The Attack Tree of 2012

Way back in the 60s, my father in law bought some woodland in Vermont.  He's no longer able to travel there anymore, so for the last few years it's just been Dawne and myself.  One of the last things he did up there was to build a very nice, 8x8 foot shed to store the mower and other tools.  Unfortunately, before building the shed he only cleared a 9x9 foot patch of land.  So not only does the shed have trees very close to it, but there's also no room for the trees to fall if you did cut them down.  Oh, and did I mention the trees are crowding themselves out and many are dead or dying?

As a result, we've been clearing a number of trees so that the one right near the shed have a place to fall.  If you've never cut down a tree before, it's usually a very simple process: Cut a wedge on one side of the tree (on the side where you want it to fall), then make a back cut.  This leaves a small section of wood that acts as a hinge and controls the direction of the fall.  When everything goes according to plan, you end up with a stump that looks like this:

Now there are several ways this can go wrong.  Most likely, the tree will try and go the wrong direction, but usually when this happens it just pinches the saw in the back cut and doesn't actually fall.  If it's a small tree, you can simply push it over in the desired direction by hand.  It's actually kind of fun to do this with a 30' tall tree.

The other thing that can go wrong, and I didn't take any pictures of this when it happened, is that the tree falls in the desired direction, but gets hung up in the branches of another tree.  In this instance, I whacked the tree with a sledge hammer to knock it off the stump, which made it a couple feet shorter but still otherwise standing beside itself, so to speak.  It actually took a couple iterations of cutting and hitting it with the sledge to get it to fall over.  Whew I thought, glad that's done with.  Just one more very dead tree to cut down today.  And because it lost it's top, it's not going to hang up in any branches.

But this was no ordinary tree.  It was one of the rare zombie attack trees.  The real problem was that it was 6 inches in diameter, but only the center-most inch had any real structure too it.  Dawne had leaned against it earlier and almost pushed it over by herself.  When the saw cut through the structure on the back cut, the tree fell in whatever direction it wanted.  This is not a pretty stump:

And of course, it fell in the worst possible direction:

Oh crap.  Well, might as well get the camera.  Looking at the picture again, I just noticed that the bottom of the tree is several feet away from the stump.  How did that happen?  Anyhow, there was no significant damage to the shed.  Also note in this picture the two trees, right next to the shed, one of which is about an inch from the roof.  Also, you may notice two white birches behind the shed.  Those are actually different forks of the same tree with a very wide base, which is only about 3 feet on the other side.  We may need to call in the professionals for that one.

How does one get a tree off a shed without doing further damage?  I hate ladders, but up onto the roof I went to try and push the tree off.  Too heavy to push.  Perhaps I can just grab a branch and roll it off.  Oh wait, if I do that the branches will try to knock me off the ladder, so I should break as many as I can off first.  And it still doesn't want to roll off easily.  So off the ladder and...

... ah yeah, when I try to roll it some of the other branches are in the way.  So I cut those off with a pole saw and get out the log roller to roll it off the roof.  But first, Dawne suggests that we move the ramp out of the way so the tree doesn't land on it.  Okay, let's put it over... there!  And the tree gets rolled off the roof.

And lands on the ramp anyway.  Grrr, but job completed except for cutting it up into sections small enough to be carried away.

Afterwards, we have a small clearing with a number of stumps to show for our effort:

That was my weekend, how was yours?  :-)

Early Morning Run

I've been trying to increase the distance of my runs this summer, but with the heat of summer and a busy work schedule, I've had to do the unthinkable:  Get up early to run.

So far it hasn't always been pretty.  Yesterday, the alarm went off at 5am, and by 5:15am I was up and turning off the alarm, then downstairs to make coffee because running without caffeine would only add to the challenge.  Finally by 6am I'm ready to tear myself away from Facebook, gulp down a bowl of chocolate cheerios, get into my running clothes, fill my water bottle, make a protein shake for after the run, and out the door by 6:15.

I’d like to say the run itself was ordinary, except that I started off way too fast and faded to slightly faster than a sane target pace by the end.  It was ideal weather and resulted in a personal best for the route.

Arriving back home after the run, it’s time for a second breakfast of the aforementioned protein shake and a bagel.

Then it’s time to change out of my sweaty clothes and get into my greasy ones and go out into the garage to continue rotating my tires.  This is a simple job I like to do myself, even though the last set of tires I bought included free rotation.  It’s not really about rotating the tires, but performing a periodic check of the tires and suspension bits.  It’s also about spending some non-sedentary time out in the garage as opposed to sitting in a waiting room.  And finally, it’s about making sure the lugs are tightened correctly, so they can be easily removed when you have a flat tire in an inconvenient location.  I have had 3 flat tires in my driving career and each one amounted to about a 15 minute delay.

But I digress, and once again, time runs out before the job is finished, and I must shower and run off to work.  In retrospect, I was up for a little over 4 hours, and got in a total of 2 hours of running and garage time.  It always seems that I end up with a 50-50 split of productive time and “overhead”.  I’d like to get closer to a 75-25 split.  Probably the first step towards that is eliminating the first cup of coffee followed by the wait for it to kick in.  Can I really be outside and running within 30 minutes of the alarm going off?  Time will tell.

Ramping up the mileage

Time to dust off the blog and announce that I finally have a foothold at 30 miles a week of "running", having covered 30+ miles for three weeks straight now.  In the spirit of lies, damn lies, and statistics, I included the mileage from my recent hike of Mt. Monadnock to reach 34 miles this week.  On the other hand, if it wasn't included, I'd have the worlds most exhausting 28 mile week.  But I digress.

The reason for this uptick is not only the vague idea that I might try and run a fall marathon, but also that I've recently joined the SQRR team for the Vermont 100 on 100 relay race.  This means I'll be racing three legs totaling about 15-18 miles.

And since this is a multi-leg relay, instead of doing a single long run on the weekends, I'll be splitting the long run into several smaller runs with breaks in between, to better simulate the actual race conditions.  So today it was two 5.6 mile runs (on two different routes actually, total coincidence that they're the same mileage).  This meant coming home sweaty twice, obsessing over the numbers from my run twice, and showering twice (and trying to dry off with a towel that was still damp from the first shower).

Looks like I'm going to have to streamline my running logistics a bit, and maybe even (gasp) not keep detailed track of my heart rate and split times on every run!