Training Log Archive: cedarcreek

Then 14 minutes in the steam room---The only reason I made it that long is because I drank 1L of cold water during the 14 minutes.

80m ARDF at Sulphur Canyon/Doc Long in the Sandias.

Good race, slow, kinda short (M40 in straightline is shorter than W21, W35, M50, and M60). Map way better than in 2005, but the trail symbols need a going-over---one huge trail symbol on the map is a normal singletrack, and other normal single tracks have tiny tiny rat trail symbols.

I'm not going to claim the contours are wrong, but it *seemed* like transmitter 1 (SW most part of my track), which is mapped as up 3 contours, felt like 5 contours. I was going *really slow*.

My QuickRoute I started my GPS 15 minutes late---I wanted to start it on a cycle so I could use the time to know what T was on. My order was 2,1,3,4. I didn't have to get 5 in the SE of the map.

Dick's QuickRoute

Event: Air Force Marathon
 

2m ARDF at Los Alamos, NM.

Very pretty, very nice area, good map. I'm happy with my result. But ARDF is not a foxhunt. I was disappointed with the course. It's a reasonable course, but I think many of the choices the designers made contributed to unfairness. I have no idea why we were given a map this big. When the map goes that way, and there are obvious course design hints that going that way (north) is a reasonable thing to do, and you decide to not put anything up there, then you need to have big hints to not do obvious things like go to the north part of the map. Going north is aggressive; going east is safe. Aggressive route choices should be rewarded, safe choices penalized.

Am I wrong?

My QuickRoute (I went east along the stream, and back west on the road; so CW.)

Dick's QuickRoute

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I considered going north on the trail about 300-400m out of the corridor, but I instead spent a lot of time verifying that I couldn't hear obvious transmitters up the reentrant to the left of the "boot mesa" as well as from the high point north of transmitter 3 (off the tip of the boot mesa). So I wimped out, but wasted a lot of time doing the safe thing---checking out the north part of the map.

The problem with the course is that so much is determined by random factors. I'm confident the best people were high in the standings and the worst were low, but this course doesn't give similar results to similar ARDFers.

Event: Radio Orienteering ARDF USA and IARU R2 Champs
 

Event: US/Region II ARDF Championships
 

Well, several hints about Saturday's 2m location were dropped at the competitor's meeting this morning: It's got a gun club, unexploded ordnance out-of-bounds areas, and environmentally-sensitive areas that are protected by big-time laws and $10,000 fines for trespassing.

Jay Hennigan noted that if we can't figure out where it is, we need to hang our heads in shame.

So...We think we found it. We're basically 100% sure we've got the spot and a reasonable estimate of the exact area of the map. We're expecting the map to be possibly expanded in one or more directions from what we know. However, it is completely unnecessary for their to be such expansions.

I spoke to Bob Cooley early, about just the size of the map that was stated, nearly a full 11x17 1:15000 map, at altitude (perhaps 7000 feet plus), and we believe the map might be that big, but if it actually uses that much, it will be a narrow sliver on the 17 inch dimension or an insanely long and difficult course. So we're trying to judge the sanity and orienteering skill of the setters. I'm going in assuming that they are both sane and have the necessary orienteering skill, but I'm preparing for the possibility one or both of those assumptions are incorrect.

More tomorrow, after the event. (We board a bus at 7:00-7:30, and it leaves at 7:30am.)

Looooong 80m Training Event. Basically a full-size ARDF.

Messed up the order. I had no early signals in the upper left part of the map, and when I realized I had gone by 1, I *knew* I wouldn't have any Ts in the upper left part, so I could easily pick it up on the way back. Unfortunately, there *was* a T up there. So I had some added distance.

Lots of bad choices today, although in my defense, the Ts seemed really messed up. 1 and 5 were both very faint, even though they were the closest to the start.

QuickRoute (2.92 MB)

Got wrangled into picking up Ts. I offered to help several months ago, so I felt obligated. It would have been a lot less of a hassle if the main course was shorter and I was completely exhausted.

And if I ever again go to get a transmitter placed in a vague spot on a vague map without taking a receiver, I've given people permission to smack me.

(Distance and time logged are correct---GPS shows part of route driving away.)

2m ARDF Training Camp. Oak Flat Picnic Area.

Picked up transmitters and flags, so probably 2.5min of delay for each control---total of 12.5 min or so.

Beautiful day, beautiful terrain.

The map was hard to read, and isn't the best anyway, so it was advantageous to stay on trails. I did, mostly, except for extended sections near the end.

Marvin did a great job setting this course. Very fun.)

QuickRoute (1.85 MB) The dark red spots are where I stopped to take down the transmitters, and the vague red spots are where I waited for the control to turn on (or where I was going through fight).

Setting an ARDF course at Mt Airy with Dick's micro-80m Ts. I let them take a bearing for T4 (the first transmitter they'd find) before they started and hoped they navigate along a road to that crossing. The problem was, the crossings were off up to a little more than 100m---more than I expected. Still findable in 1 minute, though. After that, the Ts were set so if they took decent bearings, they would have crossings and the order would be obvious. Both Dick and Brian took the same order (although another order was reasonable), and Marji got the "easy three". So---we're ready for Albuquerque. If I can pack in time.

k4bri's QuickRoute (The start is from the Loop north.)

