Sizzlin' CSU Summer Camp

NYC set a new heat record on Tuesday, and so naturally the CSU summer camp got underway during this disgustingly hot and humid spell in the northeast. Winchendon doesn't feel much cooler than more southern bits of the east coast, but at least we have a pool here. The skiers braved the heat and humidity and did about two hours of skate technique on Wednesday afternoon, and only one girl almost fainted from heat stroke. After a quick shower we managed to get everyone in the pool, which, with 30 kids, is a feat.

Thursday morning was an early one, with a morning run and yoga session. The kids didn't seem too happy about this whole "early morning" thing, but for some reason my sympathy button is broken. The humidity was even worse this morning, visibility could have been measured in feet, not miles - it was like running through a cloud, only clouds are cold. Our first workout of the day was hillbounding/ski walking intervals at Mt. Watatic, and I was impressed with the calibre of our group - no whining! We did a fun, painful workout, and then I ran back up to the top just for kicks. That would make a good uphill running time trial. Brief stretch, lunch, and more pool time.

The afternoon workout was an overdistance skate workout for the older kids, the mid-range kids did a shorter skate ski, and the "green" group (we have a red group, blue group, gold group, and green group - I want a shiny group) did classic technique, which I coached. We saw a lot of improvement... hopefully they'll remember at least one thing from that lesson. Then it was dinner, celebration of Hannah's birthday, mini golf, and ice cream. For the first time in a long time, I got a hole-in-one, but I wasn't able to repeat it, and then totally cracked under the pressure, losing the game to Olga and Stoddard.

Tomorrow brings more fun, but the humidity seems to have cracked, so this 80+ degree weather is much more bearable.

I managed to get a deerfly bite in the armpit, of all places.

July 4

It was awesome, as always. I'm really hurting without my camera; the fireworks were pretty great, way more than last year and some giant big mortars and shake your whole body when they go off, I sat there and watched them without trying to take photos of them for the first time in I don't know how long. Ed acquired 84lbs of chicken for the Trout Club party on Saturday, and cooked it to just the blackened state that I love. Don't know about everyone else, but combined with his smoked maple syrup bbq sauce, I thought it was delicious. Some running, too much of that, really, and a completely failed attempt at a bike ride, which resulted in three dead tubes, a dead tire, four miles of riding, and two hours. The stars were not aligned correctly on July 5th.

I'm in Amherst now, all moved in to my new place, which comes with two super friendly labs and a dammed lake next door, which, when its 100F in the shade, is a nice touch. I've been exploring the trails and roads a bit, covered 42mi and 1000m of climb yesterday on my road bike, which is more than I've done all summer, I'm a hurtin' pup right now. Just haven't been interested in my bike, but in a new setting, it seems like a good idea to ride it, so maybe I'll actually be in shape come 'cross season.

Today I head to Winchendon for the CSU ski camp, and the heat looks like it isn't going to break for a while, so hopefully none of our little ski campers die of heat stroke. That would probably shut us down for good. The coaches, well, I think we'll be ok if we can lay off the coffee-and-beer diets we're all on, I hear water hydrates you better.

Saxtons River July 4th 5k

Last Saturday, I was running the Rootbeer Ridge loop with Ken, and he mentioned that he was racing a 5k tomorrow. The racerhead in me thought that sounded like a great idea, so I agreed to race too. Then we continued to run through thick, hilly, muddy, brambly, hilly trails for another hour or so, because if you want to race fast, you have to train for it. The day before. The loop wasn't actually that hilly, or long, but just taxing enough to take out a little oomph from my legs for Sunday.

It was hot even at 6:30 when I got up to go to this race. I did my best to hydrate, but my stomach was hurting from too much time in the sun on Saturday, so putting too much food or water (or coffee) into it would have been a bad idea. Luckily it was just a 5k race, those are short. I booked it over to Saxtons River and found them setting up for a big ol' party, with food vendors and trinket vendors and firemen and all the works, even a policeman. Golly gee! Ken and I jogged parts of the course to check it out, it started with about a mile loop in town, then the next mile was mostly uphill, gradually, and the last mile was downhill and flat along the [sunny] river.

101 people registered, and about 20 of them looked marginally serious (no ipods), so I lined up near the front. I was hoping that my tired legs would miraculously disappear, but for whatever reason, magic didn't happen when I expected it, and I started off feeling just as slow as I had in the warmup. The field spread out quickly; there were one or two short punchy hills in the first mile that spread things even more, and I soon found myself trailing behind a guy in untied sneakers (not a good sign) and an overweight middle-aged dude (OWMAD). By the time we'd finished our parade loop through the village and started climbing out of the valley, OWMAD and I had passed the untied-sneakers kid. At this point, a kid in those Vibram 5-finger shoes (basically socks) came by, looking determined, but OWMAD and I hung strong up the gradual climb on the dirt road. I could see the top two women ahead of me, one of whom happens to be an SMS skier, so I was hoping to catch her. The heat was starting to take its toll on me, however, and every time I looked at my heart rate monitor I got bad news.

