Training Log Archive: RLShadow

Pickleball at Webster Rec Center, indoors. 9 people total: Cheryl, Paul, trailsnail, Mike, Debbie, Jayne, Susan, Rick, and I. I played 3 games, all left handed, and my quality of play got worse with each game, so I decided I'd enjoy spectating more than playing, and watched (and did some refereeing) for the 45 minutes or so.

Indoor pickleball at the Rec Center, with 7 people total. (Cheryl, Paul, trailsnail, Carl, Carol, and Jayne) I played strictly left-handed; pretty badly the first game I played, a bit better the second. Also worked on some short-game drills with Jayne, while I was sitting out once.

Tennis at the Rec Center courts, with Cheryl. A new AP activity for me. I used to be reasonably good at tennis, at one point in my life. Of course, at particular points in my life, I could also run a 5:09 mile and sub-19 minute 5K, so "used to's" don't really count for much!

I mainly wanted to see if tennis was less stressful on my tennis elbow issue than pickleball is. I definitely felt my elbow, especially at the beginning. I'll see how it feels later, to see if any major damage has been done.

Some observations about tennis: It's WAY harder than pickleball, which I knew, but this reinforced it. The ball bounces way higher. In spite of the court being roughly double the size of a pickleball court, you don't have to hit the ball nearly as hard as in pickleball, and it's alot easier to hit it out of bounds long.

If my elbow tolerates tennis, I might try to ease back into it, though.

Today is the day that the Sehgahunda trail marathon was run in Letchworth State Park. I'm hoping that feet did well in in, possibly winning it.

It's kind of humbling that two years ago this weekend, I ran it (well, ran it with a lot of walking), and today I'm merely playing pickleball! (And only for 40 minutes, at that.)

Working on the Seneca Park map update. I got a fair amount done, with more to do, but then it got very dark, winds kicked up to around 30 mph, and it started raining. I wasn't too far from my car, so I bailed out, and ended my mapping session. Turned out the rain lasted all of around 5 minutes or so.

The mapping excitement of the day was discovering a boulder (a fairly good sized one) that hadn't been mapped previously, in some nice open woods. (My standards for mapping excitement are pretty low, obviously.)

But having a newly mapped, decent feature is in fact significant in Seneca Park. Eric Mayer, a very active club member for a number of years until he and his wife moved out of town, had a very simple guideline for course setting in Seneca Park: "If you find a feature, you put a control on it." (An obvious reference to how few decent features there are in the park.)

Non-mapping-related excitement of sorts was getting a very nice and close view of the elephants from the back of the zoo (probably a closer view than people who paid to get into the zoo had).

C • Way more spots now;-) 2

"Vetting" some of the course for the Rochester Map Adventure. Great fun! Rick L. has done a tremendous job of designing an interesting course. I will be surprised if anyone on foot gets all of the controls in 5 hours.

C • bikeability 2

Mid-day walk with Homer, over to the DeWitt Rd well field area.

Walk was interrupted by a phone call, which I didn't stop my GPS for (too many things to do -- stop IPod, take one earphone out of ear, scramble to get phone, finally press the right button). I estimated how long I was stopped from the GPS trace and subtracted it from the time the GPS said I was walking.

Short late-afternoon bike ride. Haven't been on the bike in a while and I just wanted to remind my body to start getting used to the particular stresses of bike riding.

Tues morning pickleball group. Once again, I played 2 games right-handed; trying to ease back into playing right-handed while keeping a close watch on how my elbow feels after each attempt. So far, it's been OK.

R knee still a bit of an issue, but it didn't bother me much while playing. It helps that pickleball is a pretty sedentary game.

Front yard only.

GPS trace looks very weird. Not only is there the usual noise (saying I was mowing the street a number of times, and that I made an excursion into the back yard when I didn't at all), there were multiple periods where the trace showed I was moving, but it wasn't seeming to register any distance covered. That's more puzzling than the usual GPS error which is expected.

C • The use of Forerunners is not permitted 3

Mid afternoon walk with Homer to next neighborhood and around the block, going on the short trail through the woods both there and back.