Training Archive: SwampfoxIn the 7 days ending 2008-03-01:
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Saturday Mar 1 | ||
| biking 1:11:00 [3] | |
| Road debut for the year. Really mild out, and windy, too. How windy? Enough. | ||
| skiing 1:01:00 [3] | |
| Soft snow, spring conditions, few skiers out in the late afternoon. Maybe the ski crowd stayed home to cheer the Cowboys on in a successful effort against Utah? | ||
| run 51:00 [3] | |
| Lots of sub-morons were zooming around up in the hills, identifiable by style of driving, velocity, time of day, and vehicle type. I think today they were concentrating their efforts on road sign destruction, a perpetual favored sub-moron activity. At least one sub-moron was less successful, as evidenced by two tow trucks exiting the forest together, with the sub-moron vehicle borne on the flat bed of one of the tow trucks.
Quite a fine day for the trifecta. Colder weather and maybe some snow is on the way in now, so tomorrow will be, at the least, different. | ||
| Note | |
| The week isn't over yet, but I am tempted to declare an early winner for "Best Thing of the Week", which would be a new single from none other than, omg, the B-52s. Wow! It looks like a new album is on the way, not quite 19 years after the incredible "Cosmic Thing". I'd let those B-52 girls sing my boat any day they wanted! | ||
Friday Feb 29 | ||
| run 36:00 [3] | |
| Lots of mud out on the the trails in The Flats--a spring melt is underway. | ||
| skiing 1:42:00 [3] | |
| More spring-like conditions, though there were only a few re-frozen ruts at the end of the day, and for the most part the trails were in quite good shape. And, as is usual for this part of the season, quite fast by the late afternoon. | ||
| biking 44:00 [2] | |
Thursday Feb 28 | ||
| run 44:00 [2] | |
| There's a huge puddle of meltwater out on the North Prairie that is sure to draw the sub-morons like flies, as soon as they discover it and word gets out.
While I was running I was thinking some about taxes, and how many people might cheat on their taxes a little bit (or a lot of bit.) I don't have any idea, but I'd guess it's probably not a trivial number. It's not so hard to understand how someone whose bank account is all tapped out and has a family to take care might get a little creative with their taxes, if they have the chance, rather than write out a check. It's a lot harder to understand why the truly wealthy are sometimes so willing to cheat on their taxes though. And while I was thinking about that, I saw a Plan B box lying on the ground. That made me wonder if there might be some new trend in contraceptive practices up on the North Prairie. Maybe couples are going up there just intending to, you know, hold hands or whatever, but just in case the moment turns a little hotter and heavier, you bring along a Plan B packet? Well, you just never know. It could have all been the wind carrying that box over from some other point miles away. | ||
| C • theory 2 | ||
| C • Did they find it? 2 | ||
| skiing 1:27:00 [3] | |
| biking 1:00:00 [2] | |
Wednesday Feb 27 | ||
| skiing 1:30:00 [3] | |
| Looked like it snowed a good bit while I was gone, with the trails all plump with new layers of fresh Wyoming snow. Another skier told me the most recent snow had been from an 8" helping last Sunday that had been completely unpredicted.
The UW Ski team was doing something unusual today: a "slow" race, where they were racing, but had to keep to Level 1 intensity. Heart monitors were used, and delivered painful though not dangerous electric shocks when skiers were working too hard. That's cowboy tough. | ||
| run 47:00 [3] | |
| Ran from the parking lot out to Telephone Road and back, checking out the snow cover on the shortgrass prairie. It felt like Tucson. But not really. | ||
| Note | |
| It looks like while I was gone that Laramie's newest hotel opened: AmericInn. It's got free parking, roll-away beds for rent, a cowboy at the front desk (in case your roundups should go astray), and you can even launder your guests. Or something like that. | ||
| C • Free parking? 2 | ||
| biking 1:00:00 [2] | |
Tuesday Feb 26 | ||
| Note | |
| Back home tonight after a great trip down to Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. Easy to see why the candidates are spending so much time in Texas, and I still say Austin is my kind of town.
