Training Log Archive: CleverSky

Down Holman, trail along the brook, back up and out to Gilchrest and home, In The Dark. About half pavement and half packed snow, another warmish evening (mid 30s F). So much nicer to be in the woods than on roads. Saw a couple of deer.

C • streak 1

J-J's Ten (plus one) Memorable Orienteering Experiences List, #3

Whitehorse Gap, Georgia, 7/1/2004 (Bubbagoat)
I had gone down to northern Georgia for the Convention, not because I like conventions, but because I had been asked to teach a mapping seminar. (I hate conventions.) The class went pretty well, and we had good facilities, including a basemap that we were able to do training on. The base had been made into a finished map that was being used for the convention, and for one session we went on a map walk with Sam Smith, who had done the fieldwork, where he explained to the class the mapping decisions that he had made. I lagged behind, bewildered, because the map in my hand bore little to no resemblance to the terrain. It was terrible. This was gold mining terrain, unusual in the US, but the map was bizarre.
One of the races was the Bubbagoat, a Billygoat-style race held in the South. One of the traditions that they have at this event is that if you run in bib overalls, you get a fifteen-minute head start. Knowing this, I had commissioned Jeanne Walsh to make me a pair of bib overalls out of denim-colored dacron, and they came out great, looking quite realistic. When I showed up at the start and asked for my head start, the meet director, came over, took a feel of the fabric, and said nothin’ doin’. I negotiated then, how about a fifteen-yard head start?, and he said okay. I positioned myself fifteen yards ahead of the (small) pack, and when we flipped our maps, I saw that I had been boondoggled, because he had set us up facing the wrong way and I was fifteen yards behind. Served me right.
Bill Cusworth was my main competition, and he got ahead pretty quickly. Everybody else disappeared as well, and soon I was alone. I have a vague memory that it was either really humid or raining or something. For the next couple of hours, I was struggling through nasty terrain in unfavorable conditions with a crummy map. The route shown on the map looks a lot better than I remember, I felt like I was losing huge amounts of time, and was getting pretty disgusted. We were apparently allowed two skips; for the controls that I did, I measured the course at a little over 8 km.
Finally, I staggered to the finish, exhausted. Bill was there, and a few meet officials, and I was probably grumbling about how tough it had been. They chuckled, not seeming all that sympathetic. At some point I asked what place I had gotten, figuring that the other finishers had gone back to their cars, and I was told, um, you won. Huh? What about Bill? Bill said that he had quit, early on, I think.
Not a very good run. But first place, how ‘bout that?

C • Mapping 4

I decided that for the new year I want to try and have some kind of loggable exercise every day for as long as I can manage. But today I had a headache that I couldn't shake, and I also strained my right lower back sometime in the past couple of days (don't know if it was shoveling or hang gliding or both).

But it's pretty pathetic to have my streak be only a single day.

Warm evening (mid 30s F), so no hat or gloves needed, just a shirt, jacket, O pants, and a headlamp (In the Dark, natch). I also wore these weird shoe lights that I bought a few years ago but had never used, but it was really quiet out there, I saw only two cars. And just the most minimal around-the-block loop that I have available.

Gotta start again somewhere.

