Training Log Archive: blairtrewin

Often in the past much of the real business of the OA conference has been done on the Sunday morning run. The composition of the conference doesn't lend itself to that quite so much these days and it was just Jenny and myself for this morning's outing; she wasn't having a great day and I quickly decided this would be essentially a social outing - a proper long run can wait until next week. Did plenty of climbing though, including the Black Mountain summit, which went more or less OK (and did a bit of bush-bashing coming off the southwest side of the mountain to get onto the western branch of the circumcision track, which I've never previously been on). Back OK on the climbs.

Not quite sure what to make of the conference; a lot of the discussion was a bit messy and we didn't come out with a lot of firm outcomes, but we have at least got some conversations started, in areas such as having national membership and other areas of governance reform. Also quite a lot of ideas as to how we can learn from parkrun's success (following a presentation by Gareth).

C • sounds 31

C • rain in NW England 4

Post-OA conference event at Bruce Ridge. After a long day it was always going to be a bit hard to come up for this but I was still very disappointed with my concentration on this run. Two significant errors, the worst being at 9 where I didn't see the control, overran it on a track and dropped a couple of minutes; both errors were contributed to by some questionable mapping but if I'd been more on the ball that wouldn't have mattered. Also felt rather sluggish on the first hot day I've run on since returning.

Originally at the start of the week my plans had been to go long today, but I decided to let that slide after Wednesday's problems (even before having a much heavier day than anticipated yesterday). The plan was to leave the car at Fitzroy North (location of work Christmas lunch), run from there, and then head up to the airport after the end of the lunch. This plan was slightly altered when I couldn't find my watch when ready to start the run and concluded I must have left it at home, so I ran back home (about 20 minutes away), failed to find it, then continued on west to Merri Creek and back down it. (It turned out the watch was back in the car, in a different bag to the one I usually put it in).

The run itself was quite reasonable on a nice morning, although there were signs that I was starting to tire a bit at the end. Back not really tested on a run with few hills of any size.

The work lunch included lawn bowls, but I left my year's quota of ball skills behind on the soccer pitch yesterday.

Off to Canberra for the OA Conference tonight.

C • Bowling 2

First time for this session for a few weeks. Back wasn't great through this session and I wasn't entirely sure I should press on through all of it, but it worked out more or less OK.

Thought I was through jet lag, but woke up at 4am this morning....

The annual tournament between the Bureau, CSIRO and Melbourne and Monash Unis - three 30-minute games on a small pitch (with small goals), 8-a-side (which I presume meant that the entire remaining staff of CSIRO were on the field) and unlimited interchanges.

I finished the morning session thinking I was going to pull out of this, but we didn't have a lot of players spare and I thought I'd at least go up, test myself out before the start and see how it went. The answer was fine - in fact it was my heaviest involvement yet - normally, as one of the team's, shall we say, less skilled players, I would spend a reasonable amount of time on the sidelines, but we couldn't afford that today and I ended up playing the entire 90 minutes, starting each game on the left wing and dropping back to be a defensive midfielder later on, with the main job being to close down space.

The personal highlight was very early on in the first game - the ball dropped for me 10 metres out with only the keeper to beat, and I was able to do the necessary (by no means a given). I did make it onto the scoresheet a few years ago but that time it was at the wrong end. From there on I filled my usual role of running around a lot, plugging gaps and hoping no-one noticed that I (usually) couldn't do very much with the ball once I got it.

We ended up taking out the competition again for the third straight year - won all three games, although we were a bit lucky in two of them. Feeling very drained by the end, perhaps a product of the early start.

Street-O at Harvey Heights, at The Basin at the foot of the Dandenongs. Somewhat surprisingly I've never run here before - the last time I ran a street-O on a Dandenongs area was the infamous 1998 Upwey event which started in 40 degrees and finished in a thunderstorm.

For all practical purposes I still haven't run here. I wasn't feeling too confident before the start - yesterday's run and the way I felt today had a hint of illness about it - but it was the back that wasn't playing ball. On an area where there would have been 300 metres of climb before halfway, losing power up all hills isn't something you want to happen. Looked like some fiendish route choice decisions and it would have been nice to have felt better for the technical challenge.

Noticed on the way there that St. Joseph's in Boronia (?) had a sign out the front saying that they'd come second in the Victorian Primary Schools Orienteering Championships.

I have a recent history of having very good runs on the second day after returning from overseas trips. This was not one of them.

Spotted on the way down to the river was a sign for preliminary works for the level crossing removal at Grange Road (a bit earlier than I was expecting). Melbourne has been waiting a long time for this as demonstrated in this article. Presumably shortages of materials and labour due to war conditions are no longer an acceptable excuse for delays.

Today was a quieter media day than it would have been had November been slightly warmer (both November and spring missed out on being Australia's hottest on record by a couple of hundredths of a degree), but I did have one slot on 3AW. It wasn't too hard to work out what the target demographic was because the ad break before I came on air consisted of retirement villages, mobility scooters and cataract operations.

C • Quiet 6

I suspected that I might have slept a bit too well on the plane (not really waking up until after 5pm Australian time) and that I might pay for this, and so it proved, not sleeping much after 3.30am or so. Eventually got up about 5.30, and after taking in the second half of Norwich-Arsenal, headed to Fitzroy for the first leg of a Monday morning triathlon - certainly didn't fancy running on a 30-degree lunchtime on my first day back. As it turned out, morning conditions were pretty close to perfect (certainly more than can be said of riding home in the evening, with squally winds, although I missed the rain). Was feeling rather sleepy, but not as slow as I expected to be.

After a long absence, you notice the things which are familiar but in the background most of the time (like the birds at first light, and the smell of the trees on a cool still morning). The house a few doors up is coming up for sale this weekend - if (as I suspect) I paid a record price for the street, that record is not going to survive Saturday - and the conversion of the old post office into apartments, which has been blocking the footpath towards Station Street since I've been here, is now finished with its products up for sale in two weeks.

Took to the pool on a morning which was made for outdoor pools, still and sunny. Seemed to go on for a long time but not too bad. Drifting out of it a bit in the last couple of laps.

I think it would be fair to say that I was not at my most productive today, although at least I wasn't as far gone as I was when I got home; in fairly rapid succession I had a slight misadventure with a vicious cutting implement and realised I'd forgotten to get a critical ingredient, at which point I decided that takeaway might not be such a bad idea after all.

Also had a massage after work. After a month away, the masseur earned her money today.

C • Vicious cutting implement 3