CSU Orienteering Superstars

A long, long, time ago (20 years), Peter Gagarin held the first ever Orienteering Superstars event. It was modeled off of some sort of tv show that had been going on back then, and basically it was a bunch of events that made fun of certain runners for various traits. Peter and Ali and I were talking a while ago, and decided it was time to revive the Superstars event, and model it off of the current crop of orienteers' quirks. We talked about having the Samantha-speed-talk (Sam talks at a million miles an hour), the Ross Smith call 'em in (Ross is an awesome cheerer), the Boris Granovskiy pole dance (Boris' wife, Kat, has taken up pole dancing, and we're sure that's how he threw out his back a few weeks ago), and more along those lines. We ended up with the following events:

-The Boris Granovskiy pole dancing competition
-The Alex Jospe Anybody Can Ski O' race
-The Peter Gagarin Mountain Bike race (extra points for falling off)
-A mini-golf tournament
-A special sprint jig-saw puzzle race
-Ten-pin bowling
-The Ali Crocker Axe Throw
-Stair-stepper biathlon
-Post-race angry compass-throw
-Wife-carrying race
-Crutches race around the ski-o course

Basically, this was a bunch of barely-controlled chaos, in the vicinity of Peter's house. No event was longer than two minutes, unless you were particularly bad at it, and only weenies took it too seriously. My mom was here for the weekend, and she had an absolute blast, playing around with all the different events.

Here, Giovanni is pictured in the biathlon - you did 100 stair-steps, then you had three balls to throw into a bucket. For every one you missed, you had 40 penalty steps. First you threw standing, then you ran down, collected the balls, ran back up, and did another 100 steps. Then you threw kneeling. And did you requisite penalty steps, if you are short like me and can't see over the railing.

My mom about to start the ski-o: you had to carry all sorts of shit (skis, poles, boots, a map board (literally, a wooden board), and a punch card, and then you had to run around a very short course and punch four controls. I went early, and didn't know the course, so was trying to use the wooden map to navigate - not fast. The trick was to memorize the course, and then punch one-handed.
Ian attacking the ski-o course with all he's got.

Ali starts off on the mountain bike course. Peter put some flat pedals on his bike, to go around a 45-second loop around the house. Not very technically challenging, but the uphill hurt like a bitch when you're not warmed up and suddenly pedaling a bike as hard as you can!

Boris and Kat tackling the mini golf. Peter had dug some holes in his lawn, and those were what you aimed for, negative points if you hit the house. Keep in mind that he has a very small yard, and all the events went through the same sections of lawn. Semi-controlled chaos.

Peter and JJ about to start the crutch race, in honor of Ian, who broke his leg earlier this spring, and was on crutches for a long time. I did this one with the larger pair of crutches, which was basically impossible - it was faster to hop, because the crutches would continuously pop out from under my shoulders, being too big for me. The course went through the woods, which didn't help matters.

The start of the wife-carry race. I should mention that we were all in teams, mostly in couples. Ed was stuck in Boston fixing his truck, so I was in the "surrogate wife" category, along with Ken, Ian, Greg, Neil, and Ali - everyone else had their very own wife. Being teamed up with Ali, we determined she should carry, and we had the right technique, but unfortunately, she isn't really built for carrying heavy things, and I'm not really built for being carried, and about 3/4 of the way through, she just collapsed... the video is fairly hilarious.



Yeah, we actually did the "wife drop" instead of the "wife carry".

Peter, posing by his successful axe-throw.

I've forgotten everything I learned when I was a woodsman at Colby, plus the axe was way too heavy, I could barely get the thing over my head. No, I did not hit the target with the blade-side forward.

The speed-puzzle competition - Ian is working hard, but I beat him, by at least 30 seconds.

And the bowling - Ken broke out the silver spandex. I didn't break 100, but I came close with 97. I think I've long since accepted that I am just not a good bowler. Sigh.

Last, but not least, there was the pole dancing competition - Kat is really into pole dancing, and brought along a pole. She tried to show us how to do "transition moves", i.e., shake your booty, but most of us were just interested in learning the different spinny and upside-down moves. Good times.
Kat showing us how its done.
She's actually a monkey.

Neil put on a good show.
Most of the guys figured out that they could hold themselves horizontally, not fair.

