Training Log Archive: jennycas

Event: Australian Long Champs (SILVA NOL)
 

Northern Warbys. This course took me more time and effort than a half marathon would. It was a good course - I just haven't had to concentrate so intensely for this long, for some years.

1st control okay but tentative, I went wide to 2 but would have been faster to go all the way out to the track like Sus did, because Mace caught me 2 min at 2. I was with her into 3 and 4, then left 4 too high, saw a flash of yellow up the hill which was Shannon and got confused, by the time I came down to the control at 5 I'd lost both of them. Left 5 too far left not thinking straight but saved myself on a random clearing and was very cautious into 6. 7 & 8 were okay, 9 should have been too but where I crossed the creek below the control I saw a cliff and couldn't identify it on my map so thought I was too far downstream, when in fact the cliff was the lower black dot of what I had read as 3 boulders in a row. Lost 2 min here maybe? (Actually, looking at the splits, it's closer to 4.)

10 okay, 11 was the long leg and I decided to go right but I hadn't fully made up my mind until I reached the bottom of the hill, saw Anna - I had been wondering how long it would take her to catch me 10 min - and I belted off down the creek with her in hot pursuit. Once we started going uphill, I didn't see her for dust :) 11 to 12 was a bit disappointing, such a steep uphill climb I had to walk, and where I crossed the track on the ridge I was further north than I thought so started looking about 200m further north than I should have for the radio control. Vanessa punched it just before me and I didn't really have a plan when I left it except to go the direction she'd gone...remembered to navigate soon after, but then I was standing on top of the rock with 13 below it and so sure I was in the right spot but couldn't see the control until someone punched it!

Very glad to finish, still wondering how Rachel took 10 min out of me - this terrain must suit her - but the best I could have done would have been 90 with clean controls and optimal route choices. I am just not fast enough in this stuff, and tentative on the downhills, though my ankles are stronger than they were.

(oops, this has become a bit of an essay - but now I don't have to bother writing any notes on the map!)

Event: Australian Sprint Champs (SILVA NOL)
 

I was taping my ankles on the train station platform waiting for Lauren's train to arrive in Benalla as it was only 30 min to my start (the train was 75 min late and luckily Susanne managed to arrange her another start), but I still had enough time to warm up. Which I needed because it was a bit of a running race. Very glad not to have been one of the first junior girls out there - the elephant tracks helped a lot. When I finished people assumed I'd stacked it because I had so much dirt on me from rolling under a gate which was quicker than climbing the fence around the oval. Happy with 13th but I cannot understand why the majority of my ranking points come from sprints when I am not a sprinter.

Very glad we made it to the model event in the Warbys because it takes me a while to get my head around Alex Tarr's mapping and I figured I'd need all the help I could get, having spent half an hour on one control at Barambogie in 2003.

A lot of people didn't make it to the model event, however, which led to a lot of discussions among the South Australians the next day, about how we can better coordinate the sprint/model events on the Friday next year. I guess that the sprint champs now has so many competitors that the starts need to run over a few hours, but we can definitely have a wider time window for the model event.

The usual loop. Should have worn my newer shoes because the ground has dried out in the last couple of warm days and was hard on my shins. Didn't feel very bouncy but to my surprise this was a couple min faster than I last remember!

Maybe this will help alleviate my pessimistic streak which has surfaced again this week. I could say it began with being given a non-elite running number for the Aust champs - are they trying to tell me something? - but that would be complete bollocks. Anyway, the public humiliation of having to spend this weekend wearing a t-shirt with the stoned koala logo on it, promoting next year's Aust champs in Adelaide, will be far greater... (Probably I am just exhausted from fitting 5 days' worth of work into 3 days this week. And what will I do with the 3 days of annual leave I've just saved? Why, use them to drive to Canberra next Easter, of course!)

Yay for Melbourne and coffee &shopping on Brunswick St! I would just like to say, though that driving Tullamarine to Kinglake via Clayton is counter-intuitive.

When I got to Monash to pick up Hania she still had to take the work ute through a car wash so I took myself through the 25m indoor pool. It was okay apart from the heat and chlorine.

When we got to Kinglake (I can't believe she drives nearly 80km each way each day) Hania & Quentin sat down and showed me on the maps where the fire came from on Black Saturday and where it went when the wind changed - and then I didn't sleep too well. In the morning she took me for a walk to Bald Spur Rd. The burnt houses have been cleared now and in many cases people are rebuilding but it was still disturbing to hear how many people had died in which of the houses on that street.

Attack of the Killer Physio

Ow ow, my hip! It's been attacked by a Killer Physio...Kath says my hip rotators are weak. (So it's entirely their fault that I didn't want to get up this morning - they were weak-willed while the rest of me was motivated, really!) Also I am apparently under-recovered from the weekend. I could have told her that, it's only Monday....and feels like it :(

Trot along Brownhill Creek in the dark and the mud with Fern & Tyson, following the singletrack until we got to the stepping stones. 3 out of 5 were underwater so we turned around and went back the same way. I really like the sound of rushing gurgling creek water; (less so, the sensation of falling in it). Felt surprisingly okay after physio though knee is a bit uncertain.

Event: Victorian Long Champs (SILVA NOL)
 

Spur-gully, and lots of it! Only 12 controls though.I had a mostly clean run though I think my route choice on the long leg to 4 left a bit to be desired - I ended up a bit right of the line and approached the control from NE instead of SE. I thought it was an okay course; there were alternate route choices to be considered but mostly the fastest route was to go fairly straight and maybe bypass the tops of some hills. Wider routes still required careful reading of contours; you couldn't switch off much. I felt a bit sluggish on the hills (especially when Rita Homes from NZ ran past me) but will hopefully be fresher for the long run next weekend.

The only control which I didn't spike was number 8 which was in the wrong place. Well, I ran to the right spot, a bulldozer scrape on the spur above a flat saddle, but there was no control there. I could see the mapped ditch about 50m further down the hill (and had I been in geocaching mode where you look for the most obvious hiding place, maybe I would have checked there next) but I had no expectation that there would be a control in there, because it was clearly the wrong place. Then I started to doubt myself, but i knew I had navigated perfectly to it, so I went uphill a bit to check the contours, came back down again, eventually wondered what was so special about that ditch that the guy in the raincoat was still standing by it, went down and punched the control!

Turns out that the guy in the raincoat was the controller, acting on Anna Sheldon's report that the control was wrong (she was first finisher on our course). Turns out also that the control was only on our course, and that he shifted it to the correct location after he thought all the girls had been through so that the other classes on the course wouldn't be disadvantaged!

Hmmm. What I want to know is, if the control had been initially taped by the course planner, and then checked by the controller, and then put out by the course planner, and then checked by the controller, was it wrong all along - or did some of those steps not take place?