Searching for drowned hobos

I guess that title is only funny if you know that the temperature loggers that I use are the HOBO brand. Anyway, I've been spending a good bit of time recently going around and drowning hobos. First stop was the West watershed, in VT, and that was interesting - the entire state was basically trashed. I had some major issues getting around, just because of road closures, but in the end I made it to most of my stream sites. What I found there was pretty shocking - mostly related to the stream picking up and moving its channel to the other side of the valley or something.

Look ma, no road! The first stream I hit was Bellows stream, near Marlboro VT, and that stream had decided that it wasn't happy with its current location anymore, and took out the road that used to parallel it. That bank of stones - that used to be trees. My temp logger was cabled to the roots of one of those trees. Not anymore! Despite the devastation to both the VT economy and my project's data availability, this was really cool to see. Nature is awesome!

I found my logger at this site, but I'm not sure I can extract it without bigger tools than what I've got. That loop of cable, next to a loop of wire, are both theoretically connected to my temp logger. This tree used to have flowing water over it. Oops.
New boulder. Not sure where THAT came from, but it must have made some noise.

One of my loggers is way up on the Winhall river, only really accessible via the Appalachian Trail. I called up my trusty running buddy Ken, and we headed out on a really nice run, over Stratton Mountain, past Stratton Pond, check on the logger, and back on a side trail. Overall a very nice loop, but that takes a solid 4 hours out of your day to cover that much distance and elevation!
The view from Stratton firetower was great, as always!I followed up that hike with some quality time helping Ed make apple cider, before it was time to continue on to Maine, and see how the Sandy River watershed had fared. It was a pleasant surprise to find all my Maine loggers!

Oh hai Rumford! Long time no see, smell you again in January.

Having a 4-wheel drive vehicle made for much quicker work getting to some of the places I had to go; a lot of the logging roads were pretty washed out, but the truck could handle them. No more 20-mile runs for me! Here's looking at the backside of the Saddleback to Sugarloaf ridge, from the upper side of the Hardy River, as the sun was setting.

I finished up all the driving around by Tuesday afternoon, and since I was right there, took a detour to Mt. Blue state park, just to check it out. I parked the truck on a little overlook, and had a really wonderful session of core strength and some yoga, overlooking the misty western mountains of maine. It was exactly what I needed to unwind before the long drive home, and I really did succeed in finding some inner peace, watching the sun rays stab through the ever-changing clouds. Very glad that I stopped for that, as it made the long slog home a lot more bearable.



windblown, dirty, tired, hungry, happy. Ready for some civilization and some conversation other than my own.

When I eventually made it back home to Newton, I discovered that Ian had set up a legitimate night orienteering race out in Nobscott. Ed and I charged our headlamps and went to check it out, and we had a really great time. Ali crushed me, but she also crushed everyone else, so that's ok. I was still second, and beat all the boys. It was amazing how popular the night-o actually was, we definitely hadn't expected so many people! Above, Keith and Ben are pointing at each other. I forgot why, but the photo made me chuckle.

Next up: a 12-hr MTB race. If you have any idea how little I've been riding my bike, you know this is going to be an absolute pain-fest. At least I'm on a team!

Weekend Warrior

I used to make fun of weekend warriors, but it appears that's the road I'm heading down. Not enough time during the week to do all the fun stuff I want to do, so I packed it all in during the weekend. Of course, it helps that it was the Pawtuckaway camping weekend, which usually has five thousand things going on all at once, so you don't even get a minute to sit still. There wasn't a mountain bike O' this year, which was actually a good thing, because I really didn't need yet another excuse to go breaking myself. As it was, the weekend was really good fun with some great socializing, as well as some nice orienteering. I managed to actually follow my training objectives, an impressive feat, and I had a great time during the Wicked Hahd Night-O.
Ian and I preparing for the canoe-O. We did alright, but it was clear that we'd never paddled together before. Importantly, though, we beat Ali and Brendan.
Hanging out in the pavilion waiting for it to get dark enough to do the night-o.
Red course from Saturday.


Night-O map.