In the end, Sam won the women's category of the Superstars, and Joe won the men's category. In the team competition (I was paired with Ali, for lack of a suitable wife in town), Kat and Boris won (mostly, because they destroyed the wife-carrying competition). But really, the point wasn't about winning. It was a barely-controlled chaotic evening of good fun, good food, good drink, and good people. I wouldn't have missed it for the world. I hope this becomes an annual thing, rather than every 20 years.

Thanksgiving... with a turkey!

I don't remember when I last had a turkey for Thanksgiving - usually I'm somewhere with snow, and no turkeys. Or rather, turkeys-a-plenty in the grocery stores, but only a toaster oven and a microwave in the hotel kitchenette with which to cook the turkeys. So the fact that I got to stay home and eat turkey this Thanksgiving is actually kind of a big deal, even though I don't particularly like turkey. We decided to not bother with traveling, so stayed home and had a wonderful evening with Leo and Jenny, definitely the right decision.

Leo massages the turkey. I stole Ed's iphone and took silly pictures all night until they took the camera away from me.

What's going on here is that our roasting pan (we brought the turkey over, with a roasting pan, because Jenny is vegetarian, so they don't roast meat in a roasting pan ever) didn't fit in their oven. It doesn't fit in our oven, either, but we were hoping Leo and Jenny had a bigger oven. Luckily, we're talking about Ed and Leo, here, so they came up with a solution, which involved a dremel, a fire escape, and eventually, a smaller roasting pan.

Plotting their mischief. I feel like I'm in highschool again.

Also, Ed had the genius idea to inject bourbon into the turkey. It didn't actually make the turkey taste at all like bourbon, which was a bit disappointing. Because that would have been GENIUS, had it worked.

Apparently, I am a glutton. You know what? Its thanksgiving! I'm allowed to be gluttonous!

West Yellowstone may have had snow, but it was totally worth staying in town for this evening.

And did I mention the pecan pie? *swoon*


Things have been kind of hectic lately on my end, I've been trying to get all the temperature loggers out into little headwater streams at my study sites before everything freezes up, which happens, oh, right now. I don't mind the actual activity of standing in cold water tying these loggers to underwater branches so much, although you'd think I'd hate it; what I mind is the opportunity cost of wasting all your daylight hours driving from study site to study site. Just because I spent 9 hours in the field doesn't mean that I don't still have 7 hours of real work to do, too. Whine whine whine, but seriously, I don't deal well with work-related stress anymore these days. Training has taken a serious hit! Luckily, the semester is almost over, I can see that light at the end of the tunnel (does that mean I'm dead?), and I leave for Europe in 13 days for some ski-o racing action!

I wanted to do some racing over the weekend, but instead we headed to VT, where I spent another 12 hours driving around and standing in cold water. But, it was SNOWING! Like for real snow, they closed the pass on rt 100 through Dover/Wardsboro, which was problematic because I had to go that way to get to my next site, luckily I found a way around, and slipped and slid my way down the mountain, a nice reminder of how to drive in snow - turns out, snow is really slippery when they haven't sanded the roads yet!

The queen of convoluted travel plans

There aren't many people who can rival me in making plans for the weekend super duper complicated. In this case, Ali and her boyfriend Dan were the victims. Because Ed was in Rochester at the HFL ski swap, selling rollerskis, I didn't feel much need to get to Boston on Friday. I just had to be there to coach, and to run the Blue Hills Traverse, on Sunday. I was hoping to get there early enough on Saturday to coach some of the juniors on the Littleton ski, but it turns out sleeping in is actually pretty nice. Ali was also heading to Boston to run the Traverse, and let herself get roped into my plans. Muahahahaha!

The plan went something like this...

Friday night: core strength, dinner, and planning for the Orienteering Superstars weekend with Peter, Gail, Ali, and Dan.

Saturday: Ali and Dan picked me up, we drive to Littleton, where Ali and I do a loop just to get a ski in, while Dan works on his paper (he does some orienteering, but we haven't gotten him on rollerskis yet).
Then they drop me in Concord, at my Aunt Susan's house, so I can eat lunch with her and catch up briefly.
Then Susan drops me at Heath Bridge, so I can coach Corey.
Then Corey's dad drops me at the train station, so I can hop on a train to Ross and Sam's house, site of the evening's festivities.
Then Ali and Dan can drop me at my house, on their way to Dan's sister's house in JP.

Sunday:
I bike to the Bermans' house, to buy a new compass from Larry (owner of Bermans O supply).
Ali meets me at the Bermans', to buy a ski-o map holder.
We leave Dan in Cambridge to hang out with his sister, and drive down to the Blue Hills.
Race, then return to JP to pick up Dan, return to Newton to get the rest of my stuff, and go back to Amherst.

