Training Archive: barbIn the 31 days ending 2006-10-31:
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| S | M | T | W | H | F | S | S | M | T | W | H | F | S | S | M | T | W | H | F | S | S | M | T | W | H | F | S | S | M | T | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Tuesday Oct 31 | ||
| Bicycling 8:00 [1] | |
| (sick) | ||
| Work commute.
First grader Tom writes, "Dear Barb and Assistants, Thank you very, very much for teaching me to orienteering maps happy halloween. Your friend tom." And he made this picture:  | ||
| Note | |
Happy Halloween!
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Sunday Oct 29 | ||
| Event: WCOC Osbornedale State Park | ||
| Bicycling 5:00 [1] | |
| (sick) | ||
Biked over to Dana Park for the Halloween party where Rachael, Dave, David, Isabel and I put on an orienteering course for kids age 4 and up. There was also a magician and a piano recital (David & Isabel both played). We got to see (and hear) a big tree across the street split in two and fall down; some damage was sustained by houses but it could have been a lot worse.
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Saturday Oct 28 | ||
| Event: WCOC DuO #3, Huntington | ||
| Note | |
| (sick) | ||
Went with Izzy's soccer team to a great Revolution playoff game vs the Chicago Fire, at Gillette Stadium.
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| C • DC United vs. Revolution 2 | ||
Friday Oct 27 | ||
| Yoga 45:00 [1] | |
| Bicycling 28:00 [1] | |
| (sick) | ||
| To work.
To school to check on the 3rd grade bulb planting. (And take a photo of Linda's class with their recorders.) To the post office to enter a lottery for a cabin in the Haleakala crater in January. Back to work. And home. | ||
| C • layoffs suck 2 | ||
| Note | |
| Yesterday sucked. There were massive (from my point of view) layoffs at work. I was not chosen (so I don't get six months of severence pay without having to work, nor do I get pushed into some interesting new future). And I had to give the bad news to an employee. | ||
Thursday Oct 26 | ||
| Yoga 55:00 [1] | |
| (sick) | ||
| Running 10:00 [1] | |
| A bit of jogging around setting controls for a Night-O for first and second graders. In retrospect, *what* was I thinking? This was the first time orienteering for many of the first-graders. I didn't have any reflective material on the controls. It was really really cold and windy. The experience could have put them off orienteering for life.
I guess we were thinking that we could build on their planetarium field trip, where they learned how to find the north star. But it was partly cloudy and at the start we couldn't see the big dipper or the north star. So we used compasses instead. Each kid went with an adult. All 18 kids finished the course, even though half-way through the course a number of parents hinted to Dave (who was running around checking in with teams and helping) that they might quit early. Times for the 1.1-km course ranged from 21 to 59 minutes. Their (phenomenal) teacher, Linda, has a habit of expecting a lot from the kids, and the kids have a habit of living up to those expectations, and I think that's why they did so well. | ||
Wednesday Oct 25 | ||
| Bicycling 20:00 [1] | |
| (sick) | ||
| work, school, work, home.
Taught an hour-long class introducing 1st & 2nd graders to maps. Talked about different ways of finding North. They went to the planetarium last week and learned about the Big Dipper and the pointer stars. Tomorrow I'll take them to Danehy Park for a Night-O! Yesterday I heard from Cristina's mom at Concord Academy - sounds like she is going to start an orienteering club there! And NEOC prez Caroline says a Finnish (?) orienteer teaching at Philips (?) Academy might start a club. And then I'll have to reconstitute the Graham and Parks club, and we can have some serious interscholastic fun here in the Boston area! | ||
| Bicycling 25:00 [1] | |
| To and from "Key Communicators" meeting with school superintendant. | ||
Monday Oct 23 | ||
| Running 35:00 [3] | |
| Went running in the morning.
Later, exchanged email with Lucy from MIT (thanks, Caroline!) who wants to do some orienteering with high school and middle school kids on campus. I sent her my map and clues from 2005 as an example of what she might do. 
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| Note | |
| Oo, psych! Figured out how to put video in my AP log! (see 10/19) | ||
| C • and here's a video! 3 | ||
| Note | |
| Watched "Treasure of the Sierra Madre." Some make for better adventure partners than others. | ||
| C • BADGES?! 2 | ||
Sunday Oct 22 | ||
| Bicycling 30:00 [1] | |
| Biked around town with David and Jonah. We went to three games stores, including one where you paint tiny figurines and then play games with them. | ||
| C • Live GPS tracking today 25.10.2006 19.00 Finnish time 5 | ||
Saturday Oct 21 | ||
| Event: NEOC Powissett Peak | ||
| Walking in the woods 30:00 [1] | |
White course at Jeff Schapiro's Halloween-O. Not particularly tough training, but a nice walk nonetheless. I shadowed Elizabeth. She's not had as much experience as the older girls. She was doing fine, but I was a bit nervous about the time. Here she is:
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| Running 15:00 [3] | |
| This was a typically tightly scheduled Barb plan: 2 soccer games, a bunch of kids to get out in the woods for orienteering, adults tagging along here and there, being dropped off by one person, picked up by another, taken home by yet a third party, everything spread out all over the Boston area, Cambridge and beyond 128, and just a few hours to do it all in.
