Training Log Archive: blairtrewin

Out early this morning, mainly because I'd read on the online reviews that the breakfast was the highlight of the place I was staying at (they weren't wrong). Out to the beach and then along it, with some fairly soft sand at the end. Felt a bit flat this morning, and hip perhaps a little worse than it has been the last couple of days, especially in the softer stuff. Mission Beach is nice on the coast itself but quite suburban behind it, although its newness stood it in good stead when Yasi came visiting (most of the buildings here are built to the post-Tracy codes; a direct hit on, say, Cardwell would have caused far worse damage).

Today was the last day of the trip; flew back to Melbourne mid-afternoon, after stops at Bingil Bay, Josephine Falls and Babinda Boulders (with a saltwater swim at the first and a freshwater swim at the third). The locals were all talking about how cold the water at the Boulders was but it seemed pretty reasonable to me (probably about 22-23 degrees).

The flight out went further out to sea than I had expected, meaning good views of the coast down to about Cardwell (and also showed up that the really wet places, like Babinda, are opposite gaps in the coastal range so they're less protected from the E/SE than Cairns is). It wasn't the most pleasant of flights because I had a nasty headache until something went pop about two hours in and whatever pressures needed to be equalised were equalised. (Presumably this is something to do with the illness I've had, although today was the first day in a couple of weeks that I haven't really had a cough).

As news starts to come in of the bushfires in Portugal (which is looking like one of the worst bushfire disasters of modern European history), it feels close to home - the road that's showing in all the news pictures is the one I used to get back to Porto after Portugal O-Meeting.

Headed towards the Mount Baldy area near Atherton (thanks to Rachel for the tip). Original thoughts were to head up the dirt road towards the top of the rain, but instead I peeled off where it started to get steep (would have been no views anyway - low cloud) and headed into the extensive mountain bike park. This part of the run was pretty nice - lots of twisty single track and felt like it was going pretty smoothly. Last kilometre back to the car wasn't quite as enjoyable (started to feel a bit tight by then); on another day I might have tried to push the distance out a bit further, but then I'm on holiday...

The start of this was on Rifle Range Road and the rifle range was being well-used, which didn't surprise me - this is Katter and One Nation country. It has a sign saying it's a Defence facility, perhaps dating back to World War 2 where the locals were trained in guerilla warfare to obstruct a potential Japanese invasion (I hadn't realised until dropping into a local museum how massive the WW2 military presence was here; it was the main training area before deployment to New Guinea).

Up on the Tablelands it was a day which resembled a typical Melbourne June day (low cloud, intermittent drizzle) in all respects other than that it was about 6 degrees warmer. Somewhat to my surprise it was sunnier on the coast, to where I headed in the afternoon (via assorted waterfalls, forests and places of eating and drinking indulgence) - ended up at Mission Beach, with a wide beach and a lot of driftwood at its rear which I assume is the Yasi high-water mark.

There's always the dilemma when you're staying somewhere where breakfast is part of the deal - do you run early and get out of bed earlier than you would have otherwise preferred, or eat early and feel that you have to hold yourself back on the breakfast? I chose the former, and that was probably a good thing given that it was the most humid morning of the trip (23/19).

I'd picked out what seemed like a good back road on the map but for once Google let me down; the road didn't exist (or more likely was gazetted but never built), so instead I took to the parallel route, the road out to the airport and Lakefield National Park. This had a bit of traffic in what passes for peak hour in Cooktown, but a good verge (only the occasional nuisance from a wandering dog). After a nondescript first 3km I settled down pretty well in gently rolling terrain with a string of sub-5.30 kilometres (not bad by my low standards this year) and thought this was going to turn into my best run for a while, but the humidity caught up with me after about 50 minutes and the last part of the run was a struggle - especially the final climb up to where I was staying, a four-contour effort which seemed like Walsh's Pyramid. Almost felt like I was going to spew at the top of that.

Spotted a sign for Quaid Real Estate. This was a name I'd associated with the Cape York spaceport, but in fact I'd misremembered which parts of the Bjelke-Petersen hall of shame George was associated with (it was actually trying to flog off the Daintree and some dodgy deals over pastoral leases).

Unless you have a 4WD there's only one way out of Cooktown, so I retraced my steps today, although more slowly as I'd noted all the spots where I wanted to stop to take pictures, including the most extraordinary place in Australia you've never heard of, a 200-metre-high pile of boulders known as Black Mountain about 25km out of town. Having seen it relentlessly advertised on posters coming in, I thought I'd also try out the Lakeland Coffee House (at the junction of the Cooktown and Cape roads; south of there it's not too hard to tell which southbound vehicles have come from where). I normally give coffee at outback roadhouses a wide berth on the grounds that it is often not readily distinguishable from the liquid that comes out of the pumps (and is designed for the major purpose of keeping truck drivers awake), but this was stellar. It turns out there's a coffee plantation just down the road (whose products were being served); I knew that coffee was grown around Mareeba, but didn't know it was also grown on the Cape.

