Training Log Archive: iansmith

While I know very little about The Newsroom, the first eight minutes of this episode are brilliant.

Also very cool: space-time crystals.

C • Nobody does! 2

Quickroute. GPS track was wildly off, probably due to passing near a number of buildings and breezeways. Controls 3-4 are distorted; I hit 3 directly and ran to the right of 4 through the breezeway. Controls 5-6 are also distorted; I did not make any path mistakes on either leg. I wonder if right out to the street to 7 would have been better; I ran left and through the passageway.

I apparently slowed considerably on the leg to 11. I need to practice maintaining a steady and fast effort throughout a sprint. I made a mistake to 19 - I should have run east of the first building and continued on the left rather than zipzagging through the field. I think the finish might have been faster running left, but I am unsure.

Quickroute. GPS was better than in the previous sprint, though still slightly spurious. The recording mode was set to "smart" recording, which almost certainly increased the granularity of the track. The routes are essentially correct, though the bobble between 13 and 14 is a data collection artifact; I executed that leg fine. Unfortunately, the route choice error to 16 is not an artifact.

Sprint 1 - Splits

Sprint 2 - Splits

While hiking was fun, orienteering was necessary to provide some balance to the weekend. I was tired on Saturday evening - my HR clocked in at 76 bpm during dinner, but rehydrating and a good night's sleep were restorative, and my morning HR was sufficiently low to warrant activity. We traveled to Burnt Mountain to run an exercise that Carl Childs had designed.

Burnt Mountain is a rich area, with good running and complex terrain. Kroum later reported to us that the contours are from a USGS map; while it seems they were improved by the mapper, there were areas that I struggled to interpret correctly. Exactly how much is due to my lack of skill and how much to the map isn't obvious. I found it difficult to concentrate due to the mosquitos and my steady entourage of deer flies.

Ali and I alternated on the first six controls; on her first leg, she started calling out what her plan was, so I subsequently followed suit. Making the effort to describe your plan aloud is great because you must be sufficiently attentive to parse it cogently. I found it also gave my brain an extra opportunity to realize what I was saying was stupid and wouldn't work.

From control 7 to the end, we ran independently. We ran into trouble at 8 (split 9) where we both did a poor job reading the contours and kept stopping short. I went on a mini-adventure to relocate and attack again, and eventually figured the map out. A low-lying area was marshy, and we kept concluding we were elsewhere. I had difficulty at 11 (split 12 and 13) reminiscent of my Day 1 Classic Champs fiasco, where I attacked down a spur and confused myself at the bottom. Finally, the location for 13 was a bit vague, and I did a poor enough job on the attack that I wasn't confident when I arrived in the area. Ali and I wandered about a bit before finding it. Garmin died leaving 13; I visited two locations on my way to 14 and have no idea how I got between the two - Quickroute will be informative.

Maybe I should try Ski-O, where all the insects are frozen.

C • Burnt 1

After a quick refueling stop at Bagel Basement including a delicious cinnamon roll and some coffee, we traveled to Oak Hill for some o-tervals. Carl Childs designed the exercise, and Krum graciously hung streamers for us. Apparently he went to an orienteering secondary school in the Ukraine while he was growing up.

This gps track corresponds to the first interval; I reset my watch before deciding to keep all the tracks together.

The remaining three o-tervals at Oak Hill. The objective of the exercise was to run hard and fast above race pace to practice decision making, map reading, and traveling through the woods at high speed. I was sluggish, and really should be doing these faster. I think I tend to slow down to a more comfortable pace, particularly when there are no adversaries in sight.

Ali's and my courses differed slightly, so we started simultaneously after each stop. My navigation was generally good, apart from two dumb mistakes: at 12 (split 13), I took an idiotic route over an unnecessarily tall spur rather than running around on a trail, costing about 30s. At 15 (split 16), in my desperate effort to catch Ali, I followed her into her control instead of going to mine. Oops. A lesson here, particularly from control 12 is that it is important to have a plan (even a rough one) before you blast off into the woods. A second or two of extra thinking can save lots of time, particularly on the first control of a course, when you aren't in a rhythm.

