Training Log Archive: RLShadow

Hojack Trail walk with Homer. Goal was to do 4 miles and we (barely) did just that.

Back yard mowed.

Walk with Homer, around the big block.

Right knee now feels fine for walking, but it's not totally like it should be, since if I bend it much past the 90 degree point, it's noticeably stiff and somewhat uncomfortable.

At least it doesn't seem any worse for wear as a result of the semi-long walk I did with Homer yesterday, in addition to the O training.

Indoor pickleball at the Rec center. I told myself I would only play an hour due to my residual issues with my knee.

Semi-long walk with Homer, after the rain appeared to have finally ended. (And it did, at least temporarily, as we didn't get rained on.) I particularly wanted to see how my knee held up with a walk on flat pavement, to decide if I should go to Durand to try Lindsay's TNT memory course that she set up. It felt OK, not perfect by any means, but a lot better than yesterday. Also, less swollen and it has a somewhat larger pain-free range of motion. So I'm leaning to trying Durand this afternoon.

Tues Night Training but on Wed. afternoon, thanks to Lindsay streamering the controls and leaving them up for the rest of the week!

Memory-O. I did controls 1-3, 4-5, 6-7, 11-13, and 14-16. Did OK on some controls, not so well on others. The usual problem was over-simplifying and not paying enough attention to details near the control. Good exercise.

Wore a knee brace and took it very easy (zero running), and as of now, my knee doesn't seem worse for wear.

Actually, two separate 1-mile walks, one early afternoon, one later afternoon.

Left knee is acting up today (started late yesterday). A bit puffy, somewhat limited range of motion. Different than what seems to be my more normal knee ailments, which usually don't involve any swelling or range of motion issues (just some occasional fairly sharp pains when going up or down stairs). Only thing I can think of that might have led to this is playing pickleball yesterday morning on a hard court (Webster Park). I've played on hard courts before and I did find that I felt more worn out / beat up than when playing indoors, but nothing like this. Hopefully this winds up being short-lived and I'll be back to my more familiar (and less debilitating) knee issues in a day or two.

In any event, the fairly slow, level dog walks I did today didn't seem to aggravate it nor were they particularly painful (although I was well aware that my knee wasn't all that happy).

Outdoors at Webster Park. Decent day; wind just enough to be slightly annoying without making it impossible to play. My sense is still that outdoor play is distinctly harder than indoor play (different ball with a slightly different weight and bounce; wind and sun to deal with; and the hard outdoor courts beat me up physically more than indoor courts do). I think we had 12 people at the peak.

Hojack Trail. Again, 30 sec of running, 90 sec of walking.

Indoors, at WRC. Only 11 people, far less than normal, maybe due to holiday weekend. I didn't feel particularly motivated for some reason, but had some good games nonetheless.

Could the weather be any less pleasant on a May 24?? 38 degrees, windy, light rain. I wore my ski jacket, a ski hat, and ski gloves, and I was just about dressed perfectly until the last few minutes when I was very slightly overheated.

With Homer, over to Finn Park, once around the very wet field. My hiking boots, which are somewhat waterproof, were totally saturated all the way through, leading to very wet socks, along with the bottom 8 inches or so of my pants being soaked.

Took Homer for a walk in the relatively new nature area at Phillips and Lake. Cheryl had heard someone tell her that there were "4 miles of trails", but I'm thinking that either she mis-understood, or the person telling her had mis-understood, something; "Four Mile Creek" runs through the land. As far as I can tell, there are nowhere near 4 miles of trails.

It has a good sized parking lot, probably large enough to stage an O meet from, but I didn't have high expectations of the land itself, and those low expectations were borne out. Mostly thick (medium or dark green), with few contour features or anything else of interest. (Although there were a couple of impressive rootstocks -- like 3-4 m high.) Not even enough of a trail network to set a remotely interesting White course. A small patch of open woods with a steep hill down to the creek in one spot, but that was about all that wasn't totally impassable.

Indoors at WRC. Very good group of people today.

An almost-new sport for me. I used to play, decades ago, and was even semi-competent; same with Cheryl.

My band practice was canceled tonight and Cheryl didn't have movie plans, so I suggested we dust off our ancient tennis rackets and play a little. I suggested going to the courts on Embury as they are also lined for pickleball, so if we got too frustrated with tennis, we could bail out to pickleball.