Spent what was left of the day looking around parts of the Atherton Tableland. Staying in Atherton tonight.

The place I was staying, a few kilometres short of Cape Tribulation itself, didn't have any good running options in its own right (there's only one road, which is narrow and gets quite a bit of traffic), so instead I decided to head up to the Cape with thoughts of running up the beach north from there. That didn't quite work out - as I discovered, when the walk notes said that parts of the beach were difficult at high tide, they meant 'anything except low tide' (I was about halfway), plus the creeks flowing across the beach were up after the overnight rain - and mangrovey shorelines were something I was a bit nervous about in croc country. It would have been fitting had I been turned around by Blockade Creek (named for the 1983 protest against the building of the track north, handled with all the sensitivity you'd expect of Joh's police), but I think it was actually the one before it. Then tried heading south but ran into a creek there too, so plan C was to head up the track, turning around shortly after the gravel started, a spot with a disappointing lack of an if-you-drive-the-wrong-vehicle-past-here-you-will-die sign. (There might be one soon, because someone did indeed die on the track a few days ago after slipping off it in what was described in the local paper as an 'improvised campervan').

Again this was a pretty nondescript run as far as performance goes - similar to yesterday although there were more hills today, and a few steps.

After a morning looking around the Daintree, with no sign of beach weather I decided to do something a bit different and head up to Cooktown (the bitumen way). The country turns to dry savanna pretty quickly once you get up the range, but there are some interesting ranges off to the side of the road, including plenty of granite (always something to excite the Australian orienteer), and one range of hills largely made up of black rocks/scree around 30km out of Cooktown, which I plan to look at a bit more closely on the way back tomorrow.

Port Douglas has a very running-friendly beach (wide, flat, hard-packed sand) and I made good use of it - as were plenty of others, some of them probably on rather painful recovery runs (the Cairns Ironman took place on the weekend and plenty of event T-shirts were in evidence around town). Not a great run though; I'm still trying to shrug off the cold from a week and a half ago and felt sluggish throughout. Hip at nuisance level - probably felt worse walking down stairs on walking tracks later in the day than it did running.

It wasn't beach weather today - cloudy and windy with a few spots of rain (which became heavy rain in the evening - it's called the Wet Tropics for a reason) - so instead I did other things on the way to the Cape Tribulation area, mostly a couple of national park short walks and a croc-sighting cruise on the Daintree River (during which numerous crocs were indeed sighted).

In case you think I haven't been travelling enough, I'm now off on an actual, non-orienteering, non-work holiday (my boss pretty much ordered me to take a week off using some of the vast number of excess hours I'd piled up during the recent project, and this was the best week for it), with North Queensland as the destination.

The logistics of the morning made for a new destination for a session. Jenny was on a flight at 6.40 and I was on one at 9.10, so I thought what would work best would be to drop her at the airport and then go to the nearest pool. (In the process, we successfully avoided hitting a broken-down car in a very awkward spot on the freeway on-ramp - definitely safety-car territory had it been a racetrack; thanks to the wonders of social media, I've since discovered that the car in question belonged to an old school friend (and now Rex pilot) on the way to the airport).

The nearest pool was Broadmeadows. Broadmeadows as a suburb doesn't have the best of reputations, but the only sign of local stereotypes at this time of day was that my two companions in the non-lap-swimming lane both had substantial tattoos. (It did surprise me somewhat that a council pool in one of the more socially-disadvantaged parts of town charges the highest entry fee I've seen in suburban Melbourne). Session was fine; felt a little sore but not exceptionally so.

Landed in Cairns in the early afternoon and then made my way up to Port Douglas. I've been to Cairns before for work but only had a day to look around, so missed a lot. Plans for the rest of the week are still somewhat open at this stage although I'm heading in the direction of the Daintree and Cape Tribulation tomorrow.

Probably wouldn't have been up to anything more than a sprint distance today - this time it was more the back that was troublesome than the hip - and never got any speed up. At least I got a decent view of the business end of the race as they progressively came through me, starting with David Lingfors who caught me a minute at the first control, never a good start to a sprint race (I'd unwisely tried to contour across the bushy slope on the rocky hill we started on). Blew 40 seconds or so on 9, the last one on the hill - came up faster than I expected (hard to get used to 1:4000 in bush terrain), then misread a couple of spots on the tricky 12 and went a lot further around than I needed to. Generally a disappointing run, but very pleased with how the event went as an event.

Day 3 1 - Splits