Training Log Archive: blairtrewin

Training at Hepburn organised by Peter and Ralph on a warm day - went out because I wanted to get out into the terrain, to meet a pleasing mix of people - quite a few less experienced people amongst the old hands.

Warmed up with a line course (not bad, if slow, and a bit fiddly in places where the green on the map didn't match what was on the ground - not surprising given the age of the map). Next embarked on a control picking exercise, mostly OK technically, but physically was another story, on a course which made ferocious use of the area's ferocious erosion gullies - discovered that my power and agility needs a fair bit of work, and found even the smaller hills challenging by the end.

The bigger problem, though, was that I took a big knock on my right big toe in mid-course, and while I was able to finish (though scrubbing thoughts of taking on any more exercises), it was pretty painful by the end, and more so afterwards, and is quite difficult to walk on this afternoon. Hopefully it's only badly bruised and not broken (I think there would have been more acute immediate pain if it was broken), and might settle down within a couple of days, but I suspect my training will be curtailed in at least the early part of next week.

Plan today was for something around 90 (some forest training is planned for tomorrow). A bit sneezy this morning, which makes sense given that for most of this week (especially since Wednesday) I've been running as if I was fighting off a bit of a cold. A fairly uninspiring run in terms of the way I felt but not actually moving too badly. Starting to get pretty warm by the end.

All Nations intervals. Didn't get home until after 11 last night and didn't get to sleep for another hour after that, so perhaps it wasn't that surprising that I was a bit washed out this morning. Never really got into it and not too upset to see it over; didn't pick up through the session as I often do.

Going to/from the park. Don't know if it just feels jarring because of coming back after the summer, but the traffic seems particularly heavy this week (since I wasn't trying to drive anywhere, this was only an issue in trying to get across roads).

Swim in the hotel pool in Brisbane. Not quite as ferociously humid as it was when I arrived last night, but still fairly sticky. Swim felt reasonably mundane; as usual in a smallish pool, the backwash was a bit annoying until I got used to it, but at least I didn't get dizzy this time.

The talk went reasonably well (it was on how climate factors would, or would not, affect scenarios for a Brisbane River flood in 2036). Quite a lot of the results I was presenting, especially the modelling of mean and extreme rainfall, were only possible due to CSIRO climate modelling work. I'm not quite sure exactly who's supposed to be updating this work in future in the light of today's news about CSIRO; the fact that climate change exists may indeed be a solved problem (except in the eyes of a rabid fringe), but one might imagine that it might still be useful to, for example, narrow the range of predicted change in 1-in-20-year rainfall for the Brisbane River catchment to a range a bit smaller than +40 to -20%. I suspect we haven't heard the last of this one (and would not be at all surprised if space is being cleared in the schedule of next week's conference of the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society for us to go on a march somewhere).

C • CSIRO cuts/reorganisation/what have you 18

Had planned for two hours today, but this was a day when it wasn't really working out - got the message that things weren't going well on the first hint of a hill, and unlike last week didn't build into it. Thought that I'd be satisfied with 90 but ended up going a bit further than that; last 10 minutes were the best of it, but an Achilles twinge right at the end removed temptation to try to push it out a bit further.

Finishing earlier meant that I should have been able to get an earlier train, but there had been an earlier cancellation and consequently the trains looked like they were in need of those people who supposedly exist (although I've never seen one outside Richard Scarry books) to push people into packed carriages in Tokyo; I eventually squeezed myself into the second one to pass. (One of the more impressive travel feats I've been involved with was on the 2000 World Cup trip to Japan, where eight of us with full packs managed to get ourselves onto a peak-hour train in Tokyo - albeit split between about six carriages).

Headed up to Brisbane tonight. It's definitely steamy; just walking from the airport terminal to the station was enough to get a sweat up (I wasn't surprised to see that the dewpoint was 24.5).

Western Series at a venue referred to in last week's e-news as "Footscary Park". (We were across the road from the Mervyn G. Hughes Oval, which provided me with the opportunity to enlighten Fredrik as to who Mervyn G. Hughes was).

Thought it might be a bit on the short side given it was a 1:7500 A4 map. Once running it was a familiar story from the last few weeks - no higher gears and no speed. The 7th kilometre, up and across a steep slope, was slow, but I wasn't going to break 5s anyway. A fair bit of interesting route choice - mine was probably in the middle of the range.

Humidity (dewpoint 19) was on a par with a normal February week in Brisbane, which this isn't.

Predictably unpleasant after yesterday's hard work, but the incentive to get out this morning was the thought that if I was going to take one day off running this week, doing it today in a pleasant 14 degrees would mean heading out in 25 degrees and 90+% humidity on Thursday. Eventually got going, sort of.

This loosened me up a bit, which was the prime objective - did this one today because I don't want to take the flotation belt to Brisbane. Starting to get to the time of year when sunglare at this time of day is a bit of a nuisance.

The holidays are definitely over, as evidenced by an abundance of traffic - not helped by the exploits of this drongo. More pleasingly, there was also an abundance of bicycle traffic, to the point where there were actually bike traffic jams of sorts at a couple of spots.