Training Log Archive: Swampfox

Winds were "Out of Category" today, so concentrated on skiing and concentrated on not biking, succeeding at both efforts. Tried some easy jogging after skiing, but it seems my calf would like a little more time, please.

C • sighting 6

Enjoyed a nice ride up the "effortless" (ha!) Rogers Canyon where, for a change, there were no shooters shooting away on BLM land. Though there was plenty of trash and casings in evidence. Those folks sure do know how to take care of the land! Decent wind out of the SW made the good conditions better.

Skied later on. Still mucho snow up top and no signs of any big meltdown yet. It was easy to count the skiers because I only saw one other person out.

Skied in the mild mid-day, and then biked in the late afternoon. There was a nice wind out of the west, so west I headed. I was at the airport before wanting to turn around, so I kept on going to the Herrick Lane intersection and even that was too short, so I continued on Herrick to the high point and turned around there; total round trip was a bit over 2 hours.

No running because of calf pull. Last summer when I had a pull in my other calf, I made several attempts to start up again, but they were too soon, before the calf was fully ready to go, and each time that resulted in--surprise!--a setback. I was feeling some internal pressure to get re-started as soon as I thought I could manage, so as to be as fit as possible for the Scottish 6 Day. Not smart.

Sometimes what you really have to work at is not the training, but patience (when you're injured or under the weather. This time there are no pressures so I will take things more slowly and not try to rush it.

And actually there really is no pressure, partially because I have no races on the horizon, but more because since late September last year I've been limited in what I can do running by a very persistent yet vagueish groin injury of some sort. I have thought all along the very high probability is it's a so-called "runner's hernia" (which a misnomer, since it doesn't involve a hernia, but rather one or more various possible ligament strains, inflammations, and/or muscular imbalances in the general area of the hip/groin/upper thigh.) The onset was very gradual, there is no pain, really it's more a question of low level discomfort, the amount of discomfort and location varies from day to day and even varies while I'm running and is generally very hard to describe in words with much specificity. And it is running specific. The rest of the time I'm fine, and I can do any other kind of exercise for as long as I want with no problem.

I had something identical or nearly so gradually creep up quite a few years back, with the difference being that then it resolved itself with a few weeks of active rest, while this time there has been only a little bit of improvement after going very light with running all winter long. That is perhaps also the difference between being younger, when overuse injuries often heal quite quickly, and older, when it seems the same sorts of things take longer to heal up.

120th day of skiing for the season. Biked afterwards, and, for good measure, after that I went and pulled something in my right lower calf while doing some easy running. Odd that these types of calf pulls almost invariably seem to happen (at least with me) while running easy and not while running hard. It is perhaps one of the myriad ways the running gods remind us we are mortal.

C • Easy running 3

My friend and sometimes rogaine partner (when he can talk me into it and I can not talk myself out of it) Jason Poole is off to do Barkley Marathons this weekend. Some people might be impressed merely by the fact that someone got in, but they shouldn't be--the entry fee is only $1.60 or something like that, at any rate way, way less than it costs to race even a single day of Laramie Daze.

Plus, in Jason's case, this has to be reckoned as a case of pure insanity. He already has 6 starts under his belt, and 6 DNFs. He hasn't even finished the fun run (I'm pretty sure of that.) And Jason is about as tough as they come; there is no quit in him.

So, when friends are in trouble and take leave of their sense, you either intervene and do what you can, or else you just go off and say "well, it's a free country, and he's a grown adult..so he can do what he will" and go on off and have some delicious pizza for dinner.

Well, while I didn't *exactly* intervene yesterday when Jason called me up, and while I did have some delicious pizza dinner, I did do what I could.

Jason called me while he was in route. He was about 20 minutes out of Frozen Head State Park (we won't even touch the issue of calling while driving; running Barkley is so many echelons beyond that.)

And why was he calling? He had a newly purchased compass for this Barkley attempt, one that was adjustable for declination. He wanted to know if he needed to make the necessary 5 degree adjustment to the left or to the right.

In truth, 5 degrees is so little that you really don't need to make any adjustment anyway--you can just eye in a little windage and you should be fine. Plus, the evil, demented Barkley course design is such that nearly all necessary navigation can be accomplished by contours: if you're not going either straight up or straight down the near vertical slopes, then you're wrong. For all the rest of the course, you simply need to stick the worst of the brier infestations, and then there is really no possibility of going wrong.

But that's not what I told him. Instead, I told him it was such a great thing for him that he had called, and that so many people get declination adjustments completely wrong! And went on to tell him that the daytime adjustment was calculated by multiplying the given correction by a factor of 9 and making a counter-clockwise adjustment to the compass with that result, and that for nighttime use you would need to multiply instead by 5 and using that to apply a clockwise adjustment from the daytime setting.

I asked him if he understood what I had told him, and he said yes, perfect! I said perfect, too!

So, hopefully, within a few hours of starting, he will be so hopelessly lost that he will conclude that this year's race can't be salvaged, and that he will make his way back to the yellow gate, thinking about he might possibly manage to scrape together enough spare change to try for another entry next year.

By the way--I'll just add that this is no April Fool's joke. The Barkley Marathons are real; Jason is real; and Jason is really in east Tennessee, about to make his 7th attempt at the Barkley Marathons. And of course everything else I wrote above is 100% true, too, just like always. If there are any skeptics out there, you are so wrong--ha!

I knew that the Happy Jack road had been closed most of the day, but I was still hopeful that if I went up late in the day, that a) the road would be open, b) the groomers would have gone up in the afternoon, and c) just maybe even the parking lot would be plowed.

It developed that the road had been plowed, the parking lot had been plowed, too (bonus!), but there had been no grooming. With very deep new snow, and me with skate skis, that meant d) lots of floundering. It was still fun to get out, and, let's face it, any day you are out in the wilds and in deep new snow and don't get eaten by snowsnakes, you're doing pretty good.

The unpredictable nature of the late season (local) ski crowd was evident today: earlier, before this last snowstorm, we had a few days of some really fine skiing, and almost nobody was up top to enjoy it. Today, colder and with no grooming and very deep new snow, a throng of skiers were out very late in the day, and into the evening. It would probably be a good thing for some PhD candidate to look into for her doctoral thesis.

It snowed all night and continued snowing lightly through the day, so I waited until the late afternoon for Yowsa! so as to get the most conditioning effect out of it,

But when I went outside, what I saw both shocked and horrified me! Someone had poached all my Yowsa!

It had never happened before, and it was really something I had never worried about before either. Laramie is such a relatively safe, the kind of place where if you don't rush outside to retrieve your morning newspaper, you don't have to worry about newspaper thieves running off with their ill-gotten newspaper.

I could tell that it had been an entire crew of Yowsa! poachers: tire tracks and blade marks left in snow remnants on the driveway made it clear the assault had included a truck mounted plow, and footprints on the various sidewalks revealed a more conventional shovel assault there.

They must have been scared off by something, however, because they had left about 20' of sidewalk from my front steps to the main sidewalk, but that was small solace.

Of course I promptly phoned the police to report this outrage, but there was little they could do, as they said they had been overwhelmed by the volume of such incidents reported during the day. They said they suspected Laramie had been targeted by a well organized group of poachers out of Weld County, CO, which is well known as a breeding ground for such nefarious activities, and that while these criminals usually target cattle, during the winter sometimes they turn their unlawful activities to the white innocence of freshly fallen snow.