Training Log Archive: jtorranc

Work commute. Week would have been less boring exercise-wise if I hadn't been spending the evenings largely on OCAD cartography. Should be worth it though, come Sunday.

Work commute.

Work commute.

Home from work in the evening.

Event: QOC Laurel Ridge XC
 

Ride in to work. No ride home because the weekend was, in the absence of ski-O, devoted to visiting Dan's nieces in NY so I picked up a rental car in the afternoon and drove north all evening.

Commute.

Finally retrieved my bike from Wheaton, riding back to the office and then home, dropping in on two running stores in DC to drop off trail race flyers along the way.

Half the time I spent mapping vegetation at Occoquan. Think I got everything that ought to be mapped on the east side of the road that splits the map. Still a few places on the west side with some vegetation to add.

Annoyingly, having got through Greenbelt with no damage, I twisted my right ankle just walking around the terrain fairly early in the day. Leaves are more dangerous than is easy to keep in mind.

Jogging back to the car once I stopped surveying vegetation. Turns out I timed this just about right to return the car safely before they closed at 6pm. Then the weird thing of the day. Having last week done what one fears and dropped my keys through a crack into the elevator shaft of my apartment building, they were returned to me Friday evening, after I had picked up the rental car. It wasn't until I returned the car and went to unlock my bike that I noticed the bunch of keys had been returned minus the key for my Kryptonite lock. Really no way it and only it could have disappeared without human agency being involved. I wish the presumed aspiring bike thief good luck managing to find my bike locked up somewhere. If they can get into my apartment, then it's easy but that would have been true without possessing that key since I don't lock my bike up inside the apartment.

Of course, I have spare keys, one of which I used to lock the bike up on Friday afternoon, so retrieving the bike tomorrow will be easy enough. Annoyed about having to take Metro home tonight though.

Event: QOC Greenbelt
 

QOC Greenbelt Blue - fairly good race, memorable problems all related to new deadfall not being on the map while being in the terrain in places that impacted route choice.

Blue - Splits

Half the time I spent vetting control locations at Occoquan. Moved a number of white and yellow course control for various reasons and one advanced course control because the location I had in mind was a sea of thorny vegetation but the courses are mostly okay, or will be once I finish mapping the vegetation or rather that part of the vegetation in and near the area covered by the courses.

Hope we get a day like today on February 10th - it was lovely in the woods. Saw a small herd/bunch/mob/leash/parcel/rangale of deer on a couple of occasions and presumably the same gang/rafter of turkeys hanging out on the east edge of the park that I saw on a previous visit (I thought we had more agreement on collective nouns than seems to be the case - apparently murmuration is only one of at least five possibilities for starlings).

To work in the morning then onwards to Wheaton to get a rental car late in the afternoon.

To work. Since the forecast precipitation didn't materialise, as rain or snow - the biggest wrong call I can remember in the DC forecast in a long time, though apparently things didn't miss us by all that much as they passed by to the south of DC - home by way of PCRM.

To work. Home by way of the aquatic center.

To work. Home by way of TPSS. Significant rain falling once I left TPSS to head home.

Cycling home from work with some grocery shopping and a library Friends group meeting en route.

Event: QOC Fountainhead
 

QOC Fountainhead Blue - a pleasure to run on the east side of Fountainhead after at least a few years of events on the west (well, one I course set took the blue runners into the east side for their last four or 5 controls but no one had been to the east end of the map in some time). The woods have really opened up in most of the areas where they were thicker when the map was new. Will be even more fun in future after we update the map with a new contour base.

Blue - Splits

Slightly more than half the time I spent field checking at Occoquan this afternoon (morning was devoted to getting up early to renew my license at the DMV then coming home for a nap to make up for that before dropping Dan off at her German class) - I was moving much more of the time than yesterday since I spent this visit mostly getting the outlines of areas of thicker vegetation (the woods are mostly very runnable but there are a lot of areas where mountain laurel or similar occur and drop the runnability and visibility down a bit). Also visited a few areas I didn't see at all the day before so collected some new point features - rootstocks, of course, but also a small concrete cylinder protruding from the ground (like a geodetic marker, one of which I found the day before, but with no markings to indicate it was something like that) and, surprisingly, a hunter's stand in the middle of a section of very open woods that Sid simply must not have looked up enough to notice.

In to the office, not to work but to get near where I picked up the weekend's rental car and will be able to conveniently return it on Monday morning.

About half the time I spent field checking at Occoquan - meet coming up on February 10th and in addition to replacing the ridiculously vague contours on the map we ran on last year, the terrain deserves the attention of a better field checker than Sid. Priorities this visit were to get a sense for how good the new contours are (pretty good though some of the reentrants come out a bit shallower than they look in real life), sweep as much of the map as possible for point features, mostly rootstocks, and just generally get a better sense of what kind of courses will be possible and how much work it will be to field check the terrain adequately than I gleaned from running in it last March.

To work. Home by way of the aquatic center.

Work commute.

Cycling to work. Home by way of the aquatic center.

Event: QOC Patapsco McKeldin
 

Blue - Splits