| Much different from last time, significantly stronger wind. Flew for just about an hour, which was the equivalent of many -ups, because I had to keep the bar stuffed much of the time in order to keep my airspeed above the windspeed so that I wouldn't get blown inland. It finally picked up enough that I lost the race, and even flying as fast as the glider would go, I couldn't make any headway, and came down at the end of somebody's driveway a half-mile from launch. There was no way to get up in the air again, so I disassembled the glider in the lee of the garage and carried it back on the road (which is what I logged).
I did get a swell GPS track of the flight!
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| Running trails in the vicinity of Dan Parker Road with Stephen. Due to our schedules, the fact that there's still quite a bit of snow out there, and the early date of the Billygoat, this is the first, and maybe only, chance that we'll have to go out for a run together before the event. I was satisfied with how he did today; my expectations were different than they were for our training runs last year, and he did better relative to my new ones. I think he'll be fine for the Billygoat next week, but you never know until you actually do it. I, on the other hand, may be a hurting puppy, because this heel thing is still bothersome, and I'm tending to keep the weight off of it, meaning that I'm running entirely on the ball of that foot, which is stressing the calf. Stephen was motivated to keep moving, because he was going over to a friend's house with his sisters, and was afraid that they'd leave without him if we were out too long. At the end, he said something about starting his finishing sprint, and really turned on the jets for 30m or so, tough for me to go that fast with my foot hurting.
If I had been thinking a bit more, I would have been able to report the distance that we ran, seeing as how I finally got myself one of these newfangled GPS gizmos (hey, don't laugh, it was way cheap!). But I forgot to bring it with me. And the included software for interfacing with things like GoogleMaps looks kind of uninteresting and bogus. I guess maybe there are some sites like the one that Brooke uses where I could upload the track or something, but I havn't looked into that yet. But that's okay, since I wrote a program last night to convert from NMEA to KML so I can look at the track in GoogleEarth (I know, there are plenty of converters out there, but I can customize this one to do exactly what I want). But I haven't added the feature yet to have it measure the route — that will come next, I know how to do the calculation, and I just have to add a few lines of code. |
