Saturday Oct 6 |
| |
| Event: Ontario Champs
|
 | Orienteering race 43:30 [3]4.2 km (10:21 / km) | |
| shoes: kaija rautavaara |
| Ontario Champs, middle. A bit of a disastrous run; lost 7 minutes on Wil who didn't have a perfect run himself. Part of this was lack of concentration; the area was tricky and I wasn't taking it seriously enough for a little while. Part of it was map printing - I found it very difficult to read up and down in some key locations (including in one circle where the similar colors of brown and purple as printed meant I misread a slope tag as part of the control circle, meaning I expected a hill rather than a depression and got totally confused). Part of it was stupidity (didn't work hard enough climbing one slope and descended the wrong way off the ridge at the top, working it out when the trail to which I relocated was going precisely 180 degrees the wrong way...).
First time I've run over 10 minutes/km for a while. I find southern Ontario terrain both physically and technically some of the toughest in North America - it is soggy, the visibility can be low (particularly in cedar sections, something we don't seem to have south of the border), and the mapping today just didn't agree with me. Worst race of the year. |
| |
| C • 180 degrees 6 |
| Orienteering 16:26 [5]2.8 km (5:52 / km) | |
| shoes: kaija rautavaara |
| Ontario champs, sprint. Durham Conservation Area. A fairly simple race. Got the key route choices right, making probably only 20-30 seconds of mistakes (several 5-second efforts); slower running speed than some meant I ended up tied for first with Hans. |
| |
|
Sprint 4 - Splits |
Thursday Oct 4 |
| Running 1:17:00 [3]10.62 mi (7:14 / mi) | |
| shoes: johann cantaloupe bach |
| Mendon, on another glorious evening (67F, clear skies, still - just perfect); the early fall has been wonderful in Rochester this year. (My electricity bill tells me the average temperature in September was 66F, compared to 51F in September 2006.) Parked at the usual place and did a clockwise lap of the whole park, choosing trails towards the end by how well lit they were by the dying embers of the light; getting across the last small piece of forest required walking to avoid tripping and using memory of where the trail went...
Excitement for the day: within a minute of starting, nearly trod on a two-foot snake lying stretched sleepily across the path. This on the trail on the esker between Hopkins Pt Rd and Canfield Rd, at the center of this map:
View Larger Map.
I'm pretty sure it was a northern water snake - they seem widespread in this area and this is only a few yards from a pond (although a good 10m vertically above). But it seemed to have a more triangular head than most pictures of northern water snakes I've seen. Added to the (probably) black racer I saw in Harriman between controls 1 and 2 of this weekend's Highlander ;), that's more snakes in a month than I've ever seen in the forest, especially in a cold place like upstate NY.
A short time later, on the flat northern section of the park, I woke up a raptor of some kind (ok, not the saurian kind) which flew along the tunnel-like trail ahead of me for some way. No sure identification. |
Wednesday Oct 3 |
| Running intervals 16:00 [5]2.6 mi (6:08 / mi) | |
| shoes: johann cantaloupe bach |
| Usual 4/3 loop. Genesee Valley Park isn't so well lit... maybe for after-dark running it would be better to use the other version of this loop. Very warm for October (70F, still, high cloud, sunset). |
| Running 31:00 [2]3.8 mi (8:09 / mi) | |
| shoes: johann cantaloupe bach |
| Rest of the loop. Length distance is due to lack of detours at red traffic lights, due to absence of said lights. |
Sunday Sep 30 |
| Bike 2:24:00 [3]36.0 mi (3:59 / mi) | |
| shoes: shimano m-180b |
| Greenway-Lehigh Valley loop. Started at 5pm, finished just with the last of the daylight (sunset was 6:53pm now). The light looked a little wintry (high thin layers of cloud with a low sun behind them), but it was warm enough (73F when I started out). There is something tough about the cinder dust surface of the Lehigh Valley trail - one always feels like it's hard work. Perhaps it's that I only get there after 17 miles; maybe if I could ever bring myself to do this loop in the morning, so as to be able to go the other direction without riding straight into the setting sun, an interesting control might be established. |