Training Log Archive: blairtrewin

Test-running a course for the Australian Sprint Champs after a morning checking out planned control sites with the setters. Reasonably happy with the way things are going; the courses will be at the short end of the range or perhaps even a little under (it's a small area), but then I'd rather have a technical course being won in mid to upper 11s than have one which has nothing legs added on just to get the distance up.

As for the running, felt like I had a reasonable level of pace up, though there were occasional twinges from the back which suggested that I might have had issues had the area actually had any hills or soft ground. Jet lag not really an issue today after a good (and reasonably timed) night's sleep last night. Feeling like I'm ready to launch into things (both orienteering and life) now that I'm back home.

One of the ways I deal with jet lag is to be as active as I can on the first day in the name of keeping myself awake until a reasonable hour. Even by usual standards I surpassed myself in this department yesterday, though - first a State Series event at Bendigo (spending only a couple of hours at home after a 5.30am arrival), then a quiz night in the evening. I took the train to the former, partly because I could (the assembly area was only 500m from Kangaroo Flat station) and partly because I didn't trust myself to drive, not having teed up a lift beforehand.

The area was an interesting one - basically one long erosion gully in the suburban fringe of Bendigo, a 3km by 300m map, mapped at 1:5000. Bendigo is riddled with patches like this, most of them not as long (it would be well-suited to a multi-sprint day), and it made for good, if different, orienteering. Certainly wouldn't have contemplated using an area like this for anything 20 years ago.

There were a lot of things about this event which were a bit of a culture shock coming back from Europe - hard ground, blue features which don't contain water, lack of marshes, doing under 9 minutes/km - but one thing which was familiar was the 2k to the start. This reinforced that I wasn't going to be running fast today, but as it happened a technical course suited me. Took a bit of time to get into the map scale and what was/wasn't mapped and wobbled a bit at 2, but technically good and accurate thereafter, most notably through a section from 4-8 when I was in the process of going through Martin. Took a moment to find where the new maps were at the map change at 11, then again reasonably smooth through the second sector. Was catching ground on Lanita (who started four minutes ahead) from 20 onwards, but both of us lost time at 24, which I think had some issues with the mapping (it's telling that six of the top ten lost time here), and she ran away from me on the easy final section.

Reasonably satisfied with this in the circumstances, despite being a couple of minutes down on running speed - although Patrick put all of us into perspective with a 32 (having already run a 3000 and 1500 earlier in the morning). Fell asleep between about 3.45 and 4.15 on the way home, at the time when my football team was doing likewise....

Glasgow-Dubai-Melbourne. Not enough time for a gym session in Dubai airport this time :-). Flights on time but otherwise not the best ones I've ever had - didn't get a lot of sleep (on the first leg because the seat didn't recline properly, on the second leg for no obviously good reason).

I've previously mused that it's as well that most countries don't make you fill out the sort of entry paperwork that Australia does - I wouldn't fancy filling out a similar form in, say, Hungarian. It's become even more time-consuming now because you have to fill out another form (regardless of where you've come from), repeating all the personal details you've put on the first form and then asking you if you've been anywhere affected by the (now dwindling) Ebola outbreak. You then get to the Customs exit where they ask you to put the form in the bin without anyone reading it....

C • I filled in the Ebola form,... 3

Final run of the trip - north from Oban, on my own this time. On a minor road up the coast for 3km or so, then picking up a bike track (recently built on what I think was previously a farm road) until it ran into the main drag - a sufficiently heavily trafficked thoroughfare that I didn't feel like running along it. Ended up doing a short loop around the waterfront at the end to get the distance up to where I wanted it. Nice place for a run but again not a particularly good run, with hills (mostly short and sharpish) again providing a struggle; I'm no longer coughing up stuff but still sneezing quite regularly.

We didn't have a massive amount of distance to cover today so could take our time; features included the "bridge over the Atlantic" (an elegant 18th-century stone bridge across a 20-metre gap between the mainland and an island), various prehistoric burial mounds and rock art, Loch Lomond, and an ancient church which proved of unexpected interest because it turned out to be (from the family and estate name) the ancestral seat of one of the Canberra region's pioneering families (one of whose descendants was a close friend of mine at school).

