bryan wann :: binary fury

A small geocaching trip today turned into a 9 mile hike along the Greenbelt. I got it in my head to find a trail that I could use to cut across the Greenbelt to be able to walk/run to work. The cache today was in the vicinity of a trail that followed a transmission line right of way, so I took of exploring. Fortunately, the right of way is an established mountain bike trail, and at the end of the ROW clearing there was a trail leading down to the creek bottom. There was a trail leading to the north and south along the creekbed. I went south for a while and wound up at a familiar place, the Sculptured Falls. Back in March, the creek was running and one had to skip from rock to rock to cross the creek. Today it was bone dry, save for a small pool at the bottom of the falls.

Ideally, to get to either our current office or new office, I need to continue going northeast. One mile south is the Twin Falls 360/MoPac access, 2 miles north is the Camp Craft “Hill of Life” access. Looking at Google Earth, there appears to be trails leading southwest from 360 down to the falls that might solve my problem. Exploring those will be an adventure for next weekend.

I hadn’t been there before, so I hiked up to the Camp Craft trailhead. The Hill of Life is about a half mile of gravel road that keeps going up up up from the creek bed. Apparently the promising local trail running club kids do repeats up this hill, those animals. I went back to the creekbed, trying to find GCJQ4V. This is the second time I judged the best way in wrong. The GPS said “.25 miles southwest”. I said “how hard could it be?” I followed a mountain bike trail which led me up a steep rocky hill. Since this cache promised a great view of the skyline, I figured I must be on track. Eventually after several minutes of following the winding trail, I wasn’t ascending anymore and didn’t seem to be getting any closer. I didn’t feel like bushwhacking a quarter mile so I abandoned the hunt and went off in search of my transmission line waypoint, following another mountain bike trail. There was a deep ravine between me and the waypoint, so I gave in and went bushwhacking. I climbed up the hill and found the right-of-way. Tired, I headed for home.

Now that I’ve reviewed my GPS waypoints and the terrain on Google Maps, turns out I would’ve stumbled across GCJQ4V had I kept going west on the trail before I bailed and crossed the ravine. Again, an adventure for another weekend.

Dark at 6:30 PM. How weird. After running yesterday and hiking today, my feet, calves and quads positively have burning coals in them. I want to sleep to give my body a rest, but I’m too wired on caffeine.

Today was a fun day of Geocaching. I found three caches, struck out on two. The last one was an adventure in getting lost in white people suburbia. I had set out to find GCH3CZ, so I parked at the recommended dead-end street at the trailhead. Somehow I got off trying to go to the coordinates for GCYK7E instead, which is near the same neighborhood. I took off down a mountain bike trail for a mile. It wasn’t feeling right because I was going west a lot and I knew it was in a northern direction, but the trail was looping around a lot so I kept on going. I wound up in the back yard of some houses, I knew at that point something was wrong. I punched in what I thought was the parking spot for GCH3CZ to backtrack, but it was really turned out to be the trailhead for GCYK7E. blah! I didn’t know the neighborhood (who pays attention when you’re going 20 mph on a bicycle?), so I walked about two more miles finding the right street and back across the neighborhood to where I had parked my truck.

It was nearing sunset, cool outside, so parents and their kids were out in their front yards were playing. Fortunately I didn’t see any spooked parents grab their kids and whisk them inside as my dirty and stinky presence was made.

One pound of fat is about 3,500 calories. To lose eight to ten pounds in a month through exercise, a person would need to burn at least 7,000 calories a week, or 1,000 calories a day. I’ve been trying to get my head around how much effort that is. That’s a solid hour of about 5-6 miles of running, or about two hours of 15-18 mph cycling, every day for a month. I’m going to say that an hour of Krav Maga qualifies as “intensive kickboxing” which will burn about 800 calories an hour. All this means that weight loss is a lot of sweat. Stupid fucking not-cycling-all-summer.

Last week there was an article (which now requires registration, boo) in the Statesman about Lance training for the NYC marathon. The thing that struck me was during his informal time trial at the highschool, he ran a 4:51 mile. wow!

Where’s a person gotta go to learn Farsi in Austin?

And speaking of sweat, I really wish my apartment had access to a sauna. I think the Finns are onto something.