Training Log Archive: blairtrewin

A fairly casual circuit of central Olomouc with Liggo in the time window in between the WOC sprint qualifying and final. Rather warm and humid, felt reasonable while running but not spectacular. Most memorable moment was seeing two people fishing a third person (presumably drunk, but conscious) out of the river.

I thought this would be a long but fairly straightforward trip from Paris to Olomouc, but it turned out to be anything but. The legs were supposed to be Paris-Mannheim, then an overnight train to Dresden, then a connection to Prague, then another one to Olomouc (hopefully linking up with a few of the other Australians in Prague).

First hint of trouble was when the train (one of the fast ICE ones) was stopped at the first station in Germany and we had to change to another one. Remarkably, we only ended up 20 minutes late in Mannheim after this (although it´s fortunate I speak some German as the announcements telling us what platform to go to, which contradicted the multilingual ones we got on the first train, were only in German), and the overnight train was on time. Early the next morning, though, I woke up to an announcement that I thought said we were 140 minutes late. That can´t be right - this is Germany. I ask someone else in the compartment. It is right. We also got free coffee and 25% off the train ticket (but I suspect the process of claiming it will be more hassle than it´s worth). With this I missed the connection in Dresden, and everyone else moved on from Prague without me (my texting finger got a fair workout).

Piecing together what happened, an ICE train derailed in Cologne on Friday (spectacular but apparently no serious injuries). I think what´s then happened was that all other ICE trains were pulled off service at the first chance for checks, and with lots of trains being pressed into service as replacements, there was no locomotive to pull our half of the train when it split into Berlin and Dresden halves in the middle of the night. I woke a few times during the night and thought the ride was so smooth that it hardly seemed like we were moving - turned out we weren´t. In the circumstances I think we did well to be only two hours late - if it was V-line we´d still be standing by the side of the road waiting for them to beg, borrow or steal some buses.

The eventfulness wasn´t over. I arrived at Prague to see the station hall filled by about 400 teenagers (floorball players, as it happens) and hoped they were on a different train. They weren´t. This meant a very crowded trip indeed for the last leg, although others who came on different trains said those were just as bad. Finally stepped onto the platform at Olomouc 24 hours (minus 30 seconds) after leaving Paris.

A longer session in Paris.

David (the friend I'm staying with) is a pretty reasonable runner in his own right - some of you will have come across him in the Sydney Corporate Cup in the 1990s and early 2000s (and in my first foray into competitive running, under-10s at Little Athletics, my first objective was to finish on the same lap as him in the 1500). He's not doing much at the moment, being in recovery mode from doing a 250km race in the Gobi Desert (as you do), so hasn't been coming out with me, but did provide some excellent pointers to reasonably traffic-free routes. Today's route first went close to the Bastille, before picking up a path along what I'd guess was a former elevated railway to a loop through the Bois de Vincennes, a forest on the east edge of town. (Trivia question - how many prisoners were freed when the Bastille was stormed in 1789?).

Even in the urban areas I've been lucky with the traffic the last couple of days; even had a couple of friendly gendarmes stop the traffic for me this morning (OK, so they were really interested in the jam that was building on the other side of the intersection).

Despite all these advantages (and a cooler morning), though, it was a pretty ordinary run. Although there's been nothing intense this week, it is the first time for a very long time (maybe even the first ever) that I've gone over an hour on five days in a row and maybe that makes a difference. If it does then it should be sorted out quickly as I'll be spending most of the next 24 hours travelling.

Paris in early July is, not surprisingly, tourist central (and spending an hour waiting to go up the Eiffel Tower is a bit annoying), but there's an awful lot to see here and I've only scratched the surface in two days (and the food's good too). On the way to Olomouc tonight.

Did make a sighting of a genuine Australian-style boganmobile parked outside Notre Dame, complete with spoilers, oversized exhaust and fluffy dice. I guess it's progress that suburban Parisians are hotting up cars instead of setting them on fire (although the locals insist that the troubles of a couple of years back were blown out of proportion by the media, - something which of course has never happened in the history of the world).

C • Trivia answer: 2

Event: WOC 2008
 

Last time I was in Paris I spent precisely 22 minutes in the city. It was one of my epic European overland trips back in 1994 (Fiesch, Switzerland to Winchester, England in a day, involving six mainline trains, four underground/emtro ones, a bus and a ferry), and I had that long to get from Gare de Lyon to Gare de Nord. After a sprint up the stairs of the latter (almost flattening an old lady in the process) I made it with 15 seconds to spare.

This time I've got two days here, staying with a friend of very long standing (like since pre-school), and long-time partner in backyard cricket (and once a rogaine). Couldn't ask for a much better location - within 200 metres of Notre Dame. It must be very expensive real estate but when your job over the last three years has been running a commodities fund I guess you can afford very expensive real estate. (It also gives him licence to travel on company money pretty much anywhere in the world where there's a mine, so we were comparing notes last night on the highlights of Almaty, Kazakhstan).

In a big city one's choice of running routes is constrained a bit by finding options that are reasonably traffic-free. Rivers are often good for this and the Seine was the centrepiece of this run, going down as far as a park about 20 minutes away, then coming back up as far as the Louvre and finishing up with a circuit of Notre Dame. Felt reasonable without being spectacular. This week is really a week of maintenance training.

C • are you heading straight to... 3

In France for the first time since the 1996 World Cup events (and that was so close to the Swiss border it hardly counts). Yesterday turned out to be one of those days with lots of petty irritations (think walk a couple of km with your gear from the bus station to the train station, go through one slow queue and then another because all the ticket machines are broken, then discover that you're at the wrong station anyway and have another couple of km to walk), but all was happy again after a nice dinner on a nice square in Bordeaux.