J-J's Ten (plus one) Memorable Orienteering Experiences List, #2

Gay City State Park, Connecticut, 5/17/1998 (Troll Cup)
(This one is really petty, but I did a pretty good job.)
I was living in Colorado at the time, but making trips back to New England several times a year. One of these trips coincided with the Troll Cup, but unfortunately I got very sick a few days before the event. I was staying at my parents’ house, and my mother urged me to not go. But I wanted to see the new map that Clint had made, so I compromised and switched from M21 to M-Open Brown. And I went out the first day, coughing and sneezing and wheezing, but I walked every step, never ran even once.
The wisdom in those days was that the old people on Brown were not fast runners, but they were excellent navigators. I was therefore puzzled at the results, which showed me in second place, behind only Al Smith in M65 by about 14 minutes, with Dennis Porter (in my category) 97 seconds down on me. Where were all these other excellent navigators? It wasn’t like I outran them, anybody could have gone at my walking pace. (Things are different these days.)
Sunday was a chase start, and my head cold had improved quite a bit overnight, so I felt like I could run. This being the Troll Cup, it was a chase start, and Peter Gagarin looked at the start list and the course length (4.6 km), and said, you know, you might be able to catch Al (Peter was no fan of his). I decided he was right, and decided to give it a shot.
Catching Al was going to require making no mistakes, and if I pulled that off, I wouldn’t see him until close to the end. Looking at my route, I’d say I did a good job, the only thing that I’d do different would be to leave the trails earlier on #3 and approach the control directly from the south. But it was good enough, somewhere between #6 and #7 (I think), I spotted Al. Easy enough to reel that old man in, and then I stopped looking at my map and just followed him around, a step or two behind, which clearly had him a bit rattled. Right on his tail as we came around the south end of the lake (that Steve Fluegel famously made the cover of O/NA by swimming across), so when we hit the sand I turned on the afterburners and left him in the dust.
A mean thing to do. But my only regret was that PG wasn’t there at the finish to see it.

Dragging my hang glider and harness up to the Talcott launch from the gate, on the cart, with Sam helping out for the steep parts. Decided at the last moment to put on spiked O-shoes, which was good, because the footing was quite icy and treacherous, both on the hike up and on launch. Charlie showed up after we were mostly set up and helped us launch, which was great (we hiked around a bit to warm up while we waited for the too-strong wind to subside). The air was strong and kind of trashy, and the sun was getting low by the time we launched, so we didn't fly for overly long, but it got the year off to an early start.

J-J's Ten (plus one) Memorable Orienteering Experiences List, #1

Inspired by PG's Top Ten List, I decided to go though my own orienteering history and pick out ten notable races. I actually came up with eleven, but the first one is kind of just a footnote (with no map), and another is a race I didn't technically run, so it's close enough to ten. And they're not necessarily my best results (though some are), but they feel like they were significant events, thus the title of the list.

We start with...

Some Army Base, probably Massachusetts, 10/20/1979
I don’t have the map from my first point-to-point orienteering course. I had done a group score-O a year earlier in high school, then in my freshman year in college I signed up for a seminar called Land Navigation, taught by the ROTC department. It was in that class that I learned all the important things about orienteering from Sergeant Bell, like plotting coordinates, intersection, resection, modified resection, etc.
We had two field trips in that class. The first one was to some army base, where we were piggybacking onto an event that the ROTC upperclassmen were putting on for the plebes (or whatever you call them at MIT) and I don’t even know where (I fell asleep on the bus). Seems logical that it would have been Devens, but I’ve looked all over Devens on maps and GoogleEarth, and I can’t find anywhere that matches what I remember. When we got there, there was a place where 100 m was marked out on the ground, and they had us calibrate our pace counts. Then they handed out compasses, nice big army lensatic ones. But based on my experience in high school, I had gone out the day before and bought myself a Silva Polaris.
They told us to form groups of three, and I was with Scott Minneman, who lived in my dorm, and a guy named Ed. The advice from Sergeant Bell was that one of us should read the map, one should read the compass, and the third should pace count. I had the fancy compass, and Scott said he’d handle the map, so Ed agreed to do the counting. We were the third group in line, and we watched the first two groups heading out across the field in front of us, each with one person burying his nose in the map, another staring intently at the compass, and the third blindly counting paces.
Scott and I looked at the map, and it was obvious to us that the first control was on the hill that we could see at the far end of the field. We nodded to each other, yeah, we got this, and Ed looked at us and said, you guys aren’t planning to run are you? We looked back at him and said, of course we are.
The field had a bunch of ridges in it, perpendicular to our direction of travel, that I think weren’t shown on the map. When they said go, Scott and I took off, with Ed starting out pacing 1, 2, 3, 4, hey, wait for me! We crested the first rise and realized that this was a shooting range and the ridges had concrete drop-offs on the back side with machines behind them for raising targets. So we detoured to the left side of the field, ran along the edge, and got to the control on the hill just as the first of the two groups ahead of us was cruising past it.
The course was maybe something like a Yellow, I don’t know what the length was, but there were five controls. The map was a B&W slightly marked up USGS, with things like trails and stone walls added. In the middle of the course we stopped because we thought we should be at the control, having attacked from the end of a stone wall. One of the cadets who was running the event, and who was stationed in the woods to provide assistance, came over and said, here, you must be lost, let me help you. I quickly realized that the wall wasn’t mapped quite right, it was either longer or shorter than the map showed, and we grabbed the map back from him and went to the control.
We crushed that course. Sprinting in to the finish, we slammed our punchcard (actually a card that we had to write letters on) down on the table, and the cadets in charge of the finish said, oh, giving up? We said no, we’re not giving up, we’re done! They looked at the card, and realized that we were done, and they seemed astonished.
At the following week’s class, Sergeant Bell congratulated everyone on kicking the cadets’ butts. Yeah. It wasn’t everyone, it was me and Scott, with Ed in tow. And I thought, yeah, this is fun, I think I’d like to do a lot more of it.