Simple!

I hear that some people spend their weekends raking leaves and watching TV. What a strange concept.

Blue Hills Traverse

I was looking forward to the Blue Hills Traverse, because I thought it might go well, and be fun, but for whatever reason, a whole combination of reasons most likely, it was not fun. I actually haven't had that little fun in a race in years. I don't know why I didn't drop out, I guess its not in my nature to drop out of races. I had a glorious run of four years of no work-related stress, but school got hard the last couple weeks, and apparently I don't know how to deal with that anymore. The stress manifested itself in a pretty poor physical performance, and a worse mental one. I think my training log sums it up best, so I'm just reprinting that:

Orienteering race (Blue Hills Traverse) 2:41:27 16.15 km (10:00 / km) +572m 8:30 / km
ahr:171 max:190

Terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day. Not so much the orienteering, although that was hardly great, but just sort of all the little things that were adding up and I couldn't get my head past them so all these little things built into an awful blur of miserableness, and all sorts of little things that normally wouldn't bother me were just too much. My body felt frail out there, wobbly ankles, tired legs, being whipped by branches stung more than it should have. The pointy rocks were particularly hard to deal with today, and for the effort I was putting out, I just wasn't moving at all. Brief second wind (although you can't really have a second wind if you never had a first one) when Bob L caught up, and I was like, shit, I better start running again. But then the downward spiral of self pity over nothings started up again, and I just couldn't kick my head back into cheery-land, by control 23 I was sobbing, what caused that was a particularly stingy whack to the face of a white pine branch, something that I normally wouldn't even notice, and I stumbled down the hill towards 24 unable to see much for tears and hiccuping and all that, no real reason for it. So then I went ahead and spent 15 minutes on #24, just sort of whining to the world in a pathetic little way about how much I was hating life and hating rocks and hating the terrain and hating the park and hating the map and hating the course and hating the sport. Luckily Bob caught back up at that point, so I started orienteering again instead of wandering in circles at a quarter-Sharon mumbling to myself and sniffling.

Going to take a break from orienteering for a bit until I can have fun in the woods again. It was fun once, right?

Also going to get my shit back together in the rest of life; I suspect stress played a role today.


I feel like this facial expression sort of sums it up, as I jogged towards the finish...

Despite it being a time of year when I should be ramping up the volume, I need to back off from training until I can get the rest of my life in order. Working on that list of impending doom. Breathe in, breathe out, I hear that's how it goes!

Orienteering publicity, or the lack thereof

This is brilliant. Its in Polish, but, the reason its brilliant, is that it doesn't even matter. You totally get what orienteering is and how it works. The first 6 minutes basically explain the sport, how come Orienteering USA doesn't have something similar? Instead, they have this. Yawn. No wonder only old guys in their hiking boots and surveying compasses are attracted to this sport, I don't think that brochure mentions once that it is a race. I guess I shouldn't knock that brochure too much, I mean after spending 10 minutes to read the whole thing, I understood what orienteering was.

Sigh. I don't have time to take on a publicity campaign for a sport that doesn't care to be recognized as competitive... I guess that's why the serious orienteers move to Europe. At least there seems to be a growing consensus among the competitive runners in the US that we need to actually do something to change the face of our sport, and the new website is a good start. Too bad it can't also serve as a results database, then people might actually go there!

Impending doom

I'm doing my best not to A) whine too much, and B) drink too much more coffee. This whole grad school thing started out so easy, and then all of a sudden, all the shit that had been getting a nice breeze from the fan fell into it. I spent two days last week attempting some fieldwork, luckily I had a very competent FS research guy come along, he's been showing me the ropes and it makes things much easier. It still involves wading in streams in November, why did I pick a project that was going to be both wet and cold? Anyway, the problem with being out in the field (my two sites are in the West River watershed, VT, and Westfield River, MA - neither of which are particularly close...), is that the entire day is lost to getting any work done. So, that has been piling up, and I might have to give up my agreement with myself to not do any work on weekends. In Ed's words, "they don't pay you enough to work weekends". Who would have thought that school could possibly interfere with my racing lifestyle?