After a very rocky start, we both got a little better, so we could keep the ball going a few hits. It was fairly enjoyable. May even invest in more up to date rackets.

After trying tennis for a while, we decided to try pickleball to see how hard it was going from one to the other. It was even tougher than we anticipated. Even though the tennis court is about double the length of the pickleball court, you really need to hit harder in pickleball due to the rigid paddle and the rigid ball. So we had quite a few hits that went into the net (in fact into the lower part of the net) before we got the feel of pickleball back.

More Whiting Rd map updates.

Hojack Trail, with Homer. I tried running 30 seconds, walking 1.5 minutes, repeat repeat. I'm experimenting to see possibly if I stick to level, soft surfaces (which essentially means Hojack) and work on not coming down on my heel, my knee will tolerate a small amount of running. Felt fine today but that really doesn't mean anything. Key will be if I can do this on a regular basis and not aggravate knee issues.

Event: ROC - Mendon Ponds Regular Meet
 

Mendon, Green course.

Given that my knees are apparently not up for any more running, I walked probably 99% of the course. Thus, I knew I was moving slowly, but I was fairly pleased that I didn't make any significant mistakes. In fact, when I was done, I was thinking that this might be the first time when the AP split analysis has a chance of concluding that I had zero lost time. That wasn't quite the case -- I had 43 seconds of lost time, on control #10, and I can see why that would be my bad one. (because I got off line when exiting #9 and covered more ground than I needed to)

So it was encouraging that my lost time was very low, but also a little discouraging that, since I WAS moving quite slowly, I didn't do too well compared to the rest of the Green competitors. Guess that's the new reality though ... so I should be happy to be relatively mistake-free, and not upset that my time is slower than people who are running much of the time.

Only a few specific comments --

Start to #1 -- I went up the first trail that headed up to the ridge, although after I had done that, I was thinking it might have been slightly better to stay on the low trail until the reentrant that headed up to the ridge, very close to where the control was on the other side. Seemed like it might have been a little less climb and a little less distance.

#1 to #2 -- I think that control #1 was placed much higher than the circle indicated. Based on the actual placement, I should have gone back up to the ridge to save some climb, like I see Tyler did. If the control had been lower, in the center of the circle, maybe going the low route out wouldn't have been much worse than going back up to the ridge.

#4 to #5 -- I'm sure when the map was last updated, the vegetation in the field that #5 is in was mapped well, but now it is certainly FUBAR. I saw the coniferous tree from a ways away, and then had to hope that there were passages around the areas of thick, nearly impenetrable vegetation to get to the tree. Fortunately there were.

#5 to #6 -- If the vegetation in the field was as it was mapped, a direct line probably would have made sense, but seeing how thick and badly mapped the vegetation was, I didn't want to rely on making it through the field, so I bailed to the trail to the N of the straight line. Seemed to work well.

#9 to #10 -- got way off line to the right exiting #9, but fortunately it wasn't too far to the trail, so I didn't add too much wasted distance.

#12 to #13 -- took a more or less straight line through the woods with mottled green vegetation shown, which wasn't a problem at all. Came out on the field in a place where I could tell where I was, and quickly found my way to the control. Happy about this one because I was worried about the "overgrown reentrant" feature in a field where the vegetation might have been again badly mapped (but didn't seem to be).

#16 to finish -- took a more or less straight route instead of going out to the road, but I wasn't too happy with the outcome. The going was a little slower than I had expected, plus I wasn't paying enough attention to the contours and wound up doing a bit of extra climb. I think the road would have been the better choice.

My route is on Route Gadget; I think this is the link (can't get to Route Gadget on this computer so I can't confirm it right now, had to use my tiny old laptop to put the route in):
http://www.vmeyer.net/gadget/cgi-bin/reitti.cgi?ac...

Indoors, WRC. Only 10 people today. But had a number of very good games.

Pickleball probably doesn't seem (especially to people who haven't tried it) like a very strenuous game, and it also doesn't seem like it should be that much of a workout to walk a Green course, but the combination of the two in one day totally wiped me out ... plus my left knee wasn't all that happy, and I'm not sure if was grumbling due to orienteering or pickleball or the combination of the two.

Green - Splits

WRC, indoors. Good group of players.

Whiting Road. Lots of vegetation updates needed. Many because I didn't do the greatest job when I first did the map, but some were due to actual changes in vegetation, many for the better (a few very rough open areas with lots of undergrowth have been cleared out to where they are actual rough open with no undergrowth).

