Training Log Archive: blairtrewin

It would be fair to say that I went to a fair bit of trouble to make this run work - not least travelling 300 kilometres to somewhere where the conditions this morning were likely to be more favourable than they were in Melbourne (you'd have had to have looked fairly hard to find conditions this morning less favourable than those in Melbourne).

In the end I did essentially what I wanted to do. I was looking for something in the 3+ hour range at least once before Six Foot, and having missed the chance last week, this weekend was the last realistic window of opportunity. The only drawback of Port Fairy (from the viewpoint of Six Foot preparation) is that it's flat, though the wind created a few pseudo-hills (of which more later).

The change went through Port Fairy just after 8, and 20 minutes later I was off and running, on the rail trail to Warrnambool with Koroit as the turnaround point (had there been someone to pick me up at the other end, going all the way to Warrnambool, about the same distance, would have been a good option). Quickly settled down on a track through farmland - an environment I've often run well in - and was going smoothly on the outward journey; the first 20km was the best I've felt running, over any distance, since before Two Bays.

Took a gel (second of three) at Koroit, and then started the trip back. I'd thought the W/SW wind in the wake of the change might have dropped out by the time I started heading back, but it didn't, and the stretch from 20-26k was fairly hard work (though only about 8 seconds/km slower than with the tail wind), straight into a 20-30 knot wind across open country. The trail turns around a bit from there, but the 30th kilometre, on an elevated embankment, featured a buffering crosswind. That seemed to take a bit out of me and from there I was hanging on, though it was never as bad as the later stages of Two Bays.

I'll probably need to find another 75-90 minutes on top of this in four weeks' time, which won't be easy, but enough things went right today to give me a bit of confidence. (In particular, the gels seem to have worked; I didn't feel as if I was getting enough water flow out of my pack, but the bladder was nearly empty by the end so I must have been taking some in). Quite drained by the end without being totally flattened; thought the drive home might be tough but was fine once I'd spent 45 minutes snoozing under the trees in a Warrnambool park. Longest run I've done since 2008, I think.

C • Apart from Wilsons Prom March 2010... 2

A morning run at home before heading off. Not exactly sparkling but definitely a step up from most of my runs of the last fortnight. Slowed down a bit later on after taking to the small tracks on the east side of the Yarra (which didn't link up quite as well as I'd remembered them). The mild, but humid, surface layer was still well and truly intact - on the way out of town it rose from 26 to 34 between Bacchus Marsh and Ballan (normally the change is in the reverse direction).

I did end up taking the southwest Victorian option and am now in Port Fairy - hopefully this will work out for tomorrow morning. Took the chance to look at a couple of potential areas for the 2015 Australian Sprint in Ballarat on the way (one is very complex but possibly too small, a second more conventional). Also had a look at the Mount Eccles lava flow terrain, although not very much of it because the northeast approach track on the VicRoads map didn't exist, and the southwest one became progressively grassier which meant it was somewhere I didn't want to be driving on such an extreme fire weather day (although by then the seabreeze had pushed in). Looks potentially interesting if tough, but it's probably fairly academic because I had a look at the (fairly ancient) management plan for the park the other day and orienteering gets a cross in the list of permitted activities (and, to add a further level of complexity, the park is now co-managed by the traditional owners). One thing I did note is that a lot of the products of the 1990s/early 2000s boom in bluegum plantations (many of them founded on the principle that it's better to lose a thousand dollars in a dodgy investment than give one extra cent to the taxman) are now mature enough (and sufficiently undergrowth-free) to be very nice running; I didn't see any which were planted on technical terrain but there may be some elsewhere.

The news coming from across the border of the Belair fire was certainly concerning, but it seems like it's worked out better (at least for now) than I thought it might on such a challenging day.

A standard Friday session at Fitzroy. Nothing to be especially excited about, although I was glad I was in the water and not on land on a morning like this.

Not really a proper Thursday long run, but given the way I've been feeling this week felt it best not to burn too much before what will hopefully be a big weekend. Also as flat as it gets - was having the car services at Fishermens Bend so did what I usually do on such occasions - out to the beach, southeast along it until 50% of the allotted time expires, then back via Albert Park Lake. The only "hills" are the pedestrian ramp across Beaconsfield Parade, and the Fitzroy Street rise which only feels big when you hit it at the 37k mark of the old Melbourne Marathon course.

The first half of this run felt no better than the last couple of days did. Started to get into it a bit more in the second half and by the end felt like going for another 30 minutes wouldn't be totally ridiculous, but still have a fair way to go. Still cool enough in the morning that the northerly breeze was cooling; won't be the case for the rest of the week.

Continuing to feel not quite 100% well, and struggled again on this one - no energy as soon as it got challenging and drifted away in the second half. This was a pity as Blackburn Lake is one of my favourite areas, and I appear to have made a decent job of the route. A warmish night (high 20s) but certainly not as bad as what we'll see later in the week.

I've occasionally posted before on oddball things which come up when you do searches for obscure places. Today's effort came when I was searching for information on the old Acton Racecourse in Canberra (where our observing site appears to have been in the 1920s and 1930s); one of the top links which came up was to a site which was promising the best tips on horses running there. I hope the horses they were tipping have good wet-track form - Acton Racecourse has been under water for the last 50 years (it was south of what is now ANU).

Still struggling - feel a bit out of sorts at the moment (a runny nose suggests I'm fighting off a cold) and it certainly felt like a bit of a sick run (and not in the "fully sick" sense either). Weak early on, some decent patches in the middle but never comfortable on the hills (of which there were a few, this being an Ivanhoe/Eaglemont newsletter delivery run).

My colleagues have, rather bravely, forecast a minimum of 30 five days out for Sunday morning. I'm starting to think seriously of heading for southwestern Victoria on the weekend to maximise the chances of getting a run in after the change (and because at some point I need to look at 2015 sprint venues in Ballarat, and because I've long wanted to look at Mount Eccles too) - the drawback is that I probably don't then have another weekend at home until at least the end of March.

C • Ballarat 3

Felt a bit out of sorts before this run but once under way it turned into a reasonably standard Monday recovery run, with a bit of residual rear-end soreness in the mix (though that side of things continues to improve). 28 degrees at 7am isn't worth batting an eyelid over any more in the Melbourne summer of '14. (Current forecasts suggest that after tomorrow, there will be at most one sub-30 day between now and the later part of next week).

The run was done from outside the North Melbourne pool (which is next to the North Melbourne football ground). At the start I saw someone I didn't recognise in North gear getting out of a car with South Australian plates and heading into the club; possibly one of their new draftees? Reminded me a bit of a case some years ago when a group of yahoos started kicking the doors in of a car with Victorian plates in the car park at Football Park in Adelaide - turned out the car belonged to one of the Crows' new recruits who hadn't changed his registration over yet.

Second stage of the Monday morning duathlon at North Melbourne. A rather slow session although I'm not totally sure that I went up and down 20 times and not 21 (which may be an indicator that I was feeling somewhat vague this morning).

Unsurprisingly, a lot of things had piled up in my absence - my colleagues did their best to treat the end of a month when I was on the South Coast and not so easy to contact as a dry run for the end of a month later in the year when I'll be somewhere in the back blocks of Patagonia and impossible to contact, but there was still a bit of stuff waiting.