Archive for the ‘Sports’ Category

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Sycamore Scramble

Saturday, February 6th, 2010

The local orienteering club, BOK, is organizing an A-meet (i.e. a national event), February 20-21. I’ve signed up to be one of the setter/vetters.

It’s very interesting how we decided to make sure we minimize the risk for mistakes when setting up controls, and in a way it’s an OCD-er’s dream. There are at least three setters that will go out and hang ribbons where the controls are placed. Then, two other persons (the vetters) have to go and vet (approve) the location chosen by the setter. Setters have the liberty to move the control from where the course designer suggested the location to be, for example if a feature is missing or is too dangerous to get to; vetters should try hard not to move controls, unless they were set wrong.

This gives you triple accountability for a control’s location, not to mention that some of the club members will have a practice run of the courses the week prior to the meet (which happens to be next weekend).

Today I spent more than 4 hours vetting. Now I am barely moving. Probably getting into the warm house after all that time in the balmy 34-36°F (1-2°C) did not help much. However, this is exactly what I need, hopefully the small injuries I’ve been accumulating over the past couple of months will eventually go away to let me go back to running on a more regular schedule.

I’ve also worked on a solution to download data from an Sportident box on a Linux computer (it might work on Windows too, since it’s written in python, and I believe pyserial does work on Windows. It has sound to alert users if their download was unsuccessful (more about that in a future post), and generates a PDF for the splits and total time; I think the printing part is going to be the one that will cause most of the problems, I seem to have bad luck with printers in general. (The printing part would definitely not work on Windows). At some point I will publish the code, maybe someone else has a use for it.

Posted in Orienteering, Sports | No Comments »

Fall activities

Thursday, October 15th, 2009

A quick update on my non-work related activities.

A lot of orienteering lately:

  • Quick white course at Lake Bond with my daughter a few weeks ago.
  • A very eventful Birkhead Wilderness run. You can read the report in the comments – I don’t think there was one single participant to get all the controls right. I messed up the first two and had a relatively clean run after that, especially after I started to pace count.
  • A quick Bond Park sprint. I kind of had the home field advantage, and I was still slower than the fast runners.

I ran for the first time with the Raleigh Trail Runners. I knew I signed up for pain, and pain it was. 2.5 miles at a slow speed, 6 uphill sprints on the Graveyard Hill at Umstead (off of Old Reedy Creek), and back 2.5 miles; last 2 miles were 7:50 and 6:50 minutes respectively. Maybe we were trying to make it back before it got too dark. As I said to the other (3) runners, it’s no surprise so few people sign up for hill sprints.

My daughter started to take piano lessons, so a piano had to be acquired. We got a digital piano which seemed like a good compromise of quality vs. price.

Between fixing stuff up around the house I’d like to get back to some recreational programming (picking up Flex would be nice).

Posted in Babbling, Orienteering, Running | No Comments »

Prize for trash

Tuesday, September 1st, 2009

One of the novel ideas (at least for me) for the Gleneagles Challenge Adventure Racing was a prize for the most unusual piece of trash one can collect from the course. I think it was a great way to encourage us to clean up the courses, but even more so to become painfully aware of the price of littering.

It is not fun running with a wheelbarrow :-) I kept seeing it in a ditch at Lake Bond for the past couple of weeks, and was wondering who’s going to pick up; my teammates decided to break it in two pieces (the cup and the handles – there was no wheel), and we took turns carrying the parts. That was enough to earn us the prize :-)

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My First Adventure Race

Saturday, August 29th, 2009

Today I participated in the Gleneagles Challenge. I must say it was a lot more fun than I expected from an event that takes 4.5 hours and requires you to be constantly on the move.

About 20 minutes of running, 30 minutes in the kayak, an orienteering course and a lot of bike riding. The bike’s odometer showed 19.33 miles when I got back home (that included about 3 miles to get to Lake Bond and back).

Thanks to Bryan, Rob and Justin for letting me join them. Overall I think we did pretty well, second place when we only aimed to finish the race in one piece.

Posted in Orienteering, Running, Sports | No Comments »

Vote for Cary as the best place to play tennis

Tuesday, July 21st, 2009

Please vote for Cary!

The winner of the 2009 Best Tennis Town award will take home $100,000 to be used for community wide programming or facility enhancements that the winning entrant endorses, and the community will be recognized during the 2009 U.S. Open.

According to the town of Cary:

To support tennis, the Town of Cary constructed the Cary Tennis Park with 30 championship lighted courts, later converting one court to four permanent 36-foot QuickStart courts, making the Tennis Park the largest in North Carolina and one of the largest in the Southeast.  The Town also boasts 25 other tennis courts at four parks — Annie L. Jones Park, Harold S. Dunham Park, Robert V. Godbold Park, and Middle Creek School Park.   Furthermore, the Town has assembled top notch staff charged with operating the tennis program with a team based philosophy.