One thing I definitely won't miss is the traffic. There was probably an hour's worth of traffic jams on the road from Loch Lomond into Glasgow (we had plenty of time so were never worried about flights), for no obvious reason other than a surplus of vehicles, in the middle of a Thursday afternoon. I shudder to think what it's like at the end of a holiday weekend (Scottish readers may wish to enlighten us).

Now at the airport waiting for the long haul home (via Dubai). I intend to front for the Bendigo State Series event a few hours after landing; don't expect too much on the performance front.

C • I will try and provide a pillow atthe start for you while you wait. 2

A late-in-the-day run in Oban, after a day spent mostly in the Fort William area - didn't join the throngs going up to stand in the fog at the summit of Ben Nevis (reportedly, over 100,000 climb it each year, and if you assume that that is concentrated in summer, that means probably over 1000 per day on some days in summer), but did see plenty of waterfalls in the valley.

This run turned out to be a bit more adventurous (and a bit longer) than planned on. My initial thoughts were for a shortish out-and-back along the shoreline (especially as I was feeling very lousy indeed for the first 10 minutes), but when we hit the turnaround point, at the dock for a small ferry to a nearby offshore island (the ferry being of the slide-the-black-board-across-and-wait-for-the-operator-on-the-other-side-to-notice variety), we got a bit more ambitious and headed back inland on a small track - interesting, although a bit muddier and wetter than I really wanted for the second-last day before going home. At this point Jenny had decided that she was in the mood and started wanting to run up hills, something my body wasn't initially too keen on but eventually got into the swing of; we finished up at Oban's answer to the Colosseum on a hill overlooking the town, accurately described in a guidebook as a "folly".

Our last night in Scotland is being spent at the Oban youth hostel. Many of the others there are from a German Scout group. They must do things differently in Scouts in Germany, because one of the leaders was recently sighted with a slab of Carlsberg under his arm.

A fairly unambitious morning trot with Jenny around Ullapool in the drizzle. Ullapool isn't very big, so getting to a vaguely respectable length required covering pretty well everything there was to see in Ullapool. Felt reasonable, but this wasn't exactly a searching test.

We were in no hurry to get out of Ullapool as the forecast suggested conditions would get better as the day went on for our route down the west coast (more or less) to near Kyle of Lochalsh and then on through Fort William to Kinlochleven - a longer day than planned but one necessitated by the near-total lack of accommodation tonight on the western side of Scotland (at one point of my online searching last week I though we were going to have to come back to Inverness). As one might expect, this was an exceedingly scenic route, the approach to Loch Torridon being perhaps the highlight of many highlights. This was almost completely unexplored territory for me (on the 1989 trip I got the ferry from Ullapool out to the Outer Hebrides and then came back through Skye).

And, according to the front page of the Inverness Courier, last week's traffic chaos (to which we were one of several contributors) "must never be allowed to happen again".

As many of you will know, I spent 1989 on a gap year based in southern England. As you might expect I did quite a lot of travelling during this time, and the Easter holidays (once I'd done JK) brought me to the far north, with my sights set on going along the north and west coasts of Scotland. There was a minor difficulty to this - there was no public transport at that time of year along the full length of the coast. I hadn't yet summonsed up the courage to try hitch-hiking (something I did extensively in western Ireland later in the year), so there was only one way to plug the 40-mile gap between the end of one bus route in Bettyhill and the start of another in Durness. 29 miles of this, from Tongue to Durness, were walked in one day - fortunately the weather was good (if chilly). I've never done anything quite as epic (walking) before or since.

Today was largely spent retracing this route (and those from the days either side of it), starting in John O'Groats and ending up in Ullapool. It was a bit easier this time - the Tongue-Durness bit would have been less than an hour in the car except we kept finding things we wanted to look at, including a stunningly beautiful beach on what was, at that point, a very nice day. (Two hours later it was to turn into an - almost perfectly forecast - downpour, rather spoiling the views for the last part of the day).

The run was done early in the day and was another exercise in landmark-bagging: Dunnet Head, which, as most people don't know, is the actual northernmost point of mainland Britain. (You can't quite get to the northernmost point of the headland as it's on the lighthouse grounds, but within 50 metres will do). A steady climb up there, not perfect but feeling in better shape than yesterday.