Training Log Archive: CleverSky

Headed over to Mom's to do some prep work before the storm, rather than going to the Cape to go hang gliding with the pilot gang. Among other things, she had gotten another load of firewood delivered, and I brought some inside, put some in the shed, and stacked some in the normal wood pile, leaving a smaller heap that was at least out of the way for the plow guy.

Not that it mattered, because the wires came down in the driveway and the plow guy couldn't drive up. I lost power for just about 48 hours, and Mom is over 2.5 days in the dark right now. The snow depth on my deck the morning after the storm was 16", and I was able to get the snowblower started and clear a path out, there wasn't much shoveling needed at Mom's, and Stephen and Nancy dealt with their place -- we just let the rest melt, so this doesn't really count as the first round of snow dealings.

Added GPS tracks for the corn maze races -- worked reasonably well.

Well, here I am, defending corn maze Sprint champion and a member of the red group on the Classic. I had nightmares about the event last night, in which I had to go back to my car for something, and wound up missing my start. Although I was allowed to run the Classic late, I missed out on the Sprint entirely. Clearly, I'm under pressure here, and I should probably have some sort of goal. Matching my performance from last year is probably unrealistic, so I have come up with something to strive for that I think I at least stand a chance for:

Beat Phil.

C • Especially if Phil repeats ... 1

CMOUSA Classic, Mike's Maze. Hard to say exactly how many I spiked, and some of the mistakes weren't so bad (turning in one block too early, or having to circle around looking for the entrance to a letter), but in some other cases I went down some long dead end and then backed out. Two of my routes went along the west side of the map, which turns out to have never been the optimal choice. A pretty medicre performance, but as Peter said, you read the results from the top down for time, or from the bottom up for integrity. Still, I'm not without transgressions, and in particular I recall one spot on the way from 16 to 17 where I found myself looking down a long clean corridor that I intended to run to its end, and then have to start zigging and zagging, but I was surprised to find myself in Noah's ascot, an extra trail apparently having appeared in the terrain.

The GPS track turned out substantially better than I expected, although I should have reconfigured it for 1 second recording (I normally have it set for 3 second). I'll post it later, it looks like my actual route can be discerned pretty well.

CMOUSA Sprint. Third place, which isn't too bad, really. Caught up to Ali at the fourth control, I think. The only real error was at the last control, when she went to the last Classic control, and I was prepared for this, already having done the opposite in the first race, but the zigging and zagging cost me a few seconds. I got around both races without glasses, which was okay, although there may have been a few times when they woudl have been useful (like determining whether a flash of white through the cornstalks was a control or a sign). I think this might be a slightly different experience earlier in the year, when the leaves on the cornstalks are more lush and the ability to see through the maze walls is lower. I'll also note that although the Mike's Maze designs last year and this year are excellent, and very well suited to CMO, they are pretty different from typical corn mazes which tend to have a lot more corn and less total trail length, with substantially thicker walls. Earlier mazes at Mike's were more like the mainstream ones.

CMO control pickup.

US Long Champs, Pine Hill, M45. A much cleaner run, demonstrating that I'm capable of actually doing this when navigation is not particulalry required. This was basically a ski-O course stretched around the lakes. This isn't a complaint, it's just what had to be done in order to hold a meet like this in close proximity to Boston. I'll be interested to see what the splits analysis says about how many misses I had. Of the ones that I'm counting, only one really amounted to much time loss, and even that one wasn't too bad. I wound up decidedly worse in terms of medal position (in part because Swampfox moved into the category and Balter didn't mispunch today), and maybe a similar spot overall, but I did edge out a few people who got me yesterday. I'm pretty far back in terms of time, and that's really mostly a matter of running speed. In M35, I would have had Silver.

Well, splits analysis agrees that I lost time on four controls, but not on which four. There was one that I counted as a miss (#6) that just squeaked by, and another that I had not counted (#22) where I lost enough time on hesitation and suboptimal route choice that it does show up. On a more sobering note, I lost more time than 14 of the 20 people ahead of me, so it wasn't all just running speed. Cutting my errors in half would have moved me up five places (two places in M45). An interesting feature of this trail-heavy course (and perhaps to some extent a feature of the current state of the various competitors) is that the M20s creamed the old guys. Fastest two times on the course were by M20s, and my time would have put me 2/3 of the way down the field in that category.

69 controls in three days is quite a lot, as these things go.

On the plus side, I appear to have run a faster per km time than any of the M50s (with them on a shorter course).