Training Log Archive: jjcote

Sprint #1 at Pine Hill. This was terrible, mostly due to my running right past #3 all the way to #4 because I couldn't see #3 on the map (colorblindness issue, though that doesn't excuse the fact that I didn't look at the numbers). Also made a wrong turn on a trail which cost me some more time. Pretty sad, considering how simple the course was, basically Yellow at best.

Another very simple course. Didn't make any mistakes this time, but my running speed was probably quite a bit slower than other people. Both of these courses were almost exclusively on trails that were covered with snow that had been packed down by foot traffic into ice, and it was warm enough that there was a bit of standing water on a lot of it. Very glad I wore spikes -- a number of people who didn't have them used the crampon things that were available for loan at registration.

C • mail? 1

Sprint 1 - Splits

Sprint 2 - Splits

Couldn't get up the motivation to go running around in the mud and slush in the dark, so I pulled out the bike, and for various reasons decided on the mag trainer instead of the rollers. Watched the Tifa section of Disk 1 on the 2005 live Bijelo Dugme DVD.

Might as well start with the hardest part. Barely made the last one.

Spent a half-hour or so removing precipitation from the driveway. Wasn't obvious whether I should use a shovel or a pump. The stuff left by the plow at the foot of the driveway and in front of the mailbox was more solid, and particularly nasty.

No problem.

Not too bad.

The last few were pretty difficult.

So the picket fence continues, with two glitches, one when I was sick, and the other when I rescheduled to a day later to take advantage of an opportunity to get in some navigation practice. The plan going forward is a slight increase from 3.5 to 4 days per week of aerobic training, i.e. instead of exercising every other day, it will be Tue-Thu-Sat-Sun, which will fit in easier with my schedule. (The bigger-picture fence so far.)

Finished Blade Runner. Unsteady. Fell off the damn rollers twice when getting started. Can't remember when the last time was that I did that.

Last day of the month "test to failure" (i.e. let's see how many I can do). Hard to know exactly what the protocol should be for this, but I just cranked them out, with no rest pauses and no flailing of the body to make them easier. And were my arms completely shot? Not sure, but that last one went up really slowly, and it felt like I just barely made it to the top.

Towrrow it will be March, and things will get just a little harder.

C • December 2

Enough to verify that both Kraft pads were working properly.

C • Do you think you can fix mine?... 8

In The Dark (hatlamp). The little bit of snow that we got yesterday was no match for the sweltering day we had today (still above the melting point when I went out), and it was all pretty crunchy out there. Down the hill to the esker, out the powerline trail, then I went off to investigate the south end of the blazed trail that I found on my recent late-night excursion. Somebody has put up quite a few paint blotches and streamers, but it was just snowshoe tracks, not ATV. It wound around for a while, following an old cart path that I didn't know about for a short stretch, and finally wound up down by Mulpus Brook. I had wondered what would happen when it got there, but the snowshoe tracks appeared to just stop. I crossed on the ice (sturdy at that spot), and saw no blazes on the far side, so I just forged ahead, and eventually came to a trail that I thought at first was the one parallel to Gilchrest, but then I realized that I didn't see my own tracks, so it had to be the trail to Holman. My best guess right now is that this mysterious trail was blazed by somebody from Townsend, and they didn't know how to get across the brook, so they made it an out-and-back. Next task is to find out where it goes on the north end, and where it crosses my normal loop.

I modified one of the "free" Kraft dance pads for Barb a couple of days ago, and I believe I'm soon going to be doing another one for Cristina's sister, so I figured that I should test it out to make sure that it actually works. I knew that I was in trouble when I looked at the list of songs that I could download, and the only title I even recognized was "Djurdjevdan", which I know from the original Bijelo Dugme version -- this is apparently a remake. So I downloaded it and seem to have figured out how to operate StepMania well enough that I got it to play music and show a bunch of scrolling arrows on the screen. Once in a while it said that I did something right, and a lot of times it said I missed, but I was able to verify that the simultaneous up/down and left/right moves work on the modified pad, and that was the whole point. And when I was all done, it said "FAILED".

I also learned that you don't really need a dance pad for this. You can just play with the arrow keys on the keyboard.

C • Keyboard 8