Training Log Archive: CleverSky

Around, In The Dark. All kinds of things were hurting earlier -- the right ankle that I injured, various other bits on the right side that seem only peripherally related, places on my left foot that seem more perplexing, my left knee, etc. Don't know if this is some lingering aftereffects of COVID, or some lingering side effects of the drugs, or just old age, or just random, or what. Some vitamin X reduced the issue, but I shouldn't have to be doing that.

A short morning ride, keeping an eye on the clock so as to make it back in time for my first meeting. Cool and misty, but I was nevertheless overdressed with two shirts. My ankle was visibly swollen last night (which is unusual for me), so I'm going to try really hard to not fold it over again until it heals up.

Down to the lake and back. I woke up with my right ankle feeling quite tender, so I'm going to go easy on it and do some appropriate rehabilitative stuff.

Yard work, I'd guess at least an hour and a half, consisting of pulling up bittersweet, then mowing. Ankle was pretty sore at first, then after a while I didn't notice it.

CCW. Hadn't run over here in a couple of years, since I'd been focusing on the part of the park where the map is. Perhaps surprisingly, this was my third-fastest time for this loop, less than two minutes off the best time. It also measures up as the longest ever length for this loop, which I attribute to the new watch picking up a lot more of the small changes of direction. Didn't feel very sparky at the beginning, but once I was warmed up it was a pretty solid effort. Old City Road is in good shape these days since they went through with some heavy equipment to trim the vegetation on both sides, and kind of graded it in the process. On the other hand, the southern part of the loop in particular doesn't seem to have received much attention from the MTB crowd lately. One good solid twist of my right ankle shortly before reaching Old City Road, but I was back up to speed pretty quickly. Pretty ideal conditions, 72 F and dry, and still in daylight.

Coasting home from trivia (we won again), In The Dim. Maybe The Dark. It's largely down hill from Ashby to home. The light I was using was adequate, but there's a difference between "bright enough for orienteering" and "bright enough to spot bad pavement at 25-30 mph". And the little stretch of Stewart Road is just a bad idea in the dark, period. I had a spare light in my pocket, and when I got home I compared it with the one I was using, and it was considerably brighter, so maybe the one on my helmet wasn't charged up enough or something.

Downtown and back.

Great Brook Farm, Red M35, 8.2 km, 210 m, 4th. I got an email yesterday saying that the prerunner on Red was ill, and asking if I'd be willing to start at 8 AM. Hell yeah, given the sweltering forecast. The whole meet administration was a bit of a shambles, so we didn't actually start quite at 8 (I helped a bit to sort things out), then off I went.

This was basically a long Orange course, which is about all you can do with this map. Although billed as 8.2 km, which is kind of on the long side as Red courses go these days, I measure it by the shortest route not crossing uncrossable water or out-of-bounds areas as 8.63 km. I failed to punch my watch at #5, but caught up when I double-punched it at the #15 water stop, then I also apparently failed to stop it at the finish. No big mistakes, but I did a little extra distance when exiting to the road from #5, and wasted time trying to go through the woods on the way to #7 when I should have just gone out to the road. Some hesitation on #15 in a hard-to-read detailed area, and a complete overshoot on #21. By the end it was getting pretty warm and I was fading (did a lot of walking when I wasn't on a trail), and I did a pretty solid brain fade on the last control, just standing still and trying to make sense of the details to figure out which way to turn.

I was thinking when I was out there that the meet crew wouldn't have their act together enough to put out the finish punches, but then I reasoned that a prerunner on another course would probably be back sooner. Sure enough, that's what happened to the Brown runners, no punch when they arrived. Then download was kind of a mess because people had to go there before starting as well, so I wandered back to the car, changed my clothes, and downloaded later. As far as I'm aware, they didn't run out of maps, so that's good.

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