The night-o was really fun. It was a mass start, and sort of a small crowd this year. I have a new headlamp that I haven't actually tried out orienteering before; it's a Magicshine, and it's very bright. Almost like cheating, to have it be so bright! I certainly appreciated the extra illumination, because Pawtuckaway can be really scary at night. JJ started us, and I soon found myself with Ali and Carol, as well as a bunch of the old-but-accurate crowd. In some ways, night-o is almost easier than in the daylight, because you can navigate off other people's lights as well as your own, and the flags are very reflective, and hung very high. Carol, Ali, Jim, Ernst, and I were in a loose pack for most of the first 9 controls, including through the boulderfields of death on the way from 3-4. We could occasionally see Ethan and Andrew Childs dashing away from controls - they're both juniors, and both really fast, but not necessarily that accurate. Luckily, they're fast enough to make up for it.

Leaving control 9, Ali decided it was time to get serious, and that was the last I saw of her. I hung on to Carol to 10, but then my give-a-damn gave out, and I sort of bumbled for a while to 11, alone. We'd dropped the old-but-accurates, but we'd also dropped me. Sigh. Someday, I hope I'll be fast enough to keep up with the speedy ladies. I tried to motivate myself a bit more heading to 12, and it sort of worked, except that I had no freakin' clue where I was. I figured that since I was being good about compass, I would just keep going until I hit the perpendicular string of water features, but I wasn't exactly confident that I wasn't going to be eaten alive by rabid wolves. Running alone in the dark is scary!

At 12, I saw Jim, and realized that I'd lost however much time to him on my last two wobbly legs, so it was time to get serious again. Easier said than done, but I managed to run away from him by 13, and then it was just a struggle to the finish. I ended up 5th, behind the Childs boys, Ali, and Carol, and this was also the first Wicked Hard Night-O (WHNO) that I'd ever completed, so I felt pretty good about life. To make things even better, there were some s'mores left over for us WHNO runners to snack on!

Sunday, I was definitely feeling the efforts in the forest from Saturday, and it took a decent warmup before I felt like I could run. I ran a shorter course, but did it twice, trying to improve upon the first time. I did, but barely, since I just wasn't moving all that fast. All in all, that made for two first-place finishes over the weekend - the red course Saturday, and the brown course Sunday. Not that it really matters in a local meet, but it's still nice!

West Virginia

Part of my job involves electroshocking fish, so for the last week, I was down in West Virginia working on collecting data for a study that is trying to show that culverts that fail passage according to a survey, also fail passage based on the genetics of fish on either side of the pipe. Interesting stuff, but it involves lots of electroshocking. I headed down there with three others - Matt, Maili, and Jeff. Our trip was cut on both ends due to rain, unfortunately. Irene delayed our departure by a couple days because Jeff was stuck in VT, and tropical storm Lee rained us out early on the other end, since the capture probability goes way down in heavy rain. The good news is I got to come home early! The bad news is we have to go back there next fall.
Thanks Irene - I had to drive down that road!

yeah... not ideal. This one failed passage.

Catching fish. FS rules say you gotta wear orange. So wear orange we did.

Measuring fish. This should be an advertisement for waders, or something.

Identifying fish. Mostly we were seeing brook trout, sculpin, darters, and dace. And one massive brown trout.

WV was very pretty, but often very misty, especially in the mornings. I'd sort of been hoping to see some mountaintop removal sites or something, but I guess we were in the wrong part of the state for that. Just logging. Not even any huge chicken farms!





We stayed at the Monongahela Ranger Station, and there were horses next door. They seemed somewhat neglected, with knotted manes and flies and no shelter for when it rained.
Big snake!

We managed to get a flat tire, naturally on the day we were planning to go in to town. This wouldn't be a big deal, except apparently someone removed the jack from the truck, and we were 10 miles down a dirt road into a national forest in a torrential rainstorm. Some driving, very slowly, and a lot of hiking, ensued.
Sometimes, the shocking is easy. Sometimes, less so.

Back in the US of A

I made it home without any hangups, only to discover that a week of limited internet, even when you claim it's for vacation, leaves you pretty backed up. I managed to get my life under control by the weekend, and even managed to have some good fun, hanging out with the western mass renegade O' club. (We don't have an official name, but this seems about right to me. We should look into some OUSA sanctioning). We figured that with Hurricane Irene heading up the coast, we should head into the woods for one last orienteering session, before all the trees got blown down and it became impossible to run fast. So Saturday morning found Peter, Phil, Ali and I on top of Mt. Tom, ready to tackle an old red course from an A meet in 2008.

