Training Log Archive: RLShadow

To make me even more appreciative of the weather that we had yesterday for the Map Adventure -- we just missed having today's weather. Forecast for today:

"Showers, mainly before 5pm. Patchy fog between 10am and noon. High near 50. Breezy, with a northeast wind 17 to 20 mph. Chance of precipitation is 100%. New precipitation amounts between a quarter and half of an inch possible."

C • weather 1

Totally unacceptable weather for May 31! 45 degrees, raining, moderately windy. I was pretty well bundled up (down vest, rain jacket, winter hat) but I didn't think to wear gloves and I could have used them ...

I'm just glad we didn't have today's weather for the map adventure!

Event: ROC - Rochester Map Adventure 2015
 

Rochester Map Adventure. GPS ran out of power with about 13 minutes left. Trailsnail's GPS said we covered 17.07 miles, so that's what I'm going with. Mine was at 16.48 when it quit.

We really lucked out with the weather. No thunderstorms arrived. We had maybe 10 minutes of moderate rain and that was it. It was warm but really not too bad. Trailsnail grumbled a bit, but I asked her if we really could have covered much more than 17 miles if it had been, say, 15 degrees cooler? I don't really think so -- that's about as much as I ever expected we'd cover, considering we were planning to do (and did) virtually no running.

Lots of confusion at the start. We had initially taken the question sheet for Side A, which was my understanding of how it worked. You do as much of Side A as you choose to, come back, hand in your Side A question sheet with the answers, then take the Side B question sheet and go out and do as much of Side B as we have time for. But shortly before the start, I overheard that walkers were supposed to take a question sheet for both sides, and could do all of the controls they could get to in one outing, w/o having to come back and go out again. So we gave up our Side A question sheet for the one that gave all of the controls. Which totally botched up our strategy, as we hadn't done any planning for being able to do Side A and Side B controls in one outing. But THEN we heard that the question sheet with all of the controls was not really for all walkers, just for people who weren't doing it competitively and didn't want their results counted. That certainly wasn't us -- we were walkers but we were out to be competitive, although we had no expectation of winning. So we again gave up our sheet with all of the questions, and picked up a sheet with only Side A questions.

Side A route: J2, A3, A2, A1, J3, J5, J9, J8, G9, G8, G7, G5, G6, J7, J6 J4, Y2, G2, G1, C9, C7, C6, C4, C5, A8, A4, A5, A6, J1 (edit based on Tyler's input -- I forgot about J1 originally). 29 controls.

Side B route: B8, B9, B7, B6, B5, B4, B3, B2, B1, K5, K4, Y1, K2. 13 controls, for 42 total. (edit)

(Just noticed that our score was 76 in the results summary. Seems like it should have been 82-4=78. This wouldn't make a difference in the standings though, we'd still be 3rd. We would have been tied with Zak Borden in points, but he finished 20+ minutes earlier than we did.)

Frustratingly, we did not do K1 which was right by the start/finish. Coming in to the finish with relatively little time remaining, we didn't think we had time to get K1 and not be overtime. We wound up finishing with almost 4.5 minutes left so I do think we could have gotten it and been on time, or at the worst, within 1 minute of overtime. Since controls were worth 2 points and the overtime penalty was 1 point per minute, at worst we would have gained a point if we had done K1.

More frustrating that not getting K1, though, was B3, which asked "How many lights on on the ramp structure of the pedestrian overpass?" (This is the overpass going over 490 from Colby St to Norris Drive.) Our route didn't take us over this overpass because we were on our way to B2 and B1 and were then crossing at Winton. We walked up to the overpass and quickly counted 4 lights. One was burned out but that didn't throw us, we still counted it as a light. Then trailsnail got closer to the ramps and saw another light in the middle of the 2nd ramp up. 5 was not one of the choices, so we walked further up the ramp, looking for another light, and didn't find any. Apparently the problem was that we didn't go all the way up to the very top (although we were quite close), where there presumably was another light. So we grudgingly went with "4" as the answer even though we had seen a 5th light, since 4 was the number we quickly saw when we approached the ramp.

I'm sure if our route choice had taken us over the bridge, we would have seen the 6th light and gotten this right.

This was particularly frustrating because we spent way more time on this question than on any of the others trying to make sure we got the right answer, only to wind up with it wrong. And since there was a 2-point deduction for wrong answers, we not only didn't score the 2 points for getting the wrong answer, we lost 2 points, for a 4-point swing. Way more significant than thinking we didn't have time for K1 at the end! Answering this question correctly would have put us in 2nd place, rather than 3rd.

C • Walkers and N/C status 5

C • Score 2

Fitness room workout.

One game of pickleball after the fitness room workout.

Around the big block.

Dog walk on the HJ trail. Ran into a long-time friend, Joe Roth, who was walking his son's dog (coonhound mix, very nice dog, Hanna and Homer got along with it well). Then ran into them again. Three instances of stoppage time deducted, from chats with Joe.

A bit warm; I hosed the dogs off before we set out, they stopped at the stream in Finn Park for a dip, and then the got hosed off again at the end of the walk, so they don't seem worse for wear ...

HJ trail, with trailsnail. Got rained on a bit during the last minute of the run.

Evening walk, around the big block.

Sunset looked like it might have been a good one -- I couldn't see close enough to the horizon to see for sure though. But I'm expecting to see a number of Facebook sunset picture postings from tonight!

Webster Park.

With trailsnail, from her house.

Afternoon dog walk, around the big block. No GPS, but the distance is well-established from a large number of replicates :)