18 February 2015

Snowshoe Races - Feb 2015

Camp Saratoga 8K - 15 Feb 2015

Today's race was a shock. First, and foremost, it was cold. Normally when you start any winter activity, a hike, a run, whatever, you want to start off a bit cold, because your body will warm up. Today, through, I found myself wishing I had worn my balaclava, and a thicker pair of socks. My toes were so cold as we waited around for the race to start that I was clenching and releasing them just to keep blood circulating. I was punching my fists together, too, for the same reason. (Sometimes being an armchair mountaineer pays off.)

The race HQ, set up inside the old International Paper Winter Lodge, was toasty, but I had already checked in and gotten my bib, and I was eager to race. So, I wandered around outside, clenching toes, punching fists, chatting a bit here and there. I ran into one of the guys I had talked with at the Coles Woods races last year, and said hello, and that I needed to keep moving to stay warm.  Then the crowd started to move down the trail, and I figured I should follow. The starting line at these smaller events isn't always obvious, so it's good to wander when the crowd does. We all wandered back to a piece of tape stretched across the trail, turned around, and danced a bit as 100-200 of our closest running buddies (by proximity) filled in the trail ahead of us. I think the race director said something, but I honestly couldn't hear anything over the people talking nearby.  Then we were off.

Despite my decision to keep it slow, I found myself penned in after a few hundred yards, and started pushing and maneuvering for position. Eventually I found myself with other runners who were keeping a similar pace, and I settled in. The first leg of the run kept fairly close to the Stryder's 5K course (aside from our makeshift starting corral), so within the first mile we had two steep fins to climb up and then drop down off of. (They feel like eskers but they're not; they're probably remnants from the lake that once sat here.) They aren't particularly high, maybe 30', but they're high enough that everyone in my cluster of runners switched to hiking on the climb.

After that I slowly lost position as we continued along the 5K course. When we got to the turnoff for the Opdahl Farm, we took it, and immediately plunged into unsteady singletrack snow. At least a hundred pairs of snowshoes had gone through ahead of me, but every step had some lateral rock in it. Normally, after a few people have broken a trail, it's solid, but here it was like it was overbroken, if such a thing is even possible.  Out on the 5K course, we were on woods roads that had been groomed for XC skiing, so I could move to the side a few inches and avoid the sloppy mess. Here, the snow on either side was deep, and would have been too taxing to break at a running pace. I kept moving as best I could.  It reminded me of running in snowshoes over boot-broken ground.  Clearly, it pays to be up front.

We looped through the Opdahl Farm, past the church and eventually made our way back towards the trails of Camp Saratoga.  We cut through a small, pretty, open area, one of my favorites along the 5K course, which I think used to be an open sandy area back in the Scout camp days.  Instead of the normal 5K route, though, we took a different turn, and plunged into what looked like a trail cut by a snowblower: the walls were fairly straight, and about 18" tall.  This lead up and up to what appears to be the high point of the course, at 342', right around the 5K mark.

I was an hour in by this point, and had just been passed by a guy who appeared to only be walking.  I knew that I was going to be moving slowly due to the fact that I was still recovering from a stomach bug, but this was ridiculous.  On top of all of that, my knee started acting up.  It's an old injury, but I tread gently around it, since it has the ability to ruin many successive days of training.

I decided to just walk.

We (that is: I, and a few of the other back-of-the-packers,) worked our way back over to the 5K course just in time to cross Scout Road.  I found myself getting cold, and ran a few times to warm up, but couldn't muster enough energy to keep it up for very long.  So onward I crept.  The hills on this side are steeper, and on a few I found myself sliding down, despite the crampons on my snowshoes.  I did my best to go with it, and to keep a hand out in case a tree rose up to meet me.

Finally, eventually, I found myself running along the edge of the marshy area, and then across the bridge over Delegan Pond.  Alas, this was not the end of the course.  To ensure that we got our money's worth, we got to trudge past the finish line, past where the snack hut used to be, past the barbeque pits, past the old mess hall, then climb up a hill, cut through what was clearly a bushwhack, and then, finally, drop back down the hill and cross the finish line.

It was a bit anticlimactic, but all in all, it was a fun race.  I crossed the old parade ground, stopping at my car to take off my snowshoes, then headed over to the old IP Lodge again to get something hot to eat, drink, bathe in, whatever.  It didn't really matter.  I warmed up, chatted with the two people whom I knew, and then headed out.  I didn't stick around for the raffle because I had, once again, mysteriously, lost my raffle ticket.  This time I hadn't bothered to memorize the number, so there was no point in lingering.  I had promised to take my kids out after the race, and I needed to get home to fulfill that promise.

Saratoga Spa State Park 5K - 1 Feb 2015

Two weeks earlier, I had wandered across the mall (large, open area) of Saratoga Spa State Park, attempting to locate the starting line for a race that was about to start.  I found a banner that clearly stated it was the Start / Finish for the race, and figured that I had found it.

I was wrong.

Another runner, who had done the race in a previous year, directed us to the actual, unmarked starting line, which was along the carriage path in front of the unnamed building that sits across the mall from the Roosevelt Baths.  We lined up, the race director said a few words, and we were off.  We ran around the perimeter of the mall, then crossed the road and ducked in to the woods, not far from where I had seen the finish line.  We followed this path through the woods and then ran down to the Geyser picnic area along a gravel road.  There wasn't much snow on the ground, but it was enough that I didn't hear my crampons scraping very much on the gravel.

