Training Log Archive: Swampfox

Before setting out on activities for the day, I took a closer look at the blood red band aid on my, and discovered it's not just any old generic band aid, it's special! It reads "Foo Fighter"!

Okay, technically it reads "Flu Fighter", but anyone can tell what it really means. I'm a Foo Fighter!

Today I had one and only one thing to accomplish: to ride up to the National Forest and back. Today was the day when the Pilot Hill land acquisition would be officially open to the public, and would be the first time in I don't know how long--15, 20 years?--when it would be legal to make the ride.

I set off late in the morning, wondering what it would be like. Would there be throngs of people up there, savoring this brand new open space? I got my first clue when I rode by one of the streets people use to access the School Yard, which adjoins the Pilot Hill land. There weren't any more cars there than usual, and most of the cars that are usually there are identifiable as belonging to people who live along one side of the street. And, looking across what I could see of the School Yard, I couldn't see any mountain bikers.

I rode across the School Yard section, and arrived at the fence separating the School Yard from Pilot Hill and was surprised to see the wire fence gate where I was was still closed, and there wasn't a hole opened in the fence anywhere I could see, or any signage. So I lifted my bike over the fence and kept on going up and up.

A half hour later or so I caught sight of a biker ahead of me, and from that point I saw of occasional bikers, a few single, and most of them in small groups. There was one group of 6 bikers.

Eventually I crested out near the top of Pilot Hill itself. I didn't ride to the very tippy top, because I was pretty sure I had read that the area up top was going to remain off limits because of the antennas and related communications facilities up there.

But I did take a picture showing I was close. Besides, I've been up to the top before while running in the Pilot Hill trail race.



Then I rode on to a gate in the road that leads to the antennas. The fence there marks the division between the now public Pilot Hill land and the National Forest. If you go through the gate and keep going, eventually you end up at WY 210, just across the highway from the Tie City Campground. And, also, as soon as you go through the gate you're on orienteering map--a north extension of Telephone Song that has so far never been used.



Not sure why the whole picture doesn't show in this view, but if you click on it, it's all there. The view is to the east, towards Cheyenne. Devil's Claw is just on the other side of the prominent ridge in the right background.

Mission accomplished, I turned around and rode back down the hill. Most excellent!

Ran out to the Troll Bridge and back. Didn't see any trolls. Fire to the west grew much larger today, pushed along by some wind that picked up during the day.

Now the Mountain West Conference is on the clock for a decision about whether or not to play football this fall. Probably a decision to go forward has to be made within a week or so. I believe the odds are the conference will change course and decide to go ahead and play, though several conference schools may opt out (or have no choice to play because of state restrictions.)

If the conference plays football, the odds of a basketball have to be higher than they were.

But even if the conference plays football this fall, the odds that Coastal Carolina will end up as the national champion remain somewhat subdued.

The real question, however, is whether rapid antigen testing will allow the resumption of the Laramie Range Orienteering League (race series). Because snow could set a stop to this possibility at almost any moment, the decision to go forward must also be taken quickly, maybe even within the next day or so. You can play football in a football stadium in a snowstorm, but just try orienteering with 38" of snow on the ground.

Order one for the day was to get a flu shot. The online instructions I found said you can not be too safe and strongly emphasized that you should get to the clinic, etc., via mountain bike if at all possible. Well, my bike was ready to go with freshly inflated tires to exactly 62 psi, and there is plenty of dirt between me and Walgreens, so off I went.

At the Walgreens drive-up window, I was told they did not administer shots through the little drawer at the drive-up winder, that I would have to come inside for the shot, and could I please leave my bike outside. No problem, though now I was beginning to suspect that maybe the mountain bike part hadn't been essential at all, and the site I had gone to had been put together by a bunch of mountain bike bandits. They are everywhere out here.

My technique for getting shots is to not only look away the whole time, but to also tightly shut my eyes. After giving me the flu shot, the pharmacist person commented that I was a "bleeder" and put on a band aid. I didn't think much of it. At least not until that night, when I was getting ready for a shower. As I was taking off my shirt, I caught sight of an enormous blob of bright red (blood) on my arm that had been under my short sleeve. Holy cow!!! Had I been gushing blood all day long???

