Training Log Archive: CleverSky

With a big meet crew gang, walking from the parking area back and forth to the two start locations at Bear Brook to check them out.

Vetting control locations at Bear Brook. It went... not exactly awesomely. Didn't get as much done as I had hoped, but my hopes exceeded my expectations.

Northfield-Turkey Hill-Highland-Holman down to the bridge, then back up and home. A bit off my game tonight, with several stops and not much elegance getting started. Walked down the steep turn onto Highland again, and also didn't make it up the steepest part of the climb to the house, though I did get back on at the neighbor's driveway and finish up. I was able to ride the whole way down and up Holman, though with one stop most of the way down.

Hudson Highlander XVII

Got off to a fine start even before I started, when I realized that I had neglected to grab my O-shoes (they were in my car, but we drove down in Charlie’s). Stephen had a couple of my old pairs of shoes with him, but one of them I wasn’t sure still had 26 km left in them, and the other I was pretty sure had a history of giving me blisters, so I just went with the lightweight running shoes that I had on. Not very good for sidehilling, and pretty bad on damp bare rock, but I ended up with no blisters, no ailing toenails, and my soles weren’t even very sore, so I guess that turned out pretty well.

My second problem was that I was going to the bathroom when everybody headed off toward the start, and I was far enough behind them that I was concerned that I didn’t know where they had gone and might be out of luck. I decided to scoot over to Seven Lakes Drive and take a peek, and I spotted the stragglers way up ahead, which gave me enough time to catch up. And before we started, we got a picture of the half-dozen who had completed all of the previous Highlanders.

[pic]

#1: When I first looked at my map, I thought it was blank, but then when I saw the one control, I laughed out loud. Brilliant! Started out on my own chosen route, and had several people close behind me. At one point I knew I had to go left to stay on the trail I wanted, but I wasn’t really reading the map very well, and place I turned wasn’t really a trail at all, but that didn’t stop a bunch of people from following me. We worked our way back to the trail, but now I had lost track of how far along we were, so I was happy to let Pavi pass me and I just followed her. She got us to the E-W trail before the control, but we weren’t as far W as I had imagined. Jeff was there and had intended to go around the E side of the hill, but we went around the W. I ended up in the front again, with a good crowd in tow, and we caught Sam Levitin, who was pretty surprised to see us. Somehow we ended up all the way down by the road (some trails must have changed), and it was easy to hop up through the woods onto the hill and to the control, where I had my one and only cup of water provided by the meet organization.

#2: Jeff was gravitating toward the upper set of cliffs, and Hilly kept asking, “Isn’t it down to the right?”, which was where Pavi was headed. We talked Jeff into it, and there was a crowd at the control.

#3: Out in front on my own, no trouble finding it, though the features on this 1:15000 map look bigger on the ground than I was expecting. Latter-day overmapped 1:10000 stuff has ruined me.

#4: Fought through some crud to get to the trail, turned left, and realized that the trail went nowhere useful, so I just went straight at the control. Passed a group of about five cadets on the way, and spiked the control nicely, well ahead of them. This aslo put a big gap between me and the group that included Peggy and Bernie.

#5: A little to the right, found it no problem.

#6: I knew there was less blueberry to the left, so I contoured around that way, although on the way to the white woods I got myself really caught for a bit, my ankle was trapped and my weight was such that I couldn’t move at all.

#7: Went by Glen, who was looking for #4 and was a little far. A cadet was gradually pulling away from me on this leg.

#8: Easy direct trail route, I turned off at the right spot and spiked the circled boulder, but there was no control. Scooted over and saw the steep drop on the left, then I saw a bigger boulder ahead and checked it. It had the control, though the circle was elsewhere. No real time lost.

#9: Contoured around to the left.

#10: Down, down, oof, oof, down, along the bottom of the slope, out to the road, ran along the shoulder looking for the boulder, got past the cliff and saw that it was supposed to be above the cliff, so went back up and in. Found a befuddled David Onkst and led him to the control.

