Training Log Archive: CleverSky

A little excursion with Phil and Nancy to investigate a control location and do some terrain enhancement. I think things should be quite fine, certainly fine enough.

Mt. Tom, Green quarantine training course, 4.6 km, 270 m. Phil said that he'd be surprised if I could beat his time, and I said I'd be very surprised. Like Phil, I had looked at the map and thought a little about routes, but then forgot almost all of it, other than my plan for getting to the last control. I went out pretty casually, and on the way to #1 I didn't feel like going downhill when the trail went down, so I did some sidehill contouring through loose basalt instead and still came out well below the control. Then on #2 I turned off from the main reentrant when I saw a knoll that looked good, but I guess it was too small to be on the map, so there was a bit of a detour and some hesitation there. So after that inauspicious start, there really wasn't much hope, but I did get my act together and navigated pretty well for most of the rest of the course. At some point I looked at my watch and things seemed to be going fairly well, and I wondered if I could break an hour. But then I saw the big climb to #9 and decided that wasn't going to happen. Nancy was on Brown, and I passed her fairly early on that leg. I was climbing better than I expected, and decided I needed something to slow me down. I spotted a 3-point deer shed, and that was just the thing, I carried it around the rest of the course. A little error on #10, too far south and I went for the knoll instead of the spur, which was obvious as soon as I looked at my map, so a little time lost there. Then out to the road as per my plan, and no problems the rest of the way, breaking an hour with breathing room. Well behind Ian, that's to be expected, but as for Phil, well... hmm, I wonder if I should substitute in Nancy's split for the Brown leg to give myself a bogus Brown time. :-)

C • Nice run! 7

Across the street, ahead of The Dim. Cool and damp, and I didn't have that much energy. I went out on the Landlocked Esker trail, with the notion of trying again to get through from the Powerline trail parallel to the town line, and it worked much better this time. Further north, higher ground, sparser laurel, and I latched onto what you could almost imagine was some kind of faint trail. Not really manageable on a bike, at least in its current state, but not too bad on foot. Looks like I may have stepped just barely over the line into Townsend.

Started out on trails across the street, ending up on Seaver Rd., then I took that up to Tyler. Part of the motivation for this was to check out Tyler Rd. on a bike that was appropriate for the way the pavement was the last time I was there, and I was pleased to find that it's been repaved at some point in the last few years, so it's safe to go back on a road bike. I also spotted a trail off the west side of Lunenburg Rd. just a bit south of Old City Rd. that looks like it might connect up with the woods part of Old City Rd., so that's worth checking out at some point, it would be the closest access to Willard Brook.

Across the street, a bit cold and pretty windy (you know it's windy when it's windy down in the woods). The plan was down to the snowmobile bridge, Mystery Blazes to the Powerline trail, then up the Horse trail and try to cut through westward parallel to the town line to the Powerline trail again, then the Landlocked Esker trail back to Mystery Blazes and cut through to the beer cooler, across the Mulpus, around to the Lane trail and then home the normal way. That mostly worked out. Cutting through turned out to be not as wet as I had feared, but it was pretty laurely ans slow. Don't know that this will be interesting to try again, though there is room to go further north and I could see if that helps. I did bypass the worst of the flooded sections of the trail, but it was hardly worth it.

Down to the lake and back up through Woodlands Village. Cool morning, and this was about all I had motivation for after the last coupe of days. Weather supposed to get very weathery later, so it was good to do this in the sparkling morning.

An effort like what I did yesterday leaves me surprisingly wiped. You'd maybe expect that if I was getting old, but if that were happening, my hair would probably have started to turn white or something. For comparison, it was probably equivalent to a typical daily run for Swampfox. After he was done skiing.

C • SF 4

Another nice day, another spin to the east side, through Shirley and Townsend. This was a bit of an Escher experience, where it seemed like I was doing a lot of downhill, and eventually I'd have to pay the piper, but I was scrolling ahead in my mind, and couldn't think of any really big climbs. Ultimately it was just a pleasant rolling route.

WBW. A beautiful day, on the weekend, temp 60+ F, and solid blue sky. Pretty breezy, so a bike ride wasn't the most appealing, and I opted instead for an ambitious trail run, basically hitting all of the major sections of gnarly singletrack west of the road. Some of this was very familiar territory, some places I'd maybe been to only once or twice, some I hadn't been on in a number of years, and one section in the northeast was a trail I had never noticed before, across from the end of Trilogy East. I suspect it was put in by the MTB crowd fairly recently, it's not very packed down yet. The woods there are quite nice. When I finally popped out on the road, I'd had enough, and walked the rest back to the car. Right hip a bit sore, and my toe knuckles were complaining a bit, but no falls and no ankle twists.

Saw a few people, mostly in the Pearl Hill area, though there was also a guy with a dog running on Trilogy. The weirdest thing was seeing a guy pretty far into the woods carrying a skateboard.