I tried to stay nice and relaxed up the hill, and as we crested the top, I could see a downhill reaching in front of me that was steep enough to let gravity do its thing. I opened up and dropped OWMAD, passing the barefoot guy too, but the downhill was unfortunately way too short. We then turned onto VT121, and the torture commenced. My head felt like it was going to explode, with the sun bearing down and the heat reflecting right back into that mirage-like surface over the asphalt. I started concentrating on keeping my cadence up, trying to keep up with the barefoot kid who'd passed me back. OWMAD was still behind me, but I wasn't making up any ground on Gage Fichter and the other woman, either. As I crested the last little hill before the finish through town, I was starting to see stars, and all I could think about was stopping running. The finish line took forever and a half to appear, but finally I was across, in 22:15.

Pre-race, I'd said that I'd be satisfied with a time under 22min, happy with 21:30, and ecstatic about sub-21. So I wasn't super pumped to have finished in 22:15, but at the same time, given the heat and the hike yesterday, I'm not going to whine about it. I'll just have to do another 5k to get that sub-21:30 time. And I beat Ken, so at least I'm in the position to do a little trash talking. I wasn't able to stay for awards, but I was 3rd woman, and first in my age class, 12th overall. Not too bad, although of course I'd like to be faster.

The best part of the day was definitely the swimming hole after the race. I was itching to get back to Weston, but I just couldn't pull myself out of that cold water.

Change

Wednesday was my last day of work at TNC, and it was a fairly stressful time leading up to that - when you know that your contract is ending, but you're mid-project, it makes a lot of sense to pass things on to your replacement in as organized and sensical fashion as possible. This takes work, but I got all that pesky documentation done. And my replacement is wicked smaht, so I don't fear for the project, but it sure is hard to give up the data you've been working on for a year (or four). Anyway, I think I built bridges rather than burnt them, so that always feels good to leave a place in good standings. My coworkers got together and gave me a huge basket of Trader Joe's goodies (mostly chocolate) as a thankyou/goodbye, they know me, like to make sure I'm fed =).

Now I'm packing up large parts of my life and fitting it into my car and going to grad school, starting some time after vacation in July. UMass Amherst, in the Natural Resource School. I have a lot of pesky little details to figure out there, but I have faith that all that administrative crap is going to iron itself out... I might have to bestir myself to move it along though.

Change is hard. But I'm excited.

Yosemite

Over the weekend, Ed and I flew to Yosemite for Boris and Kat's wedding. We did some cool hiking as well as wedding-stuff, and in the process I believe I lost my camera, but luckily I stole some of Greg's photos to give you an idea of how cool this place was.
Yosemite falls - what Ed says is the largest waterfall in the US, and one of the top 10 in the world. It does drop 2500ft. We went to the top of that (we being me, Ed, Greg, and Greg's parents Ken and Ruth), where we met up with the group of Sam, Ross, Amy, Matt, Sandra, and Zan, who were sunbathing/eating lunch at the top of the falls.
Zan, Sam, and Sandra had to go back down (rehearsal dinner stuff was calling), but the rest of us continued up to Yosemite point.



We had been planning on climbing this, but couldn't get the permits.

The morning (well, perhaps afternoon) after the wedding, we headed out along the Hetch Hetchy reservoir to Wapoma Falls (I think?), which were very violent and spat out a lot of mist. Luckily it was hot enough that felt awesome.

The last day we headed up towards Nevada falls, on the trail to Half Dome. It was purrty.



I'm not sure what to do without my camera. If it doesn't turn up when I unpack, seppuku may be the only option. There were some true gems on there from the wedding, which was beautiful.

More Pawtuckaway

The CSU orienteers had decided at some point that we wanted to hold more training camps, but a general lack of time makes setting aside a whole weekend pretty difficult to do, so we experimented with a micro-training camp. Basically a training day. It worked well, pretty low-key, just two training sessions, but a pretty high ratio of social and training time to travel time. Of course, Pawtuckaway in the summer means deerflies, and they were just as annoying as in the past, driving each of us to the point of insanity by the time we got out of the woods. I'm not sure you can really understand the severity of deerfly season until you've experienced it, but just try imagining a constant buzzing sound around your head, with flies occasionally landing on you and taking bites, occasionally flying into your mouth, nose, or eyes, and constantly buzzing. Its the buzzing that leads to the insanity. Of course, there were a couple mosquitoes thrown in for good measure, too. Honestly, this park is not all that much fun in the summer. But living in Boston makes you forget that deerflies are out there, just waiting for a hot-blooded mammal to wander into their territory.

Presto before running - all excited to go out. Every club needs an o-dog.

The first course was a route planning activity - we sat down with a partner before running to talk about each leg and come up with the best route. Then the idea was to go into the woods and run your route perfectly. In theory, this will minimize the amount of time you spend standing staring at your map, and therefore minimize the amount of time the slow deerflies can eat you. The fast ones will keep up with you no matter how fast you run. I had trouble getting my head into planning the routes, and then I headed into the woods, and I had trouble getting my head into orienteering, and it took me 18 minutes to get to #1 (for reference, other people took 4 minutes). I'll take the easy out and blame the going-away party I'd had last night.