The trip capper was the last 20 miles or so home. As usual, the winds went from nothing at the Colorado border, to a little breezy at Cheyenne, to full gale force winds going perpendicular to the highway with full on ground blizzarding around Vedauwoo, with some icing on the roadway for extra fun--so fine! It's hard to think of anything negative from the trip, while there were many positives. Some of the highlights included: 1) Getting to sample some East Texas terrain. East Texas is a lot like Mississippi except that: it's easier to spell, there are fewer alligators, and there are more Texans. I thought the event NTOA was overall quite nice, fun, and inspiring to see so many younger orienteers flocking out in force and having a good time. 2) Seeing firsthand that Austin is every bit the happening place I always imagined it was. It looked about 300% vibrant! 3) Spotting an armadillo in Hill Country, which most experts will agree is the finest and most difficult spotting locality. I can almost retire happily on this alone. 4) Observing at close hand the famed peccaries and Wired Scorpions of Big Bend. The Wired Scorpion isn't the most dangerous scorpion of the Southwest by any means, but it does have the most fiercesome stinger. I'll toss in some roadrunner sightings too, since roadrunners are cool. Beep-beep! 5) A trail run at dusk in the Chisos Mountains which did not result in my being eaten by a mountain lion, despite numerous sightings up there over the past month. I always enjoy going on runs where I don't become prey. There's some great running up in the Chisos Mountains, and if you didn't know that and were just driving through Big Bend, you might not guess it. 6) Seeing that West Texas really is moving big into wind energy. We saw some enormous wind farms, and read that Texas has now overtaken California to become the biggest wind energy generator in the country. (But I still think Albany County, WY might pack a bigger potential punch. ; ) ) 7) Observing firsthand (if only anecdotally) that higher gas prices are so far having seemingly minute effects on the size of vehicles folks are choosing to drive, and how fast they are driving. There is a lot of 75 mph highway in the West, and lots of people are driving big trucks and SUVs at speeds exceeding 75 mph. 8) Getting to race in some more Tucson terrain at last--it was way too long since the last Tucson "A" event. I thought the Tucson event was quite good in all respects. The impermeable fences were only an added challenge. It would be easy to go really wrong around Tucson--an event in mid-summer in some typical cactus terrain would kill off just about anyone, I'd guess--but this could well serve as a classic example of how to do it right! 9) Haw, haw, haw, haw! How can you mention Texas without mentioning ZZ Top? 10) While there was lots and lots of great scenery along the way, I'd have to recommend the stretch of I-25 between Las Vegas, NM and Raton as being the overall most beautiful of anything I saw on this trip. It's almost remarkably undeveloped and looks aobut like you could imagine it looked 100 years ago in large part. On a different note, if you take the results together from last year's US Classic Champs, the Texas event, and the Tucson event, it's pretty clear that Feet are in really good shape, are in fine form, and are the man to beat these days (BT grammar invoked.) Blue runners, set your sights and get your training in motion! | ||
| C • Zane Gray wrote a rather fi... 2 | ||
Sunday Feb 24 | ||
| Orienteering race 1:28:00 [4] | |
| Day 2 at Tucson "A", no misses, just needed to be able to run faster. And maybe work on fence crossing technique--some of those Tucson fences were extra stout. An M-1 Abrams tank couldn't have gotten past several of them.
Really enjoyed the weekend, and I think everyone was really happy that Tucson put together another "A" event--what a fine winter interlude! | ||
| Orienteering race 1:28:00 [4] | |
| Day 2 at Tucson "A", no misses, just needed to be able to run faster. And maybe work on fence crossing technique--some of those Tucson fences were extra stout. An M-1 Abrams tank couldn't have gotten past several of them.
Really enjoyed the weekend, and I think everyone was really happy that Tucson put together another "A" event--what a fine winter interlude! | ||
Blue2 - Splits | ||