We got a late start at the orienteering meet but for some reason I still encouraged Rachael and Isabel to do yellow. I was attached to the idea, and had talked to them on the drive there about how they might tackle it. But when Elizabeth and I finished the white course, the girls weren't back yet, and now we were really late not just for Rachael & Isabel's pre-game warmups, but for the soccer game itself, in Carlisle, 23 miles away, and it was a serious game, and not at all good to be late. I sent Elizabeth to the car and ran the yellow course backwards (which is where my logged training comes in), shouting their names and worrying. I found them at control 9 (out of 10) (and 10 had all the candy but we had to skip it). We ended up being 25 minutes late to the game, so I was fretting instead of enjoying their orienteering success - but success it was. They told me they leapfrogged. One girl navigated while the other followed behind, checked the route, and planned the next leg. And it worked. They said they were good partners because they go about the same speed. I'm real proud of them. But sorry about making them late for the soccer game. Which their team lost. Maybe it was all my fault. While all this was going on, David and Kyle played their soccer game and then came out to the woods with Dave to orienteer and do the junior training. It was Kyle's first time orienteering at a meet. | ||
Friday Oct 20 | ||
| Bicycling 8:00 [1] | |
| Work commute. Plan was to get up, run, do yoga. I was going to feel great! But Isabel was sick again, starting at 3:30 am, and I skipped running because I was zoning out too much by 6, and I skipped yoga so I could get in some time at the office before heading back to care for her. At least I have an excuse, eh, what! | ||
Thursday Oct 19 | ||
| Running 30:00 [3] | |
| Yay! I ran! With Dave - so it was faster than I would otherwise have run. We got home to find out that Isabel had thrown up. What a trooper she is. She wanted some of the black medicine that we were kindly given at the junior orienteering training camp. But we don't have any. I think it was activated charcoal.
I hear Keith Olbermann gave a great commentary last night. Maybe I should figure out the technology to watch TV for such occasions. | ||
| C • That he did 10 | ||
| Bicycling 20:00 [2] | |
Biked to school and back to plant tulips for the Journey North project.
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Tuesday Oct 17 | ||
| Bicycling 30:00 [1] | |
| To work & school.
I met with the school prinicipal to talk about parents' concerns and ideas and a little bit about science. Then I met the two women organizing the 2007 Cambridge Science Festival. Mostly we talked about how to connect school kids to scientists. But at the end I mentioned the remote control orienteering idea and they were kind of enthusiastic about it, and want to contact GPS companies to help sponsor it. This doesn't mean it will happen, of course, but I'd better find out more soon about what it would take to pull off. | ||
Monday Oct 16 | ||
| Bicycling 8:00 [1] | |
| Work commute.
OK, here's Barb's latest overly elaborate crazy get-people-orienteering idea: Remote-control orienteering. I'm meeting tomorrow morning with the organizers of the week-long 2007 Cambridge Science Festival. I thought that might be one possible venue for this wacky idea. Here's how it would work: There would be a Runner on the ground. Say, for example, they're at Boojum Rock, my favorite local O map. Then there would be a person (or a team) back in Cambridge (or wherever) who would be telling them where to go in order to find the controls. This would be the Navigator. The Runner would have no map. The Navigator has the map. Communication could be via cell phone. The Runner would be hooked up to a GPS transmitter the way they did at WOC (right?). I didn't see the WOC technology - but my understanding is that you could overlay on a map in real time where each runner was. The navigator would see the map and the location of the runner. The runner would have a compass. The navigator could say things like: "Run south along the trial." "Now turn south and climb to the top of the hill." People could follow along on the internet. Maybe we could make it some big gala competition, with multiple computer projectors, and several teams of navigators in one big room. And people could play along in Catching Features somehow? Maybe we could put the map into Catching Features and the navigator could be observing the Catching Features version of what is going on in the woods. Requires that Catching Features accept location information from the GPS transmitter instead of being controlled by a player. But we could certainly allow people to use Catching Features to "race" the real human team, in real time. We'd have to calibrate the runners in the game and real life somehow. Point - in case not obvious: introduce orienteering to a bunch more people in the context of a festival that already would be drawing people. Make it a game, and very participatory - but also very real. Also, this might be a way to explore the "televisability" of orienteering for a wider audience than hardcore orienteers. We could allow anyone to be a runner: one family member, or a friend, could be the runner, so the navigator is talking to someone they know. Or we could get elite runners so they're well-matched for a head-to-head competition. How do I find out about that WOC tracking system? Does it actually work? Is it accurate enough to be used in this context? We could do the same thing "blind" - where the phone communication has to suffice, and the runner has to clearly state what they see around them. The navigator has to keep track of where they are on the map. Distance estimation would become very important. Score-O format. Each player/team has to get as many points as possible, and back to the beginning in the alotted time. Maybe allow a little time before the start of the race for the navigation teams to plan their strategy. On the navigation team, you could have specialized roles as I'd laid out for the junior high orienteering extravaganza week before last. You could have someone who is reading the contours: "You should see a depression on the left in 50 paces." And someone reading the vegetation and rock features, and so on. What do you think? | ||
| C • Remote control O 7 | ||
Sunday Oct 15 | ||
| Orienteering long 6:30:00 [3] | |
| Highlander. Unbelievably gorgeous. Got to meet Barb Campbell. | ||
Friday Oct 13 | ||
| Note | |
| Watched "Mulholland Drive" | ||
| Bicycling 1:00:00 [2] | |
| Biked hard out into Arlington. Easier back to school then work. Eventually I'll head home too.