Peter went out first to hang some streamers, and a couple minutes later, I went chasing after him. I hadn't been planning to run hard, but advice I'd overheard was in my head - don't run faster than you can orienteer. Conversely, run as fast as you can orienteer. I quickly found myself pushing, trying to go fast enough to keep the navigation on the edge. It was really fun; Mt. Tom is open and fast, where it isn't too rocky, and compared to the crap we were running through in France, it was pure heaven. Better footing than any of the French trails, even.


Anyway, it was a really fun way to get outside, but I soon found myself tiring on the uphills, and losing a lot of time there. Come on, body, I thought you were in shape?!? I managed to catch Peter, a major life goal of mine, but Ali put a ton of time on me in the last, hilly, section of the course, and Peter dropped out because he felt crappy. Good to train with faster people, but sometimes a little disheartening, too. I finished the course, and ran up to my friends screaming "I LIKE orienteering! It's fun!" I guess I'd been missing some of that in France, where it was all slow and technical with rough footing.

Then along came a hurricane, and although the Berkshires were getting hammered, Amherst seemed to do ok. A monday morning rollerski along the Connecticut River showed some sweet flooding, though - aren't floodplains beautiful when they're working properly? Makes me happy. Of course, Hartford used to be a floodplain, and now it's filled with impervious surfaces... bet there're some wet basements down there.





I don't talk about work much on here, because this isn't a work blog, this is a fun-other-random-crap-I-do-with-my-life blog, but there is definitely a knot of anxiety in my stomach that every temperature logger I have in both the Westfield and the West River watershed has been ripped off it's cabling, or the tree to which it was cabled is now gone. Unfortunately, that investigation will have to wait until after I return from West Virginia, where I get to go for the next two weeks to play in rivers shocking fish. I should wait and see how many loggers are actually gone before I make dire predictions about how I lost 8 months worth of data, but let's just say I'm a little worried.

Not much hope when the mainstem looks like this. Photo credit Jeff Brown.

WOC Relay

There was a rest day after the Long Distance finals, thankfully for Ali, who had also made the Middle final, and her legs were apparently a little on the tired side. The rest of us ran more spectator races, and I swear, this terrain isn't getting any easier. And I haven't gotten any smarter. We did make good use of the rest day, and acquired some outfits for the banquet.
Ross and Sergei combining the men's and women's teams banquet outfits.

My route from one of the more disastrous days out on the terrain. Gotta love that massive error to #1... and lots of other small errors as well.
More example of some poor orienteering - I had major issues (like, 40 minutes of major issues) on this control. This whole area just didn't make sense to me, the map didn't seem to reflect reality one bit. Not so good for building confidence.

Ross has a feed bag.

Saturday morning rolled around, and I was definitely nervous, because we'd decided to put me as the anchor for the relay. This was so that Sam and Ali could both run with fast people, and get the boost from that, instead of putting me out there and losing the pack. I was also not feeling so great, physically - my achilles tendon had been getting worse and worse all week, and since it's impossible to get ice in this stupid country, both kneecaps were starting to hurt pretty bad, clearly I haven't kicked the runner's knee I'd been dealing with earlier in the summer and it was coming back. I took some ibuprofen for the kneecaps, but I think I may have taken it without enough food, or something, or maybe it had nothing to do with the ibuprofen, but my stomach was not happy as we got to the arena. Probably nerves. In the end, I think I probably didn't have enough lunch; given that the relay was so late in the day, timing your food was trickier than a usual morning race. Anyway, long story short, I didn't feel awesome.

The warmup helped, and Sam went out on an awesome first leg, tagging off to Ali in 12th. Unfortunately, things didn't go awesomely for Ali, and she blew about 15 minutes on one control. The rest were good, but it didn't help my nerves to be waiting longer than expected. Of course, in a way, this was good, because there was no longer pressure to hold on to teams that were way faster than me. When Ali came through, I was ready to fight - we were maybe 40 seconds behind Poland, and I thought maybe I could catch their third runner. I just couldn't find the flow, though. I was finding controls, which is ultimately the goal, but I felt very choppy, very stop and go. This was somewhat effective in getting me through the course, but not as quickly as I'd like.
Anxiously waiting.

Heading up out of the stadium to get to where the map exchange was.