Snow dealings, round 4a: my mailbox. This was preceded by clearing the driveway (~30 min?), which I was very grateful that the snowblower was able to handle, because this white stuff is as dense as it gets, a mixture of snow, sleet, freezing rain, and regular rain. It's above freezing now, but I didn't want to take a chance of this stuff turning solid. It was considerably harder to blow the plow snow, so I just went after the stuff across the street with a shovel.

C • I don't miss those days 1

Snow dealings, round 4b: Nancy's driveway. It was dense, but it was thin, maybe 2" at most of fully saturated glop. Between the two of us, it wasn't too bad, and we basically got the whole thing down to pavement.

I expected that when I looked back at my training for 2019, it would be down from recent years, but that wasn't the case. Up from the 2018 dip, and more or less on par with a half-dozen or so years preceding that, in terms of time and distance. The most orienteering in the time I've been keeping this log, an okay amount of running, and a bit more hiking than usual. (Note that the "orienteering" category includes course setting, of which there was a decent amount in preparing for the Older Dash.) No serious physical problems other than my right ankle folding over a number of times. Ow ow ow, but no big deal.

I'm unranked! Two days on Blue (West Point) for an unofficial 59.18, which I will note is higher than anyone as old as I am (granted, not many people of my advanced age ran Blue). And only one day on Red (Ansonia). Plus a day of A-meet course setting at Gunstock.

No new dates added, but one new state (Arkansas). Looking forward, there's a chance of an additional state and maybe as many as six new dates in 2020, but we'll have to see how it goes (at least one new date is pretty much a given). Two first place finishes this year (at the Ratlum summer picnic), five seconds, and one third. My 29th place in the Billygoat was about typical, but my 17th in the Highlander was my best since 2007; I was pretty pleased with how well I managed to keep going at the end of that one. 10th in the Traverse was my best since 2011 (helped no doubt by reduced attendance due to the wretched weather). One DSQ (missed a control on the Long course in the corn at Mike's Maze). As noted earlier, I passed the 1500 meets and 2400 hours marks.

This year also had travel as a highlight. Nancy and I were in the Canary Islands when 2019 came in, and shortly after that I pushed my furthest south travel point from Miami all the way to Cape Horn on a trip to Argentina and Chile (though Miami is still the closest place the equator that I've ever stood), and in May we went to the Azores (those two trips both thanks to Nancy's travel arrangement skills).

Strolling around World's End Reservation with Nancy and Capone. There's an orienteering map of this place, made by I think Bill Jameson, and I went to the first meet there back in June of '87. I think there was only one more meet there, due in large part to the fact that, as I remember it, the place was wall to wall poison ivy if you ever left the trails. The course I did back then was 22 controls in 5.9 km. Now I'll grant that December is very different from June, but I saw few signs of anything that looked like poison ivy. It's possible that they're managing the property differently and have managed to give it a major setback (they are haying the fields these days), but I think the major problem with having any O meets there at this point would be the parking situation. The lot can hold a decent number of cars, but even in late December, it was packed and we had to wait for a space (it was a very nice day). Might be that it would work for a mid-week event, or if you could schedule something on a day when you were sure it would be heavy rain.