Training Log Archive: blairtrewin

Victorian Sprint Championships at Monash, acting my age for once - at least for now, I've had enough of coming near-last in M21 races (especially after the last few weeks).

Monash is a good campus sprint area which we hadn't been on for a while (I controlled a 2007 WOC trial here, and I think we've only been there once since). Lots of new buildings have appeared since then - universities never seem to be short of money to build stuff even if they struggle for cash to, say, pay for research and teaching - and inevitably there were a few current building sites (one of which appeared on Friday night, causing a certain amount of angst to the organisers). Monash can lend itself to long legs diagonally across the campus as there generally isn't a lot of open space between the buildings, but today it was more about legs which forced you to go very wide in one direction or the other.

This was certainly my best sprint run of the spring and the only disappointment was the result, going down by 3 seconds to Martin Steer. (Unsurprisingly, I was also behind his daughters, running the same course, although did manage to get in front of Clare today). Not sure where I would have found those 3 seconds - except perhaps for not being in a trying-not-to-have-a-head-on-dance with Aston on the way out of 11 - as this was about as clean as it gets. Caught Eleanor Johnstone (a visiting Brit) early on; she was a little faster than me but less clean into the controls, and we were dicing for the rest of the course, which was a nice kick-along. Achilles seemed better the faster I was running.

Sprint at La Trobe. Achilles was pretty bad walking this morning and I went out not certain whether I'd run until warming up, but decided it was worth a go.

Quite an interesting sprint, including the first multi-level course I've done in Australia - not as full-on as, say, the Stockholm Indoor Cup, but still a novelty. (Having to switch between two different maps meant that one of my technical idiosyncracities, not thumbing the map, worked to my advantage). Took a while to get going but got into a nice scrap with Fredrik through the multi-level section (the sort I enjoy, where I'm running slower but taking advantage of errors), and generally felt better running than I have the last couple of Saturdays (or earlier this week, for that matter), notwithstanding the heat. Achilles sore but manageable. Only time losses a couple of 5-second dips into dead ends on 3 and 8. A bit closer to the pace than in previous weeks, although still not within 50% of Peter.

I've been updating the history of Australian Schools results, and today was working on 2010, which featured an impressive sending-a-message-to-the-selectors result (perhaps not quite on the scale of Glenn Maxwell's 278 for Victoria today): Brodie was picked as a reserve for Tasmania but had the third fastest time outright. I think it would be fair to say that he went onto bigger and better things.

C • Maxwell 4

Achilles may have been OK through yesterday but came up badly this morning. Headed out on it anyway and it wasn't too bad initially, but was getting progressively worse so called it a day fairly early. Not sure how well it will get through this weekend, although at least it's a pair of sprints so not too long in time.

A pleasant if somewhat unadventurous session in the water at Fitzroy. Once again, sunglare an issue in the early part of it (and sun is not in short supply at the moment).

Some of you will have noticed the discussion on Boris's log about Martin Regborn doing a 30km straight-line leg (all on O maps, with no deviations more than 100m either side) in training. This naturally made me think about the longest possibilities in Australia. One possibility I thought of was the Castlemaine Goldfields-Wattle Gully-Mineral Springs-Glenluce-Porcupine Ridge combination; you might potentially get 25km or so out of that, although I'm not certain there's ever been an edition of Wattle Gully that has gone all the way north to the highway, and it would be hard to find a line which both took in a legal crossing of the railway, and avoided the private property in the Chewton area.

C • Straight line leg 7

The annual foray onto the football fields with the Bureau. Not as many matches this year because CSIRO's recent practice of giving free transfers without doing any recruitment in return (as well as a clash with a climate modelling workshop) left them unable to field a team, making it a three-team competition with Melbourne and Monash.

We drew both matches 1-1. The other match was almost drawn 1-1 as well (which would have made determining an overall winner a challenging problem) but Melbourne scored a last-second winner. My contribution was reasonably marginal but at least the Achilles stood up to the sprint work well.

C • Pace 2

One of those nights which my back took off: hopefully this isn't going to become a regular evening theme as it was last year (although I had a sense during the day that it wasn't feeling too good).

Occasionally some odd ads turn up on the Bureau's website. Today's was one of the better efforts, featuring military scenes and wording in Spanish. I thought perhaps they were recruitment ads for the defence forces of a Latin American country but they were actually Australian government ads spruiking for (presumably Spanish-speaking) investors in Australian defence industries.

This is turning into a rather strange week. I don't feel especially sick in the course of everyday life (bit of a sore throat, bit of congestion), but yesterday I fell apart at 30 minutes and it was a similar story today; I'd hoped for at least an hour but was struggling badly well before that. At least the Achilles continues to improve.

The warmth is a bit draining too. The media have started to pay attention to what's going on, and I spent a bit of this afternoon dealing with that.

You probably won't be too surprised to hear that by-election post-mortems occupied a fair bit of tonight's Northcote Labor meeting.

C • Symptoms sound familiar 1

Didn't seem to feel any worse this morning in an illness sense (although didn't sleep that well). Run was a bit of a struggle but no worse than plenty of other Monday morning run over the last year or two. Achilles not too bad. Continuing warm and humid, and plenty more of that where it's come from.

It's definitely a different crowd at Fitzroy at 6.30 on a hot evening to what it is at 7.30 on a Friday morning in July, but the actual lap lanes weren't much more crowded than usual. This swim never really got going - started off with getting a foot cramp on the first lap (the foot cramp is not an unknown problem for me, getting one on the first lap is), and by the last few laps, I felt a bit like other bits of me were threatening to cramp as well. Perhaps I'm more drained than I thought I was - will say it by ear tomorrow.