Things went alright to about #10, and then I came out of the woods and into the fields, and through the water stop/spectator arena, and that was when I noticed how woozy I felt. I also noticed that it was increasingly difficult to run fast, and I felt like I was working way harder than I should be for the speed I was going. Ugh. Shortly thereafter, my natural stupidity was greatly amplified, and I basically lost 9 minutes to Ireland (who caught and passed me) in the last loop. You can read details on my training log, but I really went from dumb to dumber. This was probably related to the heat, and some tiredness. By the end, I felt really awful, because there is nothing worse than having a bad race when it's a relay, and your team is waiting on you. It's depressing to suck when you're at the World Champs.

So I left WOC with a slightly sour feeling, but overall, I am really glad that I went. It was absolutely eye-opening and humbling to be out there competing with (ok, more just like trailing behind, but still) the best in the world. I need to decide what I want out of this sport before I commit to much else, but that was a really, really cool experience.

Superfan spectating

Since we have four women on the team, and three can run in each race, I wasn't running the sprint - that was Hannah, Sam, and Ali's job. It was a long day of spectating, as they ran the qualification in the morning, and then the final was in the afternoon, in the town a couple klicks south of here - Chambéry. The qualifier was pretty exciting, mostly because I knew more people, but both Sam and Ali qualified for the finals! The men didn't have a great day, but we were all psyched to play superfans down in Chambéry.

The scene down there was truly impressive. Most of the fans were gathered in the large central square, which was also the start and the finish. There were two spectator controls, a grandstand, and a massive screen showing shots from like four different cameras. The square was PACKED, and apparently all the little alleys were crowded, as well, with runners sometimes having to duck and weave between spectators and innocent bystanders. This race was a BIG DEAL, and it was really cool to see it from the spectating side, so that if I ever make the final on the racing side, I'd know what to expect. I'm now deaf from all the screaming and air horns and vuvzelas, and I've lost my voice from screaming my own cheers at our runners. It was pretty intense. I left that arena feeling super jazzed up.

Emily Kemp, one of our Canadian friends, running into the finish of the qualifier for the sprint.
Pretty fountain with le Dent du Chat in the background.
Finding a shady spot to hang out and scream at runners was easier said than done.
Spectators lining the course in Chambéry for the sprint final. This does make me want to run the sprint and make a final someday...

The central square of Chambéry was completely packed. For a little while, Ed let me sit on his shoulders, and that was cool because I could see everything, but then he got tired. boo.
Ali starting out from the top of the ramp.
Sam on the big screen.

The day after the sprint was the Long Distance finals. Ali was our only runner who had qualified for the long, so after doing some spectator races in the morning, we gathered in a sweet arena to watch the best orienteers in the world duke it out on a fairly epically brutal course. Ali didn't have an awesome race, but it was still really exciting to watch her on the big screen and follow the GPS tracking. On the men's side, Thierry Gueorgiou from France crushed his competition, and won the race with a big margin. This was cool, because he's won the middle distance race like eight times, but he'd never won a long distance race at WOC, and people tend to hold the long with the highest regard. So, to win in his home country, in front of a home crowd, that was pretty cool to watch. Sandra's husband, Marc Lauenstein, ended up in the top 10, too, so it was pretty cool to cheer him along too.

Boris and Patrick found some god-awful shorts that were on sale for two euros, and tried to convince the rest of the US and Canadian teams to buy them so we'd match. For some reason, nobody took them up on their offer.

Carol Ross, Greg's girlfriend, up on the big screen. Too bad she decided to face the wrong direction while taking a drink. Also, too bad they decided to put a tv camera at the water stop. Really guys? People drinking gatorade and pouring water on their heads is the most exciting place you could put a camera?
Ali on the big screen, heading away from the start.

Eddie attempting to get the post into the ground for
the Orienteering USA flag that we'd brought.
Looking down on the tent city of all the vendors and stuff in the arena. The finish is next to the jumbotron, and the grassy slopes made for a really nice natural stadium.
Carol coming down to the finish. If she looks tired, it's because she is...
Ed with his vuvuzela. That stupid thing is so annoying...
This is what happens when you give a bunch of orienteers a map. They huddle. In this case, Ali was showing us her routes.
Marc coming through the spectator/drink stop. Those top guys run so darn smoothly. I guess it helps when you've won the world mountain running champs...
The crowd went absolutely WILD when Thierry came through in the lead. You can sort of see him running across the bridge, carrying a French flag - he was pretty pumped, you could tell that.