished altogether without a trace, 2) numerous streamers had been bitten/cropped quite short by either space aliens or resident cattle (will guess it was the latter), and 3) I realized that one set of streamers was on the wrong feature, with the correct feature being 20m further along. How humiliating. Even if nobody saw the mistake but me, that is enough. I spent at least the next two minutes after the onset of humiliation feeling intense humiliation, and then, just like, the feeling passed and never returned.

In fact, by the time I got back to the Finish it was all false pride and hubris, baby! I was #1 again, practically the GOAT! The gods are sure to strike me down again, soon. I just hope it doesn't mean another trip to the popsicle (what my sister would call the hospital when she was 3 or 4 years old.)

C • Map Scale 5

Linked up with Tyler for a bike ride south of town. Warm.

Checked the rest of the streamers for Saturday in the late afternoon. It was even warmer.

Checked most of the streamers for Saturday's training before darkness set in. It felt a little bit unnecessary, but since I was going to do some walking somewhere anyway--and given the surprising (at least to me) number of people who will be here for the training weekend--I figured why not.

And, actually, a good thing as it turned out. One set of streamers was entirely missing, and given the circumstances of that particular location and what I had to do to set it up, I think there's a reasonable possibility that I left the site without ever hanging the streamers! Whether that was the case or not, there are streamers there now, looking very fine as they get stirred by the breeze. Still have a short line of controls to check tomorrow to finish things off.

After riding around town looking for frat parties I could crash, I gave up on that and crashed a bike shop instead, saying hello to all the dogs and patting the heads of all the bike shop mechanics--or maybe it was the other way around? At any rate, I didn't get bitten, so whatever I did must have been okay.

Downtown was looking good and all spiffed up with many welcome signs for orienteers coming to visit this weekend. Apparently all the micro-pubs will be offering unlimited free beer to orienteers (we'll just have to see how that goes, disaster in the making?), which I predict may help to (briefly) boost local orienteering numbers.

College football and other college sports may be off for the fall here in Wyoming, but high school sports in state are taking up the slack and are receiving media attention like they have never received before. Some of the high school football teams look unusually good, with numbers of walk-ons nobody has ever seen or heard of before, who look an awful lot more like Div 1 college athletes than high school athletes, but who knows--some people just mature faster than others.

Once the ACC and SEC and Big 12 start their football seasons, I wonder what it's going to be for all the other conferences looking on? It very vaguely reminds me somewhat of when orienteering was shut down in Sweden because of TWAR while everywhere else it kept right on going...

I went up to Happy Jack in the late afternoon for some walking, and while I was at it, I tormented some of the mountain bikers, telling them that "real mountain bikers ride off trail through the woods", stuff like that. Many of them just smiled, but some of them said: "Really?", and plunged their bikes into the forest. Neat.

After biking, I went up to Happy Jack for some walking, and almost at once ran into a stream of runners--though to be clear, they were the ones that were running, and not me. It was the high school XC team. After the runners had all passed, one person was still in sight and just standing there. I recognized him as probably being the coach, so I headed over that way and stopped and introduced myself. He's been the coach for a while now, and the team has been quite successful during his time in charge, so it was neat to meet him.

He attributed the success of his teams to a number of athletes who were willing and wanting to work quite hard to achieve high goals, and downplayed his part in it. But it's almost invariably the case that any really successful organization has superior leadership at the top, and I imagine that's the case here, too.

There was some sterling local news announced today (or at least it was today that I first heard it, on the radio): the Pilot Hill Land Swap has closed and there is now public land running continuously from the east edge of town to the west edge of the National Forest. Technically the land isn't open to the public quite yet while signage and new fencing is installed, but main thing is this has been accomplished after many years of effort by a number of local residents--and for much of that time, it didn't look all that likely it would ever happen. Since I expect to start some easy running again in a week (5 weeks out form surgery), then I also expect that about the time the land is officially open to the public, I might be able to do a run from home up to the forest and back--for the first time in many years now (the private land acquired in the land swap was once open to non-motorized public use.)

C • Cool to hear about the land... 2

Walked out into the wilds of Happy Jack to see if maybe I could find Randy and Dan, and I heard the chainsaws buzzing even before I topped the first climb. They've been making good progress on the new ski trail cuts and look to be nearly done with everything west of the fence just east of Upper UW, which is north of the visitors' center and well south of Casper, not to mention Montana or even Canada.

After visiting with them, I continued my walk and was promptly hailed down by mountain biker. I had no idea who it was, in her mountain biking garb and helmet, but it turned out to be Nicki--a neighbor, and also a PA. It was Nicki who first took a look at me a year+ ago when I was sporting a very swollen sore throat. So it was fun seeing her; I actually had no idea she mountain biked.

I ended up looping past the upper part of Haunted Forest, and peeped in there and saw that sometime while I was out of commission, work had started on the re-route of Haunted Forest, with trees on the new route chainsawed down to about the 3' height. Not sure why they saw at that height, but maybe it's safer to make the first cut that way--who knows.

Closed out the month by biking when I got back home. Checking my log, I see exercise came in at a very meager 14 hours for the month. Without going back to check to be sure, I would guess I would have to go back to October 2010 to hit a month where I did so little. Of course there were mitigating circumstances involved, but in the real world few people ever care about someone else's puny excuses. ; ) I will bet that September will go better.