Training Log Archive: CleverSky

Orienteers hurt their ankles, cyclist break their collarbones, baseball pitchers injure their shoulders, tennis players have elbow problems, football linemen get concussions... and hang glider pilots break their arms. I don't think I have a broken arm, but my wrist is definitely hurting after today's trip to Ascutney. The thing is, I wasn't flying. We just went up there to trim some branches and take down the windsocks. I don't even know what I did, all I was doing was using loppers and a pole saw. I'm not in agony, but it's somewhat bothersome. So I'm icing it, and we'll see how it feels later.

C • wrist injury 1

Long course at Nobscot, I think I ended up 4th. Kind of sloppy, despite not pushing hard. My main problem was that I was using my new headlamp*, which does not work with my glasses when it come to map reading. The hatlamp has a "hot spot" that's right where the map is, and that's nice. This lamp has a pretty narrow spot, and because I need to look under my glasses to see the map, I have to hold the map kind of low, and there's no light there at all. If I hold it high enough to illuminate it, I can't even focus well enough through the lenses to read the control codes on the cluesheet. So in order to look at the map, I practically had to take my glasses off, which really cramped my style. I need to come up with a better plan if I want to continue using this light for night-O. Most likely I'll get a separate light for illuminating the map.

Lost time on #2 because I was halfway to #5 before I realized that there was a loop (#1 and #6 were the same control) annd I was going around it the wrong direction. Screwed up a few others in minor ways, largely because it was so inconvenient to look at the map. Took one fall when I tripped over a rock or root and went down on both hands -- it doesn't seem to have made my right wrist any worse.

*The new light looks like a Magicshine (itself a knockoff of "real" lights), but is actually a couple of levels of knockoff down. Got it from Amazon, for Iess than $18. Feels solidly built, and on this initial trial, it performed fine. Uses rechargeable (or disposable) Li-Ion batteries, which go into a compartment on the back of the head, and are very easily changed. There are three settings: pretty damn bright, reasonable, and blinding strobe (very useful on a bicycle in daylight if you want to be more easily noticed by motorists). I used the "reasonable" setting 95% of the time, and switched to "pretty damn bright" a few times when I was looking for a feature in open woods. I know there are snap-on beam spreaders that fit lights like this, and I'll probably get one, as the narrow spot is tighter than I really need.

Morning final check and control wakeup, west-central part of Bear Brook. Everything was fine except for one control. This had not been my primary vetting section, but I did go in to look at a dozen or so controls that Bob Lux either thought were particularly challenging or that he had some question about. In this case, he and Jim Arsenault had reportedly both put up streamers on different boulders. When I went there, I couldn't find any streamers (there were also other controls where streamers had gone missing, maybe nibbled by animals), so I put up a streamer myself. When I arrived, from a different direction than before, I came to my streamer, then saw the control some distance away. Looked to me like it was in the wrong place, so I hurried back to report that. Either way, I thought that the map was a litte shaky in that area.

After reporting my concerns, Jim sent Alar out with me to look at the control in question. Alar came in from a third direction, cruised right past the boulder with the control without even looking at it, and arrived at the same control that I had streamered, and we agreed that it should be moved, so we put it on the other boulder, and made sure it was very high and visible.

What I didn't realize at the time was that the same control had been on the Red course Saturday with no complaints. And Sunday, we did have a complaint, from Sharon, although she didn't go so far as to actually file a protest. Sharon got beaten by the mighty Gail, and maybe she was largely going through sour grapes, although she lost only 3.5 minutes on that control, not nearly enough to make the difference (although she would have won if the day was thrown out).

It's clear that the control couldn't have been in the right place both days, although it was definitely inside the circle both days. Now that I'm home and can zoom way in on the map in 0CAD and see things that I couldn't see on the 1:7500 paper version, it looks like I was probably wrong: the map is funky, but the original boulder is probably a better choice than the one that Alar and I picked.

C • control placement 1

Retrieving controls in the SW part of the map. I grabbed a trash bag in case any of my controls were water stops, and it turned out that five of the eight were. Takes a long time to pick up all the cups. The way we worked this was that Jim and I drove down past the start in his truck, and he went off on foot to pick up controls, while I rode his mountain bike with trailer further down the trail. Meanwhile, Ernst rode his mountain bike down the other side of the map, and went though the southernmost section picking up controls and left them by the bike, then went back through to pick up another batch on the way back to his bike. Then I loaded everything in the trailer and rode back to meet Jim. Except picking up the cups took me so long that Jim was done, and drove down the trail in his truck to look for me, and found me before I had gotten too far. (I had an awful lot of stuff in the trailer, what with all the empty jugs and the 15 or so stands, and it was tricky to get everything lashed down securely.) We threw the gear and the trailer in his truck, and rather than try to make room for the bike, I just rode it back to the finish (this was the kind of trail where you can go a lot faster on a bike than in a truck).

The riding before and after.