Today I did the tulip lesson with some 3rd graders. It's remarkable the difference between them and the first and second grades. The kids in my group of 6 for the planting site selection outing organized themselves into different roles without me saying a word! Two recorded the features of the locations, two sketched the place, and two found the places. I talked with Dan, a teacher at the school, who said he'd heard from the junior high teachers how great the orienteering field trip was. They apparently particularly liked that I did a lot of organization so that they didn't have to. I was relieved that the teachers weren't reporting the scare when some of the kids didn't come back out of the woods. Maybe I can get Dan to bring his kids orienteering. Dan also asked me if I work and I said, yeah, full time, but I go in early to make up for my school volunteering. In the 1st/2nd grade classroom, the 2nd graders know me from last year's orienteering (see photo below). So when they saw me, they were like, "yay! we're going to do orienteering!" I had to explain that I was there for science not orienteering, although we did in fact use a map of the school to show where we wanted to plant the tulips. 
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Thursday Oct 12 | ||
| Bicycling 25:00 [1] | |
| Work, school, work, home.
At school I started a Journey North tulip experiment with a class of first and second graders. We talked about the signs of spring, and spring coming at different times for different latitudes. We talked about good places to plant bulbs, and then walked around the school grounds to identify some locations. Next week they'll plant the bulbs and go online to record the location of their garden. In the spring, they'll record the date that the plants emerge from the ground, and the date they bloom. The website will show data from schoolchildren all over North America. | ||
| Yoga 55:00 [1] | |
| weight:131lbs | ||
| This was one of the more mortifying sessions, because while I'm pretty darn inflexible (physically, that is), today's exercises showed that off more than most.
What is G, one wonders? | ||
| C • 133 (and at least no longer cl... 3 | ||
| Running 20:00 [1] | |
| Running is "really uncomfortable and every mile [is] a painful accomplishment" | ||
| C • Of all the things to gank from... 2 | ||
Wednesday Oct 11 | ||
| Bicycling 1:00:00 [1] | |
| To Tufts. Heard Fritz Roth talk about yeast double mutant experiments and their interpretation. Really nice work. Stopped to buy tulips on the way home.
Results of my nutritional experiment: * eating fewer things results in eating less results in feeling better, and gets rid of the bloating problem. * eating fewer things and eating less is hard. * bloating is brought on by overeating and possibly by milk, nuts, wheat, sugar, etc. Even honey on bread at night seems to have deleterious effect. Also it might help to eat more slowly and enjoy each bite to its fullest. * I have a tendency to binge. But we knew that. Worst example is cookie dough. * Working in front of the computer is associated with snacking. Hm, what can I eat right now? | ||
Tuesday Oct 10 | ||
| Running 25:00 [2] | |
| Ran from Izzy's soccer practice to the school to check out tulip bulb planting areas for our Journey North experiment. And back. | ||
| Soccer 15:00 [2] | |
| Scrimmage with the few kids who showed up for practice. | ||
Monday Oct 9 | ||
| Hiking 2:40:00 [1] | |
Monadnock with a bunch of kids. Took lots longer but am recording the time when I do it solo.
Keegan (age 3) made it to the top, and down, on his own two feet. I have high hopes for Keegan as an orienteer, though I'm not sure his parents are on board yet. 