Oak Hill had some good orienteering - the map is great, the terrain is runnable, but it is very steep.

Picking up the streamers. As penance for my MP, I took the longer loop and correctly attacked the control.

Ali and I drove up to New Hampshire on Friday night and stayed at the Great Bear Cabin III near Moosilauke. On Saturday, we hiked the Tripyramids from Route 112. We ascended via Sabbaday Brook Trail, scooted up to North Peak, doubled back down to Middle and South Peak, then descended via the Kate Sleeper Trail and the Downes Brook Trail. The loop was about 14 miles in length. My Garmin has been gimpy lately - running through a full battery in a little over an hour, despite smart recording - so I only turned it on for part of the descent.

While the views were unremarkable, the excursion and its numerous stream crossings were great fun. I have not been diligent about making trips into the White Mountains, and day hikes are great opportunities to get away from the busyness of life and spend time at one (ish) with nature. I packed relatively lightly, with only three liters of water, a fleece, a rain jacket, some tortillas, and the usual set of hiking equipment - flashlights, matches, iodine tablets, first aid kit, and emergency blanket. Ali wore the boots she plans to use on Mt. Blanc, but eventually switched to her X-talons when her feet started to hurt. I wore some Asics running shoes which I had previously used as my day use shoes.

The day was sunny and bright, and the temperature on the ridge was around 60-65 F. We encountered around 25 other hikers, most of whom were on the ridge.

A few peaks that looked interesting for subsequent climbs: the Osceolas, Passaconaway.

Some pics:
A beautiful day - from Middle Tripyramid, looking West. The ski resort visible is Waterville Valley. The peak with Waterville is Mt. Tecumseh, the peak to the right (north) in the foreground is Mt. Osceola, and I think the peak between them in the distance is Moosilauke.
A beautiful day II
Team photo

C • wow... 6

Easy run around the Charles. Thought about a clustering problem on pairwise ranked lists. Also of note, today the Supreme Court ruled on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act Cases (PPACA) including Thomas More Law Center v. Obama in a 5 to 4 decision that, among other things, the individual mandate is constitutional under the Taxation Clause of Article 1 of the constitution.

C • Bridges ? 8

Apparently there exists a lyme disease vaccine that was taken off the market because people are dumb:
WBUR: Why your dog can get vaccinated against Lyme Disease and you can't

While I'm always looking to move up in the attackpoint rankings, I recently discovered this (update) unpleasant surprise on the aggregate AP score. Note who is in 34th. I'm a solid point behind acjospe; it is an area in which I must improve. It occurs to me that split comments are the easiest of the seven metrics to adjust, and that a difference of 0.2 could be made up with about 10 split comments. This would inevitably spark an arms race, leading to total chaos and the collapse of our little society.

Update: it seems that the attackpoint total rankings fluctuate quickly, and in the space of a day, I was passed by AliC (probably due to her total number of visits). Rather than artificially trying to inflate my ranking, I will pursue advancement through conventional means - training, log hits, splits from actual races, and so on.

C • Split Comments 2

2012 Republican Party of Texas Report of Platform Committee

There are many comments which could be made about the above document; I find the ideological inconsistencies to be overt, particularly between the bounds of protecting individual liberties (deontological) versus banning actions because they are "detrimental to the fabric of society" (consequentialist). While I was a diligent student of Christianity, I can't recall where the Bible or reasoned analysis of Christian axioms yields a "God-given right to carry [a] firearm." I wonder what the appropriate course would be if data were to show that certain consequences of the right to carry a firearm were "detrimental to the fabric of society."

A few choice passages are being circulated in the blogoverse, e.g. the "Knowledge-Based Education" section and the section on homosexuality. As many have pointed out, the word "homosexuality" could be replaced with "interracial marriage" and be consistent with views in the zeitgeist that are now abhorrent but were common sixty years ago.

I find much of the document distressing not merely for its ideological content, but for the incompatibility of many of the views with compromise.

C • "We oppose the teaching of.. 4

To/from Alex's for an undeserved post-training dinner.