Training Log Archive: cedarcreek

Green Course at Mitchell-Memorial set by Claire Dell. Very nice course. She kept us out of the green way more than normal for Mitchell, and the difficulty was right. I went faster than I thought I could, even though I've been slacking off training way too much.

2m ARDF at Miami-Whitewater, set by Dick Arnett. Very nice course, extremely confusing. I beat Bob Frey by three minutes, and Brian DeYoung had some radio problems and was 20 or 30 minutes longer. Miami-Whitewater is much whiter than I remember. The footing is not great, maybe a little worse than Oak Mountain, AL (which is decent). Fun day in the woods. Cloudy, very diffused light. Very pretty. Most of the leaves are down. 60 degrees or so. Maybe it was an awesome day in the woods.

"Strength" in this case means "I helped my nephew move." 1hr in this case means "9 hours total, 3 hours of serious work", and it was probably the same as 1 hour in a weight room. Two days later, and I'm just getting over the soreness.

I taught an Orienteering Workshop today for some people at a small, new park. Eight people, I think. I used terraserver-usa.com aerial photos and USGS topo images (which really sucked) to fieldcheck a map on Tuesday, and the map was barely useable today for a yellow course. None of the participants had ever orienteered before (one former military guy had done Army navigation), and they seemed to like the workshop. I need to ask them what they liked and didn't like. The course was 1.6km, 52m climb, and it was all easy with maybe three sprint-like clever legs. They even want me to finish the map! (which, if I do, will be my first map) Overall, an awesome day. I had a blast. Oh! They pulled every control. That's never happened to me before.

Well, good news/bad news. The good news is that I got the track data out of the GPS. The bad news is when I saved the track, it auto-massaged the points and threw out about 95% of them. So. I've got almost unusable GPS data. Luckily, I can use my drafted trails plus this data to close my loops. It'll require some work, but it won't be too bad.

I know it's lame to claim training benefit from mapping, but I was fieldchecking for 5 hours today (very low intensity). It's my first time really fieldchecking (outside of mapping clinics and tiny, tiny postage stamp areas).
It's a whole new mental challenge, especially with the crappy basemap I have (1m/pixel image off terraserver-usa.com). I did pretty well with two loops, missed one by 20m, and the other by 40m, both over about 1km. I had very minor locating features on the 20m loop, and essentially nothing on the other. I carried along a GPS, recording tracks, so I have two independent records of the trails, if I can figure out how to download the information. It's a fairly small park, and it's a complicated mish-mash primarily of rough open and ROST. My brain shut down trying to figure out the vegetation. Hopefully what I did today will give me enough basemap to make the vegetation a lot easier. It was just too much white paper today.