Training Log Archive: CleverSky

In honor of the fact that there are people Jukoling tonight, I decided to go out for a run in the dark. All was fine until I looked for my headlamp, and it wasn't where I expected. You might not guess it from th wy my house looks, but I'm actually quite good at keeping track of where my stuff is. I hunted around for a while, checking all but one place. Unfortunately, I did not know where the one remaining place was. Eventually I gave up and dragged out the hatlamp. It's anybody's guess when I last charged that up, but it sure wasn't recently. I also grabbed a spare flashlight just in case. When I got to the parking spot, my GPS watch was unresponsive. It was displaying the time, but the time was not moving, and pressing buttons had no effect. Eventually I held down the both of two main buttons for a long time, and that seemed to reboot it.

I'm pretty pleased with the fact that I can go for a run in the dark in the woods like this. I was thinking about that while I was running, and the fact that some of my orienteering friends probably think this is nuts, and maybe all of my non-orienteering friends feel the same way. And it occurred to me that we don't have a term for those people. Sailors supposedly call non-sailors "landlubbers", hang glider pilot call non-pilots "wuffos" (a term that I'm pretty sure was appropriated from skydiving), etc. But we don't have a semi-disparaging term that I can think of for people who don't have the skills of map-reading and moving through terrain. And I kind of like the fact that we don't, seems like we're less exclusionary.

By the time I was finishing, I suppose the lamp was probably getting pretty dim, but my eyes had been gradually adusting, so I was fine. I think it was one day past full moon, but summer moons aren't good for much, especially under a tree canopy. I had no trouble following the trail, even though it's barely a trail in a lot of places, and my time being only eight minutes slower than when I did this loop in daylight isn't too bad.

(About halfway there on the drive over, the one remaining place occurred to me, and when I checked when I got home, sure enough.)

Groton to Pepperell and back(!) on the rail trail. It occurred to me on the way home from work that I had the unicycle and a chance of clothes in the car, so despite the fact that what I really wanted to do was take a nap, I stopped and went for a ride. It looked like there had been a thunderstorm earlier, and there were gust fronts blowing through, but I didn't get wet. Only two dismounts, the first at a road crossing on the way up and the second at the turnaround -- I did the entire trip back nonstop. By the time I reached my car, I had absolutely no remaining desire to do any more unicycling today whatsoever.