In addition to the Town’s tennis facilities, there are more than 200 tennis courts in Cary including public courts, private clubs, schools, businesses, and HOA facilities.  There are more than 20,317 people participating in organized tennis activities in Cary including Town programs, Western Wake Tennis Association tournaments and leagues, private club programs, corporate leagues and adult social leagues.  Many of these organizations work together to provide adult league play, junior league play, charitable organization fundraiser events, QuickStart tennis programs with local elementary school PE classes, Bridge II Sport’s wheelchair tennis program and local public and private high school teams.

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27-mile week

Saturday, May 30th, 2009

Yes, I ran more than a marathon.

Unfortunately, spread over 6 different days.

Last week I ran 24 miles (4 days 4.5 miles each, a longer weekend 6-mile run), and this week I wanted to increase the distance by 10%. That was 6 days with 4.5 miles each – tomorrow is rest day.

I am not training for anything at the moment, so I am pretty happy, especially after coming from a 3-week vacation where the only running I did was a 15-minute downhill Tâmpa in Bra?ov. I will probably try to keep it at this level, I have no interest in increasing the weekly distance at this point.

Posted in Running, Sports | No Comments »

Sprained ankles

Saturday, May 30th, 2009

Thankfully, the title is not about me.

I was running my usual trail course today and found a lady who sprained her ankle so bad, the pain almost made her pass out. I helped her hop on one leg to a house less than 100 yards away, where a very nice gentleman drove her home.

She mentioned that she doesn’t want to go to urgent care because she recently got laid off and has no medical insurance. This is so sad on so many levels. Silly economy. Stupid medical system.

Posted in Running, Sports | No Comments »

What? No rain?

Sunday, March 29th, 2009

The past two events (Lake Johnson Night-O, directed by yours truly, and Schenck Forest) were extremely wet, coming after several days of rain _and_ with rain during the event.

Today’s event at Umstead didn’t look great either if you were to trust the weather forecasts at the beginning of the week. However, as the event got closer and the forecasts predicted the rain would stop some time Saturday night, we’ve seen a lot of people registering. I know because I happen to be on the list that gets the notifications.

Today was a bit windy, but otherwise sunny and – what a change – dry! Mostly. There was still a lot of mud everywhere, and on some steep hills I felt like skiing. But coming back with my clothes completely dry, that’s definiltely different.

Jozef designed a beautiful and very challenging course. The Green course was longer than our Red usually is (6.7km), and Red was 7.4km. If that doesn’t sound much, maybe I should add the elevation changes that pretty much killed my legs by the time I got to control 13 (out of 19). By then I was obviously no longer thinking straight, I lost probably at least 10 minutes looking for control 16 after I passed it probably by 30m. Then I lost a few minutes at control 19 (the last), a trivial one, because I took the wrong clearing (which was not mapped), instead of the obvious one with some man-made objects in it.

In a way I wish I stopped after #13 and call it a Green day; on the other hand I found out how out of shape I am (not that I didn’t know, having skipped some of my runs for wimpy reasons like “the trail is wet” and “I’m too tired to wake up”). 106 minutes of running (and walking towards the end) proved to be quite tough on those hills. Once the results are posted, I’ll know how bad I did compared to others.

I probably need to train for a specific goal, maybe I’ll set one after we come back from vacation in Romania, mid-May-ish.

To quote a slogan I read on a t-shirt: “procrastinators, unite tomorrow!”

(to be fair, I know I will not train while on vacation, except for maybe a food contest, so there’s little reason to plan for something now).

Posted in Orienteering, Running | No Comments »

Gorgeous day for around-the-home activities and mapping at Lake Bond

Saturday, February 7th, 2009

After a stretch of cold days, today started at 34°F (at least started _for me_, when I stepped outside around 8:45 for a quick run). After that, trimmed the crape myrtle in front of the house (by then the temperature got above 65°F), went for a couple of hours back to Lake Bond with my son (throwing rocks and twigs in the lake is fun!), then back home for an hour and a half, then back to Lake Bond (third time!) to do some mapping on the North-Western side of the park – and I ran out of daylight.

All in all, a great day to spend most of the time outside.

Posted in Orienteering, Sports | No Comments »

Refreshing map at Bond Park

Monday, February 2nd, 2009

Sunday was the second day I spent doing map refreshes at Bond Park. As Vladimir described in several posts, the map is very outdated. I found lots of features missing from the map, and some mapped features that no longer exist. A lot of construction took place too, major trails are now paved, new buildings were erected etc.

Today I checked if what I recorded last week was accurate (and it was), and then handled the rest area North of the dam, around the rope course and South of the parking lot at the community center (or maybe Senior center, now that I think about it).

I am still learning, both how to go on the field and record features and how to use the CAD program for drawing the map. But it is a lot of fun.

Posted in Orienteering | No Comments »

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