So last weekend, instead of studying for an exam, doing problemsets, or finishing my thesis proposal, I helped Brendan put on an orienteering race at Rocky Woods, in Medfield MA. Ed basically took it over, printing the maps (all fancy-like, with color separation and other printing terms I don't even understand), running the e-punching, and setting out and picking up his share of controls. It was a pretty low-key event, but everyone seemed to like the courses that Brendan and I had set - he set the advanced ones, I set the beginner ones, and boy is it hard to set beginner courses when you're used to trying to make things tricky.
The orange course - hardest beginner course before you move on to the advanced courses. "intermediate beginner".

I went straight from the orienteering meet to Lincoln Sudbury Highschool, to help Rob coach a NENSA coach's clinic. It was mostly Bill Koch coaches, and as Rob put it, super important to teach them the right stuff to teach the kids who'll eventually end up with us. I was in a pretty foul mood driving over there, feeling guilty about leaving the meet early (thus not helping to pick up any controls), feeling pressure that I should be doing schoolwork instead of coaching, all sorts of stuff just sort of building to a head. Luckily, coaching relieved that feeling of impending doom, and I was smiling again by the end of it. There is really nothing quite so rewarding as coaching people who want to learn. Maybe teachers feel like that, too, but its something about moving that does it for me.

By Sunday I was only feeling small amounts of doom-impendment, and after coaching the CSU practice in the morning, and Corey in the afternoon, on a gorgeous sunny Indian-summer day, I was even in a good mood. Managed to actually do some studying for the exam, and then Ed and I spent something like three hours playing in the kitchen. We made dolmades. With other stuff. Quite tasty.

Monday is always too early, in this case even earlier because I wanted to arrive early enough to do some more cramming. 5am hurts, but it was worth it, as the exam was easy and I was still riding on an adrenaline high for most of the day, crossing off many of the impending-doom-list items.

Whee! Now to just not add anything to that impending-doom-list.

Norwottuck training

Mt. Norwottuck and I have a rocky relationship. It started in 2005, when I did a Billygoat there, completely unprepared. I've talked about this Billygoat before, its the one known as the hardest Billygoat, with a 21% DNF rate, and only 48% of starters finished within the time limit. An inadequate breakfast and the first hot day of the year left me totally bonked and staggering around into trees. I was one of those overtime finishers.

I thought maybe Norwottuck and I could move past that rough spot in our history, especially now that I live out here, but it seems that area will always give me trouble. Last week, Ali and I headed out to work on moving smoothly through junky woods, and things were going ok until about #9 on the course we'd designed, where I just got totally thrown off, and couldn't recover. It was an ugly day, a bit of a soul-crusher; thank god it hadn't been a race.

You can see how after I got to #10, I just gave up and ran home. All those pointy rocks, all those little pine trees in your way, it was just an unpleasant training session.

I thought I'd give it a go again this week, when Phil mentioned that he'd like to do some compass training. I set up a corridor course, where the map is all whited out except for a corridor of terrain between controls. The idea is to use your compass to go in the right direction. The penalty for leaving the corridor is pretty high, because there is no way to relocate. We didn't bring along a full map, which was silly, but there ya go.
This went even worse than last week. I made a 5 minute error to #1; I'm actually quite impressed that I found it at all, after totally leaving the corridor. #2 was alright, but then I got pushed south by an expanded beaver pond on my way to #3, and never actually went to the right area. That is a danger when there is nothing in the woods, but anyway, that threw me off on my way to 4, and I was just moving waaaay too slowly, trying to make things match up. Just having so much trouble running. Luckily I figured out where I was, and got to the control location eventually.

Another minute or two evaporated near 5, I was in the right spot, but without being able to see the massive reentrants on my map, I just couldn't put two and two together until I'd relocated off the little lake. Sloppy sloppy. I tried to get my act back together on the way to 6, but was just moving so slowly, that I got depressed. I slogged on to 7, and then had to decide whether or not I wanted to bail, or keep going over the mountain. I thought about bailing, just because I wasn't having that much fun, but eventually decided to keep going, since it wasn't that much longer. Up to the top, and then I jogged down the trail, which was mostly in the corridor. Things were going well, and I was moving faster again, but then managed to completely overrun #10, ending up almost at the road. I took that as a sign that I should just go home, and stumbled back to the car to meet Phil, who had been waiting almost 10 minutes. Not a fun time, but hopefully somewhat valuable in using my compass more intelligently... We've decided that future trainings should be done as partner exercises, when we have a partner. Much more fun that way.

Time for more ski training and less orienteering training - I'm going to Sweden in three weeks!