Training Log Archive: TomN

Neighborhood run at around noon. Whew, it was hot.

I rode to work this morning, which was the plan, having left the car there last night. The morning ride is more pleasant than the evening ride, for a variety of reasons. First, the automobile traffic on the cross streets is more crowded in the afternoon, and the drivers seem more impatient. Second, there are bugs and other flying debris in the air in the afternoon, some percentage of it getting in my eyes, but not in the morning. And third, my available glycogen reserves seem to be considerably greater in the morning. I bonk about halfway home in the afternoon, but never in the morning.

I put my bike in the back of the car this morning, left the car in the overnight lot and rode home. (Since Florence is on travel all week we had 2 cars in the lot that night.) Left around 4 p.m, got home around 6. It should have been 22 miles but I made a wrong turn, getting on the Anacostia Trail instead of the Northwest Branch, and going a mile before I figured out it was wrong. I must have been really deep into some daydream, because I know that intersection pretty well, right off of Rhode Island Ave.

Mid-Atlantics at Rocky Ridge (SVO) Green. I had a lot of trouble with this course, and I'm not sure why. It's as if all my bearings were off. Where I was able to correct using features, it was o.k., maybe even unnoticeable, but in other places it was ruinous.

The real stinker, #4 on the NE cliff, was an example. I took the trail network to the big cliff just to the SE, went in on a bearing, and found cliffs but no control. I circled back, found the circular bare-rock feature, took a bearing in from that, and found the same stuff but no control. By that point there was a crowd, and when one of them found it we all did. Seems like something was wrong here. Other little problems in the attack on subsequent controls, but nothing as bad as that.

First leg of the relay. I stuck with the leaders through the first control (we all went to the wrong rock) and the second. The third was a long uphill, which separated me from the leaders but also from a lot of others who fell even farther behind. Still in a train to the spectator control, then a split as some went for the wrong control out of the arena. I was running well and passed a couple of runners on the second loop. Punched finish and forgot I was supposed to hand off to Heidi, but she reminded me. Heidi chased Anna and Alex for some of the way and handed off to Tori who pulled through for the win among the 9-point teams. Yay!

Green - Splits