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Saturday Oct 7 | ||
| Walking in the woods 1:00:00 [1] | |
| Took some younger but more experienced kids to the woods to help retrieve flagging tape. Rachael in particular got some real training in. After, we ran footraces for short distances. I don't run as fast as I can very often, and was sore in hamstrings and buttocks the following day. | ||
Friday Oct 6 | ||
| Event: 2006 North American Championships (Golden Leaf Orienteering Fest) | ||
| Walking in the woods 2:00:00 [1] | |
| Set controls and picked up controls for 80 junior high kids spending a day at Boojum Rock.
This was interesting. Typical for a Barb project: it got very elaborate, and didn't all work out as I had planned. But it was a good day. Pulled an all-nighter (rogaine training?) the night before to create my complicated playing cards (thanks Dave), 13 different maps, 9 different memory-receiving clue sheets, various instruction sheets, etc. The teachers wanted the kids to come together as a community. I had asked what they were studying in school, and was originally hoping to incorporate some of the science (mass/density) and math (slope, inverse functions). But in the end I just focused on the book they'd been reading and discussing, "The Giver" by Lois Lowry. I started from Jeff Saeger's map walk + white course approach with the Melrose middle school kids. I had the kids for more time: 3.5 hours, so I layered on additional activities for more map reading skill learning and teamwork. Details: (1) map walk in teams of 8 with one adult per team. One kid on each team read a narration at each control on the map walk. The map walk took the kids from the entry point across the street from the ice rink parking lot, to our "home base" which was the meadow near the Stoneham life care center. The narration taught the walkers how to orient their map, read features, estimate distance, and plan their route to the next control. 
Map walk (2) Pairs (subteams of the original teams of 8) went out on short white courses. There were 3 courses; every pair went on a random one of these 3 courses. 
Course B (3) Teams of 8 reconvened and selected roles for each individual. There were 4 roles (so 2 of each on a team): Leader, Contourer, Feature Reader, and Distance and Direction Diviner. Each person then was supposed to do a short "apprenticeship" in their role to gain expertise. (The idea of the roles was both to practice teamwork and also to echo the societal roles assigned to children when they turn 12 in the Giver community.) (4) Teams reconvened and strategized about their challenge, which was to collect clues from the forest. Each clue was mapped either with a control circle on the map, or with word directions from a reference control. Each clue location was off-trail. Each clue was a 4-digit number written on a piece of flagging tape. Each team had 8 or 9 clues to gather. They didn't have to get them all, but they did have to be back at the Meadow by a given time. When they returned to the Meadow, they exchanged their collected numbers for "memories", which were photos on playing cards of memories from the book (like sledding or sunshine or warfare). Each control was given to 3 of the 9 teams; no two teams had the same set of controls to gather. I originally had it such that each team could optionally split into 2 subteams (of 4) (with each role represented), but in the end I had them stick together and go with an adult. Nonetheless, people reported really liking this last challenge. To help with navigation, I had flag controls at many intersections, which were also shown on the maps. On the ground at those intersections I created a flour arrow pointing north (J-J's idea). (They had no compasses.)  I had taken photos at every clue location, and gave them playing cards with the photos before they set out. I thought they might enjoy matching the photos with the locations. And that maybe they'd like to have these photos as keepsakes - their own memories - of the event. But I don't think this really took off for them. Here are some of the photos from control locations: 
Classic control location: boulder 
The water tower 
Note Boston in the distance. 
Shiner Pool 
Lichen on a control boulder 
Mushrooms from one of my favorite sections of tall pine forest. 
Poison ivy (OK, I didn't actually put a control here, but I did put this picture on the Joker card.) The feedback I got was positive. I need to follow up with a flyer about upcoming meets and see if I can get any of these kids to the woods again. 
Kids in the Meadow 
Jumping and hiding among the flowers was a draw for some. 357 | ||
| Bicycling 1:00:00 [1] | |
| Biked home from Boojum. Did not have my helmet or a hair tie.
I was so fried picking up controls that when I ran into a guy I know in the woods, I couldn't remember his name (Randy, he told me) or where I know him from, though he was very familiar (and in fact I still can't remember exactly how I know him, but that must be the Alzheimer's because I'm no longer fried). | ||
Monday Oct 2 | ||
| Note | |
| This weekend I was working in an old partly-filled notebook. I looked back through the notebook at an idle moment, and found jottings about a 1998 A-meet in the redwoods of California. These included a little sketch/cartoon of Peggy D's head in profile. I'm sure it looks nothing like her. But perhaps I will remember to post it at some point. | ||
| C • hmmm 2 | ||
Sunday Oct 1 | ||
| Note | |
| Ideas for Friday's outing: a.u.r.
Basic idea: design group day in the woods based on "The Giver." Learn orienteering, fall in love with the woods, solve some puzzles, build a team, use some math, role-play some social studies, do some science, have fun. | ||
| C • School work 2 | ||