Training Log Archive: Nadim

Event: QOC Jug Bay - CANCELLED
 

From the Adventure Playground Parking Lot in the South Germantown Recreational Park and Maryland Soccer Complex, I ran around lightly overlooking areas that I'd planned to field check after my run. I didn't do any field checking the day before, and I didn't plan to get into the forest a lot partly since for several days after the previous week I had kept finding ticks on me, and I had several tick bites. I also knew that the late spring vegetation was getting too high and tick for me to be effective. The run was nice and lots of people were all over the places where I ran.

From the Adventure Playground Parking Lot in the South Germantown Recreational Park and Maryland Soccer Complex, I field checked most of the areas south of Schaeffer Rd.. The early parts of this were in thick woods and tall grasses. I found a few features but I wouldn't expect these areas to get used very much. The map is thin in this area and it's in the extreme south of areas I'd planned to include. However, I did find some oddities. One unused path across a stream had been expected. There was a concrete bridge for it. Later I found a completely different one that apparently had no connected trail. There were also some odd copse in a big field. Two of these had hidden paved areas inside them (they were big enough to have open mapable forest in them). Other parts of the terrain had been manually sculpted for drainage, old roadbeds, and picnic grounds. Despite bringing 3 pairs of spare batteries for my GPS, all of them failed. The areas were mostly contoured enough or within sight of things i had picked up from satellite photos that I felt effective mapping using my eye. My watch GPS still worked and that helped too. I got to an area that photos had shown to be under construction. I also covered parts of the park which photos had shown to be under construction. A professional looking cricket field had been built there with a road and a parking lot. I walked this to let my handheld GPS pick it up and using my notes, I got enough to get a pretty accurate sketch. I finished-up by going through parts of the soccer field complex that I hadn't field checked earlier.