This morning was a longer one, taking advantage of the fact that my train didn't leave until 10.47. I plotted a course on a map at the hotel which seemed reasonably promising, along the river and then across to a lake. It was a reasonably good route on the whole, although I hadn't noticed that my route took me past the Place de Reception des Dechets Urbains and the Unite de Traitement des Eaux Usees, which sound a lot better in French than they do in English (the tip and sewage treatment works respectively - at least they didn't smell too much). Spotted a few other groups of runners near the lake, including one group carrying a ladder - presumably firemen in training. Came back inland from the river; as sometimes happens in unknown cities I spent some of this on a more major road than I would have liked because I didn't trust my map memory enough to be more adventurous, until reaching the stadium at which point I knew it was 4km due east (this time I remembered to take my compass).

I feared the worst for this run when my Achilles was sore when I woke up but it settled quickly, and after a mundane first half the second half was very smooth, especially the last 30 minutes.

The next mission of the day was to get to Chateauroux for the end of today's stage of the Tour. I hadn't planned this trip around the Tour, but when I saw that my planned route could intercept it with some minor modifications I thought 'why not'? For a while I thought I wasn't going to make it because we had a 44-minute connection in Limoges and left Bordeaux 43 minutes late, but made up enough time en route to have a little to spare. As might be expected the Tour (and its build-up) is quite a spectacle, although it's all over in 10 seconds once the riders arrive - I was on a corner about 1.5km from the finish. Didn't find out who actually won the stage until I got to Paris.

C • Good finish to watch 3

As my birthday usually falls during the peak of the European orienteering season (in most years, although not this one, it's during JWOC), I've spent it in a lot of different places over the years. Spain and, later today, France are this year's additions to a list which includes the UK, Switzerland, Austria, Germany, New Zealand, Romania, Finland, Lithuania, Canada and Japan (and, within Australia, in addition to the obvious Canberra and Melbourne, Jindabyne, Newcastle, Bendigo, Warwick, Darwin and Dubbo).

This morning's run involved exploring the nice bits of Santander, especially the beach district about 4km east of the city centre. I wish I'd known about this (and the fact that it contains all the good places to stay and eat) 12 hours ago because I ended up in one of the worst dives I've stayed in in my 37 years - this sometimes happens when you enter a place without plans or information and take pot luck. I then decided I'd at least put the money I'd saved into eating somewhere decent but struck out there too. Hanging around the bus interchange was a more appealing prospect - albeit a decision assisted by the fact that it's a wireless hotspot. (I'm sitting there now). Hopefully I have better luck in the sleeping and eating department in Bordeaux tonight. (At least I slept well, perhaps because I didn't get any 1 a.m. calls on my mobile from Australian radio stations like I did on Sunday night).

The setting of the run was pleasant - for an urban centre it has some very good beaches (and although I didn't get that far, the municipal golf course, on the end of a headland, looks spectacular). The run was a bit more mundane, sometimes settling pretty well on the flat but rather weak whenever I had to go uphill (which wasn't that often). Achilles again a bit touchy.

Not surprisingly most of the main Spanish sports paper (there were copies floating around on yesterday's bus) was devoted to Wimbledon (I was a little surprised that there wasn't an outbreak of horn-blowing - perhaps they're a bit more sedate in La Coruna). The obligatory football coverage was devoted to what appeared to be a tournament for teams representing immigrants to Spain. Either there are not many Chinese in Spain or they're not very good at football (or both) because China's record was 0 wins, 0 draws, 3 losses, goals for 1, goals against 42. Not surprisingly Morocco is doing well. Australia doesn't appear to be represented; the most famous Australian immigrant to Spain (now deceased) probably wouldn't have been much help to them even when he was alive.

C • happy birthday Blair! 3

First run since WMOC, an early morning session in La Coruna. Not much was happening on the streets at 6.45 which is no bad thing for a run. Nothing happens terribly early in Spain, and particularly so in a place which is effectively in a time zone 2 1/2 hours ahead of what it should be and so doesn't get light until close to 7 even in midsummer. It was raining lightly, which is fitting for one of the wettest parts of the country. (The rain in Spain doesn't fall on the plain - it falls mainly on exposed northern and western coasts like it does everywhere else at similar latitudes).

The first target of the run was the Estadio Municipal de Riazor, home of Deportivo Coruna, one of my several adopted European football teams - others, in addition to Norwich City, include 1860 Munich and Tromso IL. (The last of these introduced the world to Arctic football when they beat Chelsea in a blizzard in a 1997 Cup Winners Cup match (before losing the return leg 7-1), and more recently saw Viking traditions introduced to football when a supporter sacrificed a goat on the pitch before the season's last home game in the hope it would save them from relegation - it didn't).

After that came a circuit of the headland which the old town largely occupies, which was a lot of fun, particularly a couple of kilometres around the old lighthouse which is a park. This coastline is riddled with rocks and little coves, some of them holding beaches only a few metres long. (I'd have loved this place as a ten-year-old). Finished off with a bland stretch down the main drag back to the hotel, past a queue of people waiting for a government office to open. The run itself had its high and low points, and my Achilles was a bit more fragile than I would have liked (especially on the cobbles), but not a bad session on the whole.

Spotted a few signs of the local politics. Like some other parts of Spain, Galicia has its own separatist movement, although as far as I can tell, the only evidence of illegality carried out in its name, unlike its Basque counterpart, is the intermittent pilfering of the letter 'L' from public signs (La Coruna is A Coruna in Galician - bus destination signs sidestep the issue by just saying 'Coruna').

Spent the rest of the day on a bus along the north coast, a lovely trip with mountains on one side and coves and estauries on the other for much of the way. Now in Santander.

C • Canaries!?!? 3