Training Log Archive: CleverSky

Car retrieval from Ayer, on the Incubus. Nancy flew to Italy last night, but because she had to be at the airport in the middle of the day, she drove herself there and left the car in central parking. I drove to the train station and took the commuter rail to Boston, sprung her car, and drove home, so I had to go this morning to fetch the car that I left behind last night. Now there are three cars in my driveway, and this morning I stopped by the dealership to find out when my new car is due in (about another month to wait).

C • New car 1

CMO Champs Sprint, Mike's Maze, 14th. A little stressed and underprepared because I was helping out with registration and such. No errors of any consequence that I can recall; the GPS trace doesn't capture all of the subtleties of the route, but I think the worst was a few steps down a wrong path. Split #1 is to the remote start triangle (map memory to where Peter was handing out maps). The course was forked, and in looking at the maps in the return pile, I tried to remember which order I had done the controls in, but I was wrong (#7 and #8 were swapped, which worked because there was a choke point to get into that section).

splits

CMO Champs Classic, Mike's Maze, 13th. About the same, no real errors. I should maybe oughta count the start triangles as controls on these, since we had to navigate there, but whatever.

splits

5 points on the Trail-O: 1 for being vaguely in the vicinity on one balloon, and 4 for taking less than a minute to make my decisions. Had I spent longer up on the platform, it's doubtful that my guesses would have been any different. I had the drone with me, but couldn't come up with a way to use it that would make sense with the time limit, seemed like I'd need to count the time that it was in the air plus the time that I spent looking at the video (and maybe the time in between) because I don't have live video capability, and I'd be way over the 5-minute time limit. I might have been able to use it effectively by going to the SW corner of the maze and just using it to do the three down there, but that would be a decision based on knowing roughly where they were, based on a view from the platform. With live video, it might have been possible to fly the drone to the locations within the time, but my piloting skills are rusty, and it still might have been a challenge to transfer the location information to the paper while piloting. So this format was a pretty good way to get the drones out of the picture (though other tools like rangefinders might be useful), and it also made the Trail-O more compact and organized than in the past.

CMO Champs, Mike's Maze, something like 10th place I think. The handicapping method gave me 3 skips out of the 29 controls, but I opted for the crummy flashlight from Big Lots (instead of my headlamp) in exchange for three more skips. I think the three skips saved me more time than the light cost me, pretty clearly. I didn't agonize over the options too much, skipping 1, 2, 5, 6, 8, and 15. Might not have been optimal, but I think it was fine. No serious mistakes, though there were a couple of times when I briefly lost track of where I was, and due to the cloudy sky it was possible to be off on direction by 90 degrees, but in those cases I recovered pretty quickly. The distance on these is probably a bit underreported, because of the GPS not capturing enough points in the chicanes.

splits

Control pickup, with my headlamp this time (needed my hands free for carrying controls, got the nine controls in the remote H section. Stopped the watch late, so there's extra stuff on the GPS track.

Forgot to mention a couple of details: although I grabbed my bag of orienteering clothes before heading to the event, the smaller bag that usually lives inside it didn't seem to be in there, so I didn't have a compass (no big deal) or an SI card (so I grabbed a rental stick). I have two pairs of orienteering glasses, but my newer pair was sitting on my kitchen table because I had adapted them for eclipse viewing and hadn't put them back yet. So I pulled out the older pair, which had been showing signs of surface corrosion from years of exposure to pesrpiration, and it turned out that it went deeper, because they broke in half when I took them out of the case. So I did all of this orienteering with no glasses, which was fine for this venue.

Two other notable items:
This was the first time I've orienteered in MA all year, though I've orienteered in six other states and one province.
This was the first time in over 1400 races that I've ever orienteered on September 2. That leaves September 4 as the only missing date between March 13 and December 15. Alas, the only orienteering opportunity I'm aware of on Labor Day this year is in Wyoming, too far. There are 35 dates remaining; how many will I manage to get?

Apparently daylight and familiarity make a significant difference, this was within a minute of doing it on foot (though I did skip a short out-n-back that I did by mistake the first time and deliberately the second). There are some spots where I still didn't bring enough skillz to get past the rocks and roots, so that slowed me down by means of a number of dabs and stops, but the bike has a definite speed advantage when it's smooth going. I'm thinking that maybe this was laid out to be done in the opposite direction, because it feels like I'm doing a lot of obstacles the hard way, so I might try turning this around. I almost did the esker section at the end cleanly, though I chose to dismount instead of trying to jump a large log that was oblique to the trail, and I also came to a complete and sudden stop at one point when my handlebar end caught a tree (but I stayed upright, maneuvered around it, and kept going). Front tire was too soft, so handling was pretty squirmy.

The algorithm still mystifies. First time on the bike it called it orienteering. Then when running, it called it running. Now on the bike again, at the same pace as when I was running, taking no splits, it still says orienteering. It's possible that I confuse it by using "pedaling" for three activities with very different speeds. Speed distribution may be a factor; although running and [road/unicycle] pedaling are done at a speed that's either steady or that changes gradually, mountain biking and orienteering have more stops.

When I got home and was taking off my shorts, I was surprised to find my wallet in the pocket. I don't remember putting it in my pocket when I was done, which means I may have done the whole ride with it in there. If so, I'm really lucky I didn't lose it.

Wapack south of Binney Hill Road, with Nancy. This allowed her to pick up a short section of the Wapack she hadn't been on, and for me, the northernmost obscure bit of the Midstate Trail. It's a little vague where it goes, but our best guess is that it starts at this rock, heads south, then turns left (east) at the junction and right (south) at the next junction, going over Nutting Ledges and to the top of Watatic, then down the main trail to the big trail and thence to the parking lot.

Travel was slowed considerably by the blackberries. The thorns weren't an issue, it was rather that Nancy kept stopping to eat them, estimating at one point that she had eaten enough to make a pie (I don't think she was anywhere close). I had a few, and was also delighted to find a few highbush blueberries that still had a bit of fruit, unexpected at this late date.