Training Log Archive: Nadim

Patuxent River Park, MD. After helping at the inaugural QOC Patuxent River 10K trail race, I got a turn running. I mostly took photos during the race and had trotted a bit here and there doing that. I felt awfully tired on this run, despite the flattish terrain. I looped the boardwalk marsh at the end where I met Peggy and Max. It was a nice sunny day.

45 situps. I used the time to complete my drafting work from the last field checking session and did more painting in Max's room.

45 situps. I used the time to paint Max's room and my left calf was still tight.

Washington, D.C. From 12th & Independence Ave., SW, onto The Mall, past the Washington Monument, Constitution Gardens Pond, and the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial to Lincoln Circle. to Ohio Dr. to the Rock Creek Trail, to Calvert St., NW to the Woodley Park/Zoo Metro Station. I felt good starting out. The temperature was in the mid-40s F. It didn't take long before I started feeling more tired. but I still felt much better than when I did almost this exact route last week onTuesday. About 3 miles into the run I started feeling tightness in my left calf. This calf plagued me all last year but just a be more to the left of where I was feeling it today. I slowed to a crawl for a while and it got better. I had to do this a few more tmes before finishing but I was still slightly faster than the previous week. I did some stretching afterward.

I had wanted to go running this evening but I spent the time painting and preping for more painting in Max's room. When I got far enough along on that, I resorted to spinning and watching a movie.

Lake Needwood, MD. I felt odd driving out to the park to do field checking while it was raining. My past attempts at that had proven largely futile; I just can't write on wet paper. However, the radar before I left gave me a good prediction so that by the time I got out of the car the rain had stopped. I had hoped to finish-up the park today but a section which I had thought would be somewhat easy to map proved to be much harder. It looks to have been an old farm on a hillside. I found several good ruins, a spring and some other point features. There was a large section of irregularly shaped fields which I hardly even attempted to draw. Inside the fields were some tree and shrub islands making it even more difficult to map. Some efforts at keeping the fields clear appear to have been made. Instead of drawing it, I ran around the field edges with GPS tracking on (I did just under 3 miles worth altogether with other tracks). My earlier aerial shots from the county hadn't shown so much that was distinguishable but when I projected the tracks onto Google Earth's newer imagery, there was a strong correlation. The fields were very runnable as were most of the woods so It's going to be a fun area to navigate through. I did make it into the area where the new permanant ropes course had been setup. I tracked the trail system but there was so much going on with various stations and different cable systems that I decided to stop there. I still have the ropes section and some more picnic areas to do, as well as some clean-up/quality control to do in various places.

I met Peggy and Max for some splashing around and chasing in the Germantown Acquatic Center. Peggy then went off for a trail run. Max and I tried to go up to the big water slide but at almost 47 inches, Max was just under the required height. It was really crowded; so much so that I could barely lay out to get wet in the 3 ft. water.

Lake Needwood, MD. Starting near the archery range, I covered the NE end of the park. The area will not be very difficult to navigate through but mapping the changing vegetation was challenging. There was also a section of parallel pipeline rides which I had partially put on the base map. When I got to the first, I thought it was another one since the first one I came upon hadn't been on the base map where I hit it. A half hour later I discovered this and had to spend time shifting things over on my field notes. I also had trouble with some of the contours. The base had some of them shown incorrectly, including an odd pair of dry catch ponds. I had to reverse the contours for those. I almost always underestimate this but there doesn't seem like there's a lot left to do to finish the park; a day or two more, and then some clean-up.