Training Log Archive: TomN

Drumm loop.

Drumm loop. Kept the pace up.

Easy run around GSFC perimeter road. Picked up Tom W. around the start of the dirt road and ran with him (slightly slower pace) the rest of the way. Discussed, among other things, the slowing of runners in the Goddard races over the decades.

Core strength workout. My shoulder now hurts too much to do pushups. It seems to be degenerating -- this is a distinct change for the worse since the last one of these workouts. I have no idea what's wrong, but I guess I'm going to have to deal with it.

OK, so this was my first core strength workout for about 2 months. My unacknowledged philosophy has been, don't do it unless it's a problem. And along the way, running has been tentative day-to-day because of ankle and leg pains. This morning I woke up with some lower backache, so it's a problem, so I did the workout. As I said, no pushups. Everything else is fine. There will be a medical consultation in my future regarding the shoulder, but hopefully everything else will be off the table.

C • Shoulder 1

GSFC perimeter road.

Forest Glen/Georgia Ave.

Back from niece Phoebe's wedding in Indianapolis, an intentional timeout from running. Now a restart on the usual Drumm Loop. Ankles felt ok, but that wasn't the case yesterday. Also, not much complaining from the glute injury side, but still non-zero. I don't feel like I'll ever get normal again. Still, a respectable workout.

My Garmin 405 got into the wash a couple of weeks ago (it was still in my pocket after Pawtuckaway) and appears to have survived the submersion and subsequent drying. Didn't expect that.

I took Florence and my parents and my brother and his wife to Columbus, Indiana, to look at the architecture. I first saw it during the Flying Pig this past April. Addie and I were staying in a hotel near Columbus and looking for something to do. Google searches kept coming up with "First Christian Church." What's up with all this churchiness? Well, it turns out, that church was designed by Eliel Saarinen, and the library across from it was by I.M. Pei, and the sculpture in the plaza between them by Henry Moore, and the middle school down the street by Gunnar Birkerts, and four buildings on a nearby corner by Kevin Roche (four!), and there are 50 more buildings in Columbus designed by major architects in the modernist style, and incidental commissioned sculptures, including an operating Tinguely. I'm so happy to have seen, and revisited, the First Christian Church, which I think is the most extraordinary building I've ever encountered. This time we got a tour of the inside from a friendlly employee acting as docent. Take a trip next time the Pig is held in the vicinity, it's an astonishing town. And then explain to me, if you can, how all this extraordinary architecture came to be, because the official story leaves something to be desired.

Noontime run around the perimeter road at GSFC.

Butterflies this run:
Buckeye (first of year)
Some kind of small satyr, maybe a Carolina Satyr, second one of these I've seen, need to get a positive ID.

Cool morning run around the usual loop. Going to be a busy day.

Event: QOC Lake Needwood
 

QOC Lake Needwood Green. I ran this course in good style except for one control, for which there is no excuse. I'm pretty sure the trouble started leaving #3, when I ran in a direction about 90 degrees off. I should have known better, because this has happened a lot. It's like my sense of direction (which is awful to begin with) is only kept in short-term memory. So when I look up from punching, I have no idea where I came from or where I'm going. This is the time to be careful with the map. Actually, the time to think about the way out is on the run-in to the control, but that didn't happen this time.

Anyway, the way I went crossed a river at the right place, so I didn't notice the problem then. Nor did I notice on the hill on the other side. So I was a long way off before I figured things out, and even then I rabbited off from a known location without due consideration, so it all happened again. 19 minutes on a 4 minute control from 3 to 4. Yikes.

One or two slowdowns approaching controls after that, but all in all, good orienteering. The course was maybe the best I've seen at Lake Needwood: plenty of running in the good areas, not too much in the bad areas, some good route choice problems, hardly any trail running, map seemed good the whole way through, even, in retrospect, in the parts where I didn't know where I was.

A big start to the official QOC season, on a beautiful clear day, with over 200 entries. The new pricing structure was designed to encourage e-punch ownership, and I believe we nearly sold out of SI-8 e-punches, so the incentives appear to have worked as planned. There was an early lineup for registration, not the fault of the crew -- just the sheer volume of registrants, but things settled down about a half-hour in.

C • Short term memory 2

A little search and rescue effort. A pair of cub scouts had taken a wrong turn just 50 meters short of the finish, and hadn't turned up after 40 minutes. Adam Szabo drove me down to Southlawn Road, where I interviewed some folks coming up from the south (no sightings), and jogged back north to the finish. No sign of them. Then on trails around the west side of the map, still no sign of them. But the mapped area was full of orienteers, so I figured they must have crossed Southlawn and walked off the map. It turned out that's exactly what they did, and they got all the way to the south end of Lake Frank before finally talking to someone who called their mom.

Then I helped with control pickup.

Green - Splits

Intervals at Einstein HS track. 3x1000 with 4:00 jog (600m) in between. Times: 4:15, 4:17, 4:20. Faster than last month. Maybe the first one was too fast, or maybe I don't have the base for this workout.

Warm-up jog to the track, a couple of laps around with 3 strides. Cool-down jog back home.

Around the GSFC perimeter road. Great day for running.

Greenbelt Park Perimeter Trail, with the upper Blueberry cutoff. Hot hot hot.

Went to the track for intervals, but found it full of soccer players. Not on the infield, but all over the track, with soccer balls and coaches. So I turned it into a road run instead.

Back in Maryland. Easy run around Drumm loop.

Event: Pawtuckaway Camping Weekend
 

Ugh. Totally avoidable errors. I don't even want to talk about it.

Around the lake to Morrison's and back.

Down the hill to the Rumford town line and back up. Conditions were reversed this time: fog up at the pond, and sunny down below.

Saw a Harvester today, Feniseca tarquinius, a first for me. The only carnivorous butterfly in the U.S. They need wooly aphids to survive, and they don't fly very far from them, so you have to be where they are to see them.

C • MEAT EATERS 2

End-to-end run around Howard Pond to Morrison's, to Seely's and back.

Down Howard Pond Road and then back up, a steady climb of over 400 feet. Heavy fog this morning down below, but clear and sunny up on the pond.