Once down in the picnic area, we cut across the first pedestrian bridge over Geyser Creek, and then ran through the woods back over to the gravel road, making our way up, over to, and then around the Peerless Pool, before plunging back down the way we had come.  This time, though, we followed the creek along the old carriage road, crossed the creek again, crossed the picnic area road again, and then climbed up a rather steep climb toward Columbia Pavillion.  Here I expected us to link up with the Five Mile Trail, but wisely the route avoided it, since the FMT in this section dances along a cliff.  Instead we cut straight through the woods and then linked up with the FMT once it was past the potentially dangerous section.  We found North South Road, ran along it for a minute, past the ticket booths, and then ducked back in to the woods near Ferndell Pavillion.  We were on the final kilometer of trail, so I started pushing hard.  From here, it was all carriage roads to the finish line, and mostly level.  I managed to hold the pace for most of the last stretch, enough so that when I crossed the finish line I was ready to hurl.

We warmed up in a room inside the Administration Building, enjoying a spread as wonderful as the one shared at the race today.  The Stryders definitely know how to warm up after a snowshoe run.  I look forward to running in future snowshoe races.

Savoy Mountain Trail Race - 17 Aug 2014

(This was originally posted on a test blog hosted on svbtle.)

When I look back on this race, 3 months later, the only word that comes to mind is: broken.

I felt myself burning out in the run-up to this race, and I scaled back my training to try and compensate. It didn’t help; I felt undertrained in the race, and broken afterwards. It was somewhere around 15.2 miles in length, and the only flat parts were on the last mile or so. Everything else was rolling, so that coming down off of the mountain was as brutal as going up. Not that any portion of it was truly brutal, but it was way more than I was expecting. There was a touch of technical stuff near the summit, but nothing terrible. There was a guy running with what appeared to be running crutches, and he managed to get through the technical stuff, and beat me by at least an hour.

I don’t know what else to say about it. It took 2.5 months for me to enjoy running again after this race. It broke me, badly. It took another race to rebuild me. I’ll get to that in about 5 more posts.

Putting aside my personal difficulties, this was a very cool race. The people were pretty laid back, and they had a big picnic waiting for runners as they finished. The view from the summit of Spruce Hill was pretty, as was the view from the drive in: my route took me over the Petersburg Pass and along the hairpin turn on Route 2. Just past thexperience hairpin turn, I saw the BNRC trailhead for the Hoosac Range Trail, and the tables for water stop #3 set up in the parking lot.

A few other thoughts stand out in my mind…


  1. The Hoosac Range is moody. For the first several hours the threat of rain dominated the course, but nothing fell aside from some mist in the air. After that, the sun came out and stayed out.
  2. The course crossed over two power line cuttings on the way up to the summit of Spruce Hill, and then again on the way back. On the way back, as I was running toward one of the cuttings, I heard a cacophony off to the left (downslope). I thought, nay hoped, briefly, that the finish line had been moved up to here, and there was a magical shortcut to bring me back to my car. No such luck; it was a hoard of 4x4s and their drivers, who had come up the service road to have a party, apparently.
  3. The out-and-back format meant that I got to see every other runner on the course; I had just cleared the photo area coming off of the summit nub when the leaders came tearing past from the opposite direction. I did my best to encourage everyone.
  4. I need to so a lot more training before I tackle anything this hard again.
  5. Topos never give the full picture. The terrain looked fairly simple. It wasn’t.
  6. I don’t want to race anything I haven’t already seen for a long time. I had thought about reviewing the course ahead of time but never actually got around to doing that. When I was recovering at the end, I joked with one of the other runners that I was glad I hadn’t run this course in advance, because there’s no way I would have come to the race. In hindsight, I would have known it was too much, and I would have saved myself a lot of trouble. Live and learn.
  7. My salt strategy for this race was insufficient, and that contributed to my pain. On the last third of the race, I felt my energy draining, so I kept taking in fuel, but I never recovered. As it turns out, I had switched fuels a week or so before the race, due to some intestinal issues, but I hadn’t noticed that the fuel I was now using didn’t have salt in it. By the time I realized my mistake, it was to late to correct it.

Well, that’s about it. I will be back to this race, and I will do better. Since I’ve had time to think about it, I’ve decided is time to push myself harder in training, and to start winning my age division in racing.

Until next time, be excellent to each other.


11 January 2015

Garmin Woes

I've had this problem a few times now: I'll record an activity on my 310XT, go to upload it later, and the sync agent fails to pull the activity.  My suspicion is that there is a bad block in the flash memory on the watch, and the watch hardware is old enough where it can't work around it.  I had this problem with the old Garmin ANT+ Agent under OS/X, and I just experienced it under Linux, with Garmin Forerunner 610 Extractor, a Python script that does a similar job to the ANT+ Agent.  What's interesting is that the new script always downloads all of the activity data, so I've been keeping the old activities around, and I now know that the error occurs somewhere between 540k-584k of memory usage, and that the value equates to 24% of the watch's memory, based on whah the watch says.  So it's a good guess that the watch has about 2 megs of memory on board.

(The sizes above are the byte count and the filesystem size of the downloaded activities.)

The solution here is to wipe out the old activities (and occasionally reset the watch), but it's still frustrating.  Luckily I only lost one run; there are times when I'll go for a few weeks without downloading any run data.