After #1, things got better and I was able to run away from most of the mosquitoes. I even had fun at times, despite the constant deerfly activity over my head - I had tried wearing a baseball cap, and it was working to keep the buggers out of my hair, although it didn't do much to prevent sweat from pouring into my eyes. I'm not really making this sound fun, am I? Anyway, I did pretty well following my routes and got back to the parking lot with a cloud of deerflies in tow, luckily they didn't like the water when I jumped in the lake, and mostly left us alone during lunch.


The second training session was a partner memory-o. I teamed up with Ali, and the way it works is that for one leg, she would lead, without looking at the map, while I memorized the route to the next control. Then I would lead, without looking at the map, while she memorized the next leg. Its a great way to get better at reading on the run and synthesizing information quickly, and picking out the important features to get you there. We didn't hang any streamers this time, because we didn't want to pick them up, or spend any extra time with the deerflies than we had to, but at least with two people you could verify if you were at the right feature or not.

Leading the memory legs was great - when you don't have a map, all you have is the memorized map in your head, so you can ignore all those pesky little extra features, and move a lot quicker than you would normally. Of course, this sort of sucks for the person following, but that's part of it. I definitely found myself wanted to take a look at the map as I approached the control circle though, just to verify things.

We worked as a team until the 8th control, and then Ali decided that she wanted to redo a control, and there was no way I was running extra - it was hot, I was dehydrated, and the deerflies were driving me mad. I sort of walked to the next control, hoping Ali would catch up, but she didn't, so I jogged the rest of the course on my own. Quite a useful training session, and despite the deerflies, super fun.

Then we got back to the cars (and the lake) and taught Presto how to swim. He isn't what I'd call a natural, and definitely did not enjoy the water as much as the humans. He also did not enjoy the watermelon, but he was quite interested in the ice cream we got later on.

The Adro Mile

Last week, one of my junior skiers emailed the team to tell us about the Adro mile, a scholarship fund race for Concord Carlisle highschool, in honor of Adrian Martinez, a talented young runner who died unexpectedly during a pickup soccer game. I decided to sign up for the race, because at the very least the money was going to a good cause, and hopefully I'd run fast, too. Ross and Ian from the orienteering section decided to come along; Ross had run with Adrian at Williams. I was originally signed up for the "Adro" mile, which is the elite race, but luckily the track coach/race promoter warned me that the other women signed up were sub-5min milers before I toed the line with them - I would have gotten slaughtered.
Yeah, I do not fit in with this crowd.

Steve, the track coach, broke up the open heat (coed, age 19-39, with only three women) into three heats - sub-5, sub-5:40, and everyone else, since it was pretty big. Given that my last (and only) mile was 6:04, and this was a full mile, rather than a 1600, 5:40 would be a stretch, but I was sort of hoping I could do it, given all the running on a track I've been doing, and figured I'd rather tailgun it and run my own race than have to worry about highschool boys who can't pace - the ones who can pace would definitely be faster than me.

Tim Parsons was there to run the masters' mile, and was kind enough to take some photos of me while I ran.

We took it out in 40s for the 209m, which is considerably faster than I meant to go. (the 9m extra are the extra bit you run in the beginning to make it 1609m instead of 1600). I had hoped to see 41, +2s for the 9m, so it wasn't all that smart to do 38+2, but its hard to not start fast when you're in a group. Alas, it was too quick, and although I hit the 400m mark in 84s, which is about where I'd hoped to be, I'd accumulated more lactic acid than my legs knew what to do with.

The second lap I slowed down too much, I thought the third lap was supposed to be the hard one, but I was having trouble running smoothly on this second one, and my upper body was starting to feel fatigued as well. I came through the 800 at 3min flat, which was a big slowdown, and so I tried to push hard through the third lap. My legs felt heavy, and my arms felt heavy too now, but there was no lung-burning agony like I'd expected. Either I'm not in shape, or I just had accumulated too much lactic acid in that first 400 so couldn't get up to speed, but there wasn't much I could do to speed up at this point. I was off the back now, just trying to keep running.

The last lap was painful, as expected, and the other half of my brain (the half not occupied with trying to figure out splits and remembering how to run) really wanted me to stop running. "This is decidedly uncomfortable! Can we stop this torture now? Its gone on long enough!" I had hit the point where it takes serious effort to go through the motions that should be so natural - one foot, then the other, with a hop in between, I mean, everyone can run, but my body seemed to have forgotten what to do - almost like my brain had to explain step by step how to do it. As I came into the finish straight, I could hear the guy on the announcer telling the crowd to cheer me on so I'd break 6min, and I did my best to kick - it was pretty pathetic, but it did the trick, and I crossed the line at 5:58. New PR!

Although not as fast as I'd hoped, I'm pleased with this run, and thinking that I might actually do some more running training and bring my track spikes out of retirement at some point to see how my calves handle them...