#11: David decided that his forte was speed, so pulled away from me on the way to the map exchange. Here I had the bottle of sports drink that I had sent out. Had I only known...

#12: Shortly after leaving the map exchange, I saw a couple of pieces of paper on the ground. About a minute later, David was coming back toward me with an empty map case in his hand. I then proceeded onto the grueling, inexorable climb that I thought at the time was a little tough. I went by an unmapped trail intersection where I had to kind of turn, but I spotted some streamers that led me through it. A couple of cadets passed, then David (after he missed the aforementioned turn, then another cadet). Finally Jeremy Colgan went tearing past. A little while later, I caught up to the last cadet, who was sort of standing still and looking at his map. He asked if we were going the right way, and I said yes, I has just passed some streamers. So we ran on and on, with the cadet pulling away, then I heard Jeremy up ahead asking teh cadet if if J-J was still back there. The trail was starting to degenerate into nothing, and Jeremy noted that we were now a long way from the Palisades. I said yeah, looks like we must have missed this turn, and we doubled back. We went even further than Glen did, about 1.2 km. They pulled away from me on the way back, so I was on my own when I hit the next turn, and missed that one as well, by about 300 meters. By the time I got to control #12, I had run an unnecessary 3 extra km, and had slipped from 18th to 36th place. I had been 5 minutes ahead of Pavi and was now 22 minutes behind her, and my 12-14 minute lead over Peggy, Bernie, Jeff, and Hilly had become a 20 minute deficit. Split analysis says I lost 25 minutes (on the whole trail run), but it looks more like 37 minutes to me. I blame a lousy trail map (sorry Alan) and lousy streamering (sorry Joe), but in the end it was up to me to get myself through it. This is the kind of mistake that pays dividends, too, because that extra distance had worn me out. And there was more to come...

#13: From here on there was no trail, just streamers. Mostly red streamers. Which I can't really see well. And it went though a bunch of laurel and stuff. I didn't take long for me to get to a place where I couldn't see where to go next, and had too wait for a couple of cadets to show up and lead me through it. I did my part to help find ribbons as best I could, but we were all just walking and hunting. When we finally got near the underpass, we lost the trail entirely, and I just said screw it, I know the tunnel has to be down there, and I went down to it and through. Since the control was a water stop, I ate a gel, and as I was punching, I said to the three guys right behind me, "I'm about to be really pissed off". Because I could see that the four gallon jugs were empty. And one of them said, "Oh, I bet #15 is out of water, too".

#14: Hopped onto the ride as soon as I could and followed it to the control, while the others stayed lower. Got there together.

#15: Didn't see those guys again, as I took the straight intermittent trail through the blueberry and over the hill, no problem. As predicted, there was no water.

#16: Should have taken the spur, but instead I took the imaginary trail, which was awful. The steep climb up to the control wasn't too bad, but it was a slow route choice.

#17: Pretty much straight, through a lot of blueberry. Missed at the end, went to the cliff to the west, but the time loss was negligible.

#18: Easy.

#19: Saw a cadet up ahead of me at the control, but it turned out he was still on his way to #17.

#20: Wanted to be careful, though it might be tricky, but it was a cinch.

#21: The new sapling growth cut down the visibility a lot and made me pretty anxious, but it opened up near the end, and I had a clean spike (though I initially went for some old faded ribbons on the other end of the cliff). Saw a pack of five people hunting around the next knoll down, and one woman from the group came running up the hill. I was in no condition for uphill running, and figured they might all pass me before the finish.

F: I hear there were streamers, but I went straight for the dam and might have gotten myself out of the view of the pack. As I remembered, the spillway was crossable, but then I had to face the mantle to get up on the other side. I still had enough strength to do it, though I banged my knee a bit in the process (no harm done). Managed to keep up enough of a jog the rest of the way in to hold off my pursuers. I had been as far down as 36th place, but I managed to claw my way back up to 28th. Ah well, 17 down, in any case.

C • side trips 1