My GPS track (blue globe) isn't accurate---I forgot to start my watch. The GPS only shows the very end of me picking up 2 woods controls, and 1 with the car, then leaving the park and driving down Colerain Ave to about the bottom of the hill.

Just a beautiful day to be outside. We had a few drops of rain, but the woods was so pretty.

2 movies:

The Adjustment Bureau (1). I'm a sucker for Philip K. Dick novels and for Emily Blunt. Matt Damon continues to pick smart movies. I especially loved the way this movie shows New York City. Wow. This is a solid movie and I liked it, but it wasn't awesome.

Contagion (2011) (1). About a bigger-than-SARS, bigger-than-pig-flu pandemic. Interesting and fun to watch, but the story didn't move along very well. I've been thinking of a way to explain this: If this were a real-life story, Ira Glass would reject it for This American Life because it didn't have the little elements that make it a great story. A few years ago there was another epidemic movie called Outbreak. Contagion seemed more realistic with the technical details, but it wasn't as fun to watch as Outbreak. It seems too subtle. To steal a line from Ebert: This is a good example of a movie of this type.

80m ARDF set by Dick Arnett at an undisclosed location.

Brian beat me by 2 minutes. I made a pretty major orienteering error in the first ten minutes. I was trying to go to the far side of a field, across it at 45 deg to the NW, but it was really overgrown. So I went around the edge of the field to the west and then didn't realize I had to go north along the edge before I went into the woods. So I was off the map and didn't realize it until the end when I had a chance to look at the map. I had a warning sign. I was supposed to leave the field corner at 320 deg and when I went into the woods the angle was 240 (60 deg off). (I normally don't know angles like that, but in ARDF I tend to use my reversed rosette compass, so the angles are obvious.) I started to figure it out, but then the T came on and I just ran it down, actually going a little east of straight north. I really sucked, though, because it took me 2 or 3 cycles to get through this green (that wasn't on my map, but I didn't know exactly why).

The big lesson from today was: When the forest is thick and there are lots of trails, really pay attention to your trail navigation. It would have doubled my time bushwacking if I wasn't navigating today, and I took some fairly roundabout routes.

It was a really nice course set by Dick. There wasn't an easy path in the right direction ever. (Well, say 1 out of 5 times there was.)

Picked up two of the remote controls, 4 and 5. Stopped a bit to talk to Brian as he waited for confirmation it was okay to pickup 3.

2 movies.

The Guard (1) with Brendan Gleeson and Don Cheadle. It's about a cop in rural Ireland, a pretty sleepy place, who has to work with a black FBI agent because of a suspected ring of drug traffickers. Or that's what you'd believe from the trailer. It's a lot more complicated and interesting and funny than your average movie with a similar pitch. I really liked it. I'll certainly be watching it again on DVD with subtitles to see what I missed. I'll probably actually buy this one.

Beneath Hill 60 (1) (Australia). A World War I movie about miners who worked underneath No Man's Land. Low budget but with a big budget feel. Good acting. Neat story. After I watched it, I googled to find the diary it is based on. Unfortunately, it's unpublished. I'd read it if it were available. (One of the officers in this is named "McBride," which made me sit up and take notice. I read another WWI biography by H.W. McBride called "A Rifleman Went to War"---Not the same guy, though.)

C • secret agent 2

Event: Knight Run 5K
 

Cycling on one of the bike paths in Dayton. From Eastwood Metropark to the Main Street overpass in Moraine, near the old Cooper Tire factory. A little farther than last time, and I'm pretty sure much faster.



And I *finally* got to see the Five Rivers Fountain spraying *from up close*. w00t! It was pretty cool. I actually rode through a sheet of falling water and it felt great. (Hot one today.)

I replaced my brake pads last night, and I put good ones on the front and cheap ones on the back. It was an attempt at not buying two expensive sets and finding they didn't fit. The results of the experiment show that the good ones are awesome, and the cheap ones suck, even though the good ones aren't even contacting the full surface of the rim---They'll need to wear in a bit. But I'll be buying another set of the good ones.

I again rode the folding clown bike. There is a definite speed penalty, but for convenience and training it's just awesome. I had another new creaking sound pop up, and I kept looking trying to localize the source, and using my foot to touch various bits that might be moving, but I couldn't figure it out.



Well, just after the turn-around, I stopped a few times to move the seat back up (long story), and as I started from a dead stop, my pedal foot *BOOM* hits the ground, I almost crash, and my pedal goes skidding across the bike path. My geek brain thought, "Crap, I broke a pedal shaft! How impossible is that?", and then I realized the pedal wasn't broken---it had just unscrewed itself from the crank ***and I hadn't noticed***. So---geek fail. Luckily, I had a little Park 32mm/15mm headset/pedal wrench in my bag. (The 15mm fits the axle nuts---I never expected to need a pedal wrench, and this bike's headset doesn't use a 32mm.) Anyway, the crank threads weren't too boogered up, and after a few tries and a bloody fingertip, the pedal went on nicely. Oh, and I checked the other side, and it was loose too.