No. Upon closer inspection, it developed that the enormous blob of blood pouring out of my arm was only a bright, blood red band aid.

And this is exactly why blood red band aids should be banned, to prevent moments just like this.

Today featured Selling Twin Boulders by the One to Twelve Five, and I'm not even making that. Having been set free from my self imposed (okay, doctor imposed) moratorium on orienteering yesterday, today I got right to it, stepped out into the terrain, and initiated the fray. Although the plan remained and remains to ease back into things. You don't want to dive off the 10m platform on your first day back only to realize halfway down there is no water in the pool. That would not be good.

So I ran the course from the first day of our recently concluded training weekend, at a pace where it felt like I was doing some work, but definitely not at race pace. And it seemed like it would be a good idea to refrain from falling, especially from falling on sturdy stub type objects in a way that would subject the abdomen to violent piercing forces. I plan to repeat this at uncertain intervals as I get back some of whatever I had before, and see how the times change (hopefully getting fast).

The O' went well, so that was good. Some streamers had been trimmed by something (cows, probably), and two were gone. One of those, #13, was missing streamers when I was out checking before the training, and at the time I took a guess that maybe I had forgotten to hang them. I had had to drag a small log over to the cliff to have something to hang the streamers from, and it may have been that I took off after finishing with the log, and simply forgetting that something more needed to be done. But now that it has happened a second time, I'm revising my thinking: there is some animal hanging out in that area that either a) really doesn't like having streamers around or b) really likes streamers.

The other was weirder, and this one was #8, the boulder. As I ran up the little slope to the boulder and was passing the side of the boulder, I caught a glimpse of the streamers from the side, and then was surprised when I rounded the boulder to the streamer side and found they were missing entirely. How was that even possible? I had just seen them a microsecond earlier, and now they were gone? So I returned to the side of the boulder and looked more carefully and saw the streamers were wedged into a large crack in the boulder. Because of the way the streamers had been originally hung on a stick leaning against the boulder, there was virtually no way they could have flown off the stick and ended up in that crack, and it was almost as hard to see how an animal could have done that, or why, if it were possible.

The likeliest guess seemed to be that it had been done by a person, but then, who would have been out there? You hardly ever see anyone off the trails in general, and this part of the forest would be especially unlikely to see human visitors other than the occasional orienteer. And then even so, why would someone untie the streamers (they were intact) and take the trouble to put them in this rock crack, which really wasn't all that accessible?

So, once again, it would seem to come down to space aliens.

When I designed the course, I thought it would be fun, and I felt the same way as I was setting and checking it. But the proof is in the running, and I enjoyed all of it.

The very best part came near the end. I was running through some sage and almost at the next control feature--which was right in front of me and in view--and I started thinking about how I hadn't fallen and how good I had been with running stability and all that. Then I was at the control. Then I was leaving the control, and then about 10m later at most, I hit a rock stub or something with one foot, and fell forward. No big deal, but a fall is a fall. Orienteering can be so humbling.

Hazy yesterday and hazier today; from my part of town and looking to the west, the airport is only barely visible, and nothing beyond that.

Things I learned today: Coastal Carolina has a football team. Never would have guessed it.

C • And they are undefeated 1

Ran trails at Happy Jack after some biking. Today (today, this afternoon, to be more precise) marks 6 weeks since surgery, which is how long my surgeon said I should wait before resuming normal exercise activities. As far as I can tell, I got through the period fine, and now I plan to start slowly ratcheting up some higher intensity stuff--which won't be hard, because almost anything I do will be higher intensity than anything I've done since the beginning of August.

Biked shorter and ran longer, running on trails at Happy Jack. Went looking and did some finding: in this case, finding a crew with a small backhoe back at work on the massive re-route of the Aspen Trail. Not too many actual aspens where they were working, but it didn't seem to bother them. I didn't want to bother them either so I kept right on going. Plus, they were well off to one side of the existing trail, out in the woods proper.

It felt like summer, it felt like nice. And, I know, technically it's still summer, but around here mid-September = fall.