Training Log Archive: PG

Feeling quite wiped today, maybe it was the 36 holes of rogaine practice, the first round starting not much after dawn with my regular old guys group, the second with Gail, and a fine round that was, 75, had thoughts for quite a while that it might be par or better but it was not to be....

But also feeling totally satisfied with the weekend, and that is such a fine feeling, and one that will last for a long, long time.

I'm in the process of writing up something about why the relay courses were set the way they were, may take a couple of days to finish.

And then need to figure out if there is a future for the Sprint Series in 2008.

And if there will be a Relay Champs in 2008.

C • Should there be a ***** in 2008? 8

The WCOC crew (PG, Sandy, Valerie, Jim, Lyn, George, Joe, Rick, Susie) --



Photo by Speedy, click on photo for a larger image (also for more relay photos)

Hanging 11 controls for the relays plus putting out a water stop.

Checking the other 38 controls. Sure glad I had 3 helpers for putting them out. We only had a couple hours, and it takes a lot longer when you have stands and e-boxes to deal with.

Picking up 6 controls and a water stop. Wow, we really had help for this one, including Randy Hall from DVOA and Joe Sackett from CAOC. Had everything out of the woods in about 45 minutes.

Very pleased with the weekend. Everything went as planned/hoped. WCOC sure has a fun and talented group of folks to organize a meet with. And I'm including in that the club's honorary members, Valerie Meyer and Sandy Fillebrown.

So far my major disappointment was forgetting to include in the awards ceremony the presentation of the $10 prize for first person to reach the start triangle in the leg 1 mass start, a distance of maybe 100 meters. The winner -- and he did get his ten bucks -- was Joshua Wiley from West Point. He ended up finishing seventh among 4-point teams on leg 1.

C • Thank you, Peter 8

Event: Sprint Series Final & US Relay Champs
 

Sprint Finals. Went well.

Boy, I'm falling behind on my AOWN reports. The latest was a red fox, spotted as I was nearing the 2nd green, the fox was coming from the woods just west of the green and didn't seem very concerned about my presence. But it seemed so unscared that it made me start to think about what might be wrong with it. And by now I was on the east edge of the green and it was on the south edge and getting quite close to me.

So I thought about my options, and fortunately this is an area where I have lots of experience, namely club selection, and I pulled out a sand wedge. It wasn't an obvious choice. I'd have maximum reach with my driver, the smoking D1, but I'm less accurate with it and under conditions of close combat and high stress I suppose it's conceivable that I might whiff, even though a well-delivered center-of-the-clubhead blow would certainly knock Mr. Fox back a bit. Whereas the sand wedge, I love the sand wedge, really accurate with that, but with the 56 degrees of loft and a heavy flange it's really better suited to, say, beheading copperheads (not that anyone would want to do that). But the sand wedge it was.

And I could see Mr. Fox noticed, because he must have figured I wanted to play -- he trotted into the sand trap, sat down, and scratched himself for a while. I assume he was an elderly male? I still was nervous, still had the wedge out. And after a bit, Mr. Fox trotted around a little more, looked at me for a while, sat down and scratched some more, and then eventually trotted off in the direction of the tee.

My conclusions:

1. If it didn't have rabies, it certainly had fleas.
2. Maybe I should start packing some heat when I head out. I've heard a 9mm is effective, I wouldn't know, the last weapon I fired was about 40 years ago and I think it was a 90mm, it was sticking out the front end of a tank at Fort Knox, and if a 9mm is just 10% (or even 1%) as potent as a 90mm, there wouldn't be anything but a few wisps of fur (and maybe a flea or two) left of Mr. Fox.

A short session at the track. The group was doing either 3 or 4 x 1 mile, 8:30 cycle. I did the first one a little quicker than I meant to (6:26, very even pace), then the second one (6:25) felt hard enough that I didn't have any desire to do a third. Although, more to the point, I was a little nervous about my calf, which seemed mostly ok, and I didn't see any reason to push it.

Nice evening, nice group, wish I'd been healthy (and motivated) enough to be doing this every Thursday the last few months.

Off to the Sprint Finals and Relay Champs tomorrow. Hope JJ remembers the loudspeaker....

Before and after, testing the calf. Nice thing about the track is if you have to stop unexpectedly, it's not very far back to the car.

Still felt pretty crappy today.

On the bright side, I am slowly making my way through the biography of Einstein, maybe one-third done, which is much farther than I thought I would get (my initial prediction, had I made one, would have put one chapter as a respectable accomplishment).

Along with some interesting stuff, and some physics that I can't pretend to understand, imagine my surprise to run into a neighbor of mine, well, not exactly a neighbor of mine, rather a neighbor of the g. I'm talking, of course, about h, Planck's constant, apparently one of the other famous constants in the universe.

And when I think about h, not that I have thought that much about h, three things strike me:

-- h is really old. Not just in that it was discovered over a hundred years ago, but the fact that it's really being around forever. Whereas the g, a 21st-century discovery, can only trace its roots back to the 1940s.

-- h is really small. 6.626068 × 10^-34 m² kg / s. Makes the g seem almost obese (even if it doesn't have any superscripts).

-- and, they're still not sure exactly what the value of h is. h must really envy the g, it just has to get on the scale each day.

All this makes me wonder, is there an f? And what's it like?

C • Lots of free letters out th... 8