Training Log Archive: TomN

NEOC Needham Town Forest, Red course. Shortish course, not a lot of climb, but slow orienteering for me. We were warned not to trust the small trails, so I didn't. As soon as I got off the trail on the way to #1, I found myself surrounded by big rocks with hardly any rocks on the map. Thought about that for a while and plugged on. I began to get the feel of things (as well as wet feet) on the long route to #4, which seemed to involve some wading no matter which way you chose.

Things were a little more fun after that. It's interesting terrain, with a mapping style that deemphasizes the ubiquitous rock and plays up the contour complexity. The map was at 1:7500, and it's hard to imagine trying to condense it any further.

I had a disaster on 13, there was a straightforward route around the marsh, through the rocks, and straight in, which I finally did after my original stupid idea utterly failed. Fairly consistent other than that, mostly walking near the controls and working on visualization.

Red - Splits

Pine-Front-Railroad-Park-Swazey-Gilman. Cool and breezy.

Same trails as yesterday, but in a more sensible order. It unexpectedly started to rain half way through, and then, even more unexpectedly, changed to ice pellets.

Various loops around the cross country trails.

Crazy rain last night mit donner und blitzen, but it all went away by mid-morning and the temperature shot up. There was some standing water on the trails. It's the change of the season, I'm sweating a lot more runnng in the mid-50s than I was a couple of weeks ago.

Easy run mostly on the trails. Got back just as the rain started. Looks like rain for the next few days.

C • dad you have too many miles again 3

NEOC Breakheart Reservation Red. I sneaked a peek at some maps online, and I was pretty nervous about the navigation. Lots of fiddly little contour detail, some green, some indistinct trails, all peppered with the usual New England rock.

But it turned out o.k., I needn't have worried. It was pretty high quality terrain, and a good map, not unduly cluttered. The course featured short legs with direction changes, and that's no surprise because the roads and trails make it hard to get any distance cross country. But there were some unfortunate in-and-out legs. On the other hand, the "indistinct" trails were distinctly visible (unlike last week at Prospect Hill), which helped a lot.

My major problems were at #1 (didn't go high enough, lost a couple minutes going back and forth below the control on about a 20-meter leg), #12 (lost track of where I should leave the trail, got hung up in nasty thick vegetation), #13 (still flustered from 12, went the wrong way on the road, then attacked too early and couldn't find the cliff, thought it was going to be easy), and #15 (no brain at all, must have been oxygen deprivation, couldn't even locate myself on the road).

In contrast, I had an easy time with #10 which others had trouble on, but would have been faster if I'd headed straight down and across the marsh instead of following the trail along the ridge. Also good on #19, went all the way along the lake to the little bridge at the neck.

Better at the controls this time, picked out the boulders pretty well, but the maze-like cliffs at different elevations gave me a lot of trouble.

Spotted a little blue butterfly on one of the wide trails. This time of year, it was either a Summer Azure (celastrina neglecta) or a Spring Azure (c. ladon) and the likely candidate, oddly enough, is the Summer Azure (spring form) which usually emerges earlier. At least, that's the way it is in the Mid-Atlantic.

Red - Splits