Training Log Archive: blairtrewin

A bit later than usual after a 1.30am finish last night (or to be more precise, a 1.30 exit by me from the meeting, which I think ran until 3 or 4 our time) - at least it was cool and cloudy so the delay didn't hurt too much in terms of conditions. My quads are fine now but still thought I might be best to be at the low end of long-run ambitions today given the week that's just gone, and did a not-excessively-hilly two hours. Quite decent through the middle hour, but struggled a bit in the last 30 minutes, more for muscular endurance than anything else.

Streets collected: Alfred Ct, Bundoora and Alfreda St, Rosanna. It will be a while before I get another one because the next one's in St. Helena.

Really faded out this evening (after spending a fair chunk of the day not making as much progress as I'd hoped in hopefully having a Special Climate Statement ready for release tomorrow). These sorts of weeks stretch us pretty heavily and I'm definitely feeling it at the moment. At least in a few days any subsequent events (none of which are on the radar at the moment) become someone else's problem.

Perhaps lost in the translation was a report of a joint action by the Italian football authorities and Disney to launch what was described as a "Mickey Mouse initiative to combat racism". Racism seems to be getting the Mickey Mouse treatment elsewhere in European football, after the Polish authorities decided that Lech Poznan supporters singing things like "Your home is at Auschwitz" and "we're sending you to the gas chambers" did not constitute incitement of racial hatred because the comments were supposedly directed at all supporters of the opposition team (which was Poland's approximate equivalent of Spurs) and not just at Jews.

Certainly much improved on anything else this week; it helped that the conditions were a little kinder (though not dramatically so). This meant that it was a reasonably standard run, a little later than usual for a Saturday after a late night on the IOF teleconference last night. Spent a bit of time on the Yarra singletrack (as expected, completely dried out now), having to dodge the odd mountain bike en route.

It's a measure of how quickly one acclimatises that a humid morning in the low 20s felt cool, and that everyone thought that it was a cool night when the minimum of 21.5 would have ranked as the hottest night of the year in about one-third of the years in Melbourne's historic record (though none since the 1980s).

Having accumulated something like seven days' worth of excess working time since the New Year, I'm taking a few days off post-Canberra, initially "down the coast" in Canberra parlance, then making my way round through Gippsland (fires permitting). Anyone interested in a long run at the Prom on Sunday 2nd February?

C • Long run 4

Don't normally do a session in the spa but the Fitzroy pool wasn't too far short of it this morning; the water temperature was 31 (anyone going there in the afternoon to cool down would have been in for a shock, especially as it was probably even hotter by then). A reasonably mundane session without as much to recover from (at least in the running department) as there usually is.

The somewhat anarchic trip in from there gave one the impression that a lot of people were under the impression that all traffic laws had been suspended because of the heat and that everyone was assuming parking inspectors weren't working.

It may have been a light running week but the combination of living through this week's conditions and the work required to keep track of it has meant I've hit the end of the week pretty exhausted (which means that having IOF Foot Commission meetings until the early hours of the morning tonight and tomorrow night is something I could have done with it). Will probably have to work a fairly substantial chunk of Sunday to have the heatwave report ready to go out on Monday, too (one of these days a major climate event will finish sometime other than a weekend).

And, while the information I'm seeing is rather imprecise, I have a nasty feeling that SA may be having to find a couple of new areas for Easter 2015....(The Black Range, which was on our shortlist for the 2015 Australian Long but presented too many access/permission hurdles, looks to have burnt as well).

(stop press: have just read on the Advertiser website of 60m-high flames in the Wirrabara Forest).

C • Snow and cold is also great... 1

The best that can be said for this run is that it wasn't as bad as the one at the equivalent stage of the 2009 heatwave, and that it gave me the chance to catch up with someone I hadn't seen for a while.

On a morning as warm as this I decided to head straight for the Yarra Flats, thinking of 60 as a minimum with thoughts of extending if I was feeling OK. I wasn't feeling particularly OK - this was again a struggle, although perhaps a bit improved on yesterday (and quads are fine now). Oddly enough, I felt best (although slow) on the steepest hills coming back through Eaglemont. Feeling a bit out of sorts in general - not sure how much of this (if any) is illness, how much is the heat, and how much is recovery from the weekend.

The catching-up was with Darren Meeking, whom I'd barely seen since the 2011 Oceania events - he lives in North Balwyn these days (with two children under three, which is a large part of the reason why we haven't seen much of him) and was on his way back on a river loop. We ran together for 15 minutes or so before splitting off and going our separate ways.

Then it was off to crunch numbers, talk to journalists, run a couple of meetings, occasionally pause to draw breath and try to endure the second-last day of the heatwave of 2014. Part of this was trying to put the "Adelaide forecast to be the hottest city in the world" story in perspective (I would guess it would happen at least a dozen times in a normal summer - no city of any consequence in either South America or southern Africa gets above the mid-high 30s with any consistency). So far, the Melbourne infrastructure has just about held up, but it remains to be seen whether it will still do so tomorrow (and then there are fires to consider, with the stronger winds).

Quads significantly improved tonight but still feeling very sluggish running - decided not to make any attempt to go hard tonight. The weather certainly encouraged me in this decision, although a weak seabreeze pushed in just before the start and dropped it to 33 or so (having been up to 41.7). Even at slow pace, I still felt as if it could fall apart at any moment, but it didn't.

It was slightly annoying to not be running fast on a night when I nailed the route - about 500 metres shorter than most of the others, but that merely narrowed the margin (very reminiscent of the Wednesday after Two Bays two years ago in that sense).

C • heat 3

The best that can be said for my quads this morning is that they weren't as bad as they were at the equivalent stage after the last marathon I ran. They still weren't good by any stretch of the imagination, but from past experience attempting to go for a run would help them, so I did (after first walking down the Hawdon Street hill, on the basis that a steep downhill at the start isn't the start I needed). It wasn't particularly pretty even with a course as flat as they get around the Banyule Flats, but hopefully it will get me somewhere. If I'm going to have an enforced easy week, it's not the worst week for it to happen....

I am thankful to the ABC - an 8.30 interview with them meant having to get out in time to finish my run not long after 7, which in turn meant that I got most of this run out of the way while the cool early-morning surface layer remained intact. Street-O tomorrow evening is not going to be pretty, although Adelaide is even worse; today was their third day over 45 since early 2009, which means that there will be children starting school there in a couple of weeks who have experienced more 45-degree days than someone who lived through the entire 20th century.

C • Yeah, but... 10

Part of me was tempted to go for a run this morning on the basis that this morning will be the least worst conditions we have for running this side of Saturday, but I woke up with pretty stiff quads - the sort where I probably could have run if I'd suddenly found myself in the middle of a riot, but otherwise didn't mind an excuse for a rest day. (The plan is for the run which would otherwise have happened today to happen on Friday, although I reserve the right to change these plans given my expectation that the temperature at 7am Friday will be somewhere north of 30).

The swim was slow, and mainly about trying to loosen things up. I'm not sure how productive it was in that respect, but at least it felt OK while I was in the pool.

It was slightly alarming to see a policeman in full riot gear entering the changerooms post-swim, but it turned out he was merely in search of the Gents. (The protest is still going on out the front but seems more sparsely populated on both sides than it was last week).

C • Quads 5