Mostly-suburban dog walk. Getting the feel of the portion of Brighton that is fairly close to Cobb's Hill Park, as an initial rough assessment of whether it would be worth using for a future Rochester Map Adventure (starting at Cobb's Hill, for example, and using much of what we used in the city this year, plus some of Brighton). Results of the assessment were fairly discouraging -- not a whole lot of any even remotely interesting questions were apparent.

One exception was the Brighton Cemetery, which is quite small compared to Mt. Hope, but looks to be about the same vintage in terms of age of graves. Definitely could ask a question or maybe two from there.

There is a rail-trail which I took for a while, thinking (I'm not sure why, in retrospect) that could provide some map adventure material. Definitely did not.

Indoors at the Rec Center.

Ultra run going on outside the Rec Center, on the paved 1-mile path.

C • Webster Rec Center 1

Urban walk with Homer, mainly to check out the last day of Spiderman filming, and also to check out Control 42 (Monroe HS; # of pillars) as one person answered 6 instead of the intended answer of 8 (which everyone else who answered the question got). He's communicated with me by e-mail about how he couldn't understand how he got it wrong (not that he was upset about it though), so I decided to see if there was anything tricky about it, as it had been a while since I had come up with it and I couldn't picture what it looked like. Conclusion -- nothing tricky whatsoever, very clearly 8 pillars. I took a picture and will send it to him, to find out if he was looking at what I (and apparently everyone else) was looking at, or if he was somehow in a different location.

Saw lots of the set of Spiderman, including actors dressed like NYC policemen and policewomen hanging around waiting. I bet there are at least 30 NYC police cars. I was places where I almost felt like I shouldn't be, as there were so many crew people around and all kinds of equipment, vehicles for the scenes, etc. But once again, I failed to see any action ...

Some pictures from the Spiderman set:
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10200096...

C • pillars 4

Indoors at the Rec Center. Warm and steamy inside.

Late morning walk with Homer around the big block -- end of Woodland through the woods to Heathland, then to Maple, Rt. 104 path, Bay Rd, and back to Woodland. No GPS carried -- distance from previous big block walks.

Did the 5-hour Rochester Map Adventure course. Obviously I'm familiar with the course, but I think this offers fairly little advantage in terms of finding controls or navigating to them, and only very modest advantage in terms of route planning. Especially since I really didn't have a solid idea of what my strategy would be when I set out. But once at the control circle, I obviously knew what to look for, so that is an advantage over someone doing it without being familiar with it.

I see that the GPS deleted the tracks at the beginning of the walk, because it must have been "full". But it still counted the distance. Basically, in the section that was deleted, I had done the cemetery and the U of R.

I made it to 55 controls.

My route: Cemetery controls (5), then U of R controls (4), then:
24
9
44
45
46
47
49
50
51
52
48
54
53
58
57
56
61
63
59
60
62
68
69
71
70
76
66
67
65
64
38
36
35
34
32
33
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
3
2
1

C • Send us a hard copy please ... 2

Track from the Forerunner 10 which I carried in my Camelbak. The battery ran out at the 4:14 mark (after 14.14 miles). One of my frustrations with the FR 10 is the short battery life.

But at least this has the track at the beginning of my walk unlike the FR205 ...

Event: ROC - Rochester Map Adventure 2013
 

After the start of the Rochester Map Adventure, I took a walk over to Mt. Hope Cemetery to hopefully get some pictures of some of the participants. I got some shots of PG and arthurd (both determining what the Maruggi's favorite type of wine was) and a few other people, plus a lot of other pictures (not of people) from the cemetery.

Then a lot of sitting around at the finish, with a number of trips back and forth between the start/finish area and the community center building for various purposes.

I was impressed that quite a few bikers got all 82 controls, and particular congratulations to arthurd for getting them faster than anyone else!

Also impressive, of course, was PG demolishing all of the other foot competitors by getting 78 controls, comfortably ahead of 2nd place.

Indoor pickleball at the Rec Center.

Urban walk with Homer (very urban), mainly to peruse the Spiderman situation. I didn't see any action but I saw lots of non-native vehicles staged ready for action (NYPD cars, NYC taxis, NYC buses, etc.), and lots of RPD police keeping spectators like me out of areas we shouldn't be in, and lots of crew from the filming, mainly waiting around).