Training Log Archive: TheInvisibleLog

Second Christmas Present!
First post-op run. Only slight knee pain, but it was in the other leg. Main constraint was lack of aerobic fitness.
Tis amazing how good it feels to run again, even for so short a time and so slowly. Reduced back pain! Mood improvement! The post-run glow of self-righteousness in the shower!

A Christmas Present:
After 10 dry years in Bendigo, serious rainfall was becoming a story told to children. You had to be a teenager at least to have an memories of heavy rain. But I had hope. I had spent a week watching the weather models, and they were all showing significant rainfall, though initially disagreeing on the exact day. I was printing of the maps each night and showing them to Julie. Sensibly, she was reminding me of all the other times the models had misled us with broken promises. But models started to agree on Friday as the day, and at lunchtime the rain began to fall, gently. I rang Julie and offered her and her bike a ride home in the car, and she accepted with little delay. By 5.30pm we had received about 25 mm and the sky looked to be clearing as we drove home. I mused that it would be lovely if we could have some serious rainfall for a change. Twenty-five millimeters was on the bottom end of the 25-100 predicted by Blair's mates. On cue, as we turned into our residential street, the rain started to fall in buckets. It kept falling for 25 minutes and added 25 mm to the rain gauge. Then it stopped like a tap had been turned off and the sun arrived. I decided this was the time for my first exercise since the operation... a bike ride out to the White's Ruins map to see the creek. So I hopped on the bike and headed off to the bike path that leads to the bush. It was there that I realised this was what the pedologists and dabblers in regolith studies call an 'episodic event'.

For some years there was a debate in the salinity research community about the study of watertables. One crew was running 3 year experiments and measuring the impact of different vegetation on watertables. Another crew as arguing this was futile because the recharge happened every so often in episodes of extreme rainfall and sheet flooding. Episodic events. The geomorpologists and regolith scientists are firmly of the episodic school. After failing to even wade up the bike path (and a good thing too as I subsequently discovered massive steel grates had been dislodged by the force of water escaping from drains) I was even more determined to get out in the local bush and see what was happening. But by a more circuitous route. The main creek through the White's Ruins map was in flood. I could hear the roar of rapids while still 500 metres from the creek. That is a very rare event on any map around Bendigo. It was probably happening on all of them. The creek was too dangerous to cross. So I snapped some before and after photos. I might not see this again.
Where my standard run crosses the gully. I wasn't too keen to cross here.


The reason I wasn't keen to cross is because this was below.



A broad gully. Note how the leaf litter is absent. This used to be covered in dry leaves.

The leaves swept away by this overland flow at least 100 metres wide.

From Dec 2007 flas...

Things looking up. I jogged 10 metres last night!

Saw surgeon today. Spent 30 seconds on the consultation and then 10 minutes on the issues surrounding the training of medical specialists. I think I may be riding on the weekend. A run will be my Xmas present to myself.