Training Log Archive: jennycas

Bundaleer Forest, near Jamestown. I'd talked Steve Cooper into doing this with me; he was worried about holding up for 6 hours, but I knew he would be fine. We'd decided to drive up and back in one day - this involved leaving town at 6.30am, and for most of the drive up the car said it was 4 degrees outside! It became a beautiful clear day, and we never stopped running for long enough to get cold. The terrain was a mixture of pine forest, eucalypt plantation and grazing country with some big hills in the south which we decided to tackle first, leaving the flatter stuff for the end, making sure our route didn't miss any controls that we'd later regret not going to. We doubted being able to clean up the whole course, but were pretty sure that Dave Talbot and Ryan Cox would do so.

We were pretty evenly matched - I'm faster on the downhills and road running but Steve powered up the big hills in a way that I just couldn't. At the top of the range to the west of the hash house we were rewarded with views across to Mount Remarkable in the northwest, and the Hallett windfarm in the east. At numerous controls we were rewarded with chocolate thanks to the sponsors (this was an Asthma Foundation fundraiser and so ended up with 130+ teams and quite a lot of sponsorship - I was relieved to find that "sponsored by Santos" didn't mean having a bucket of oil at the control). The best control was "sponsored by Nippy's" and had fruit-box drinks at it, but the juice was so cold that I got an ice-cream headache from it.

At about 2hrs 45 we saw Dave Talbot and his teammate (not Ryan) going the other way, and they were running up a hill, and had done about half the course already, so we were sure that they would be able to clean up by getting the 43 & 73 which were immediately south of the hash house and didn't easily link to any other controls. We got to the north end of the map at about 3hrs 45, and at this point Steve said "if we get back to the hash house with half an hour left, we'll be able to get those last 2 controls". I told him I admired his optimism!

In eventual fact, we had 35 min left, so dropped our packs and tackled the slog up the hill to 73. I looked down as we passed where 43 would be and spotted it in an open gully, so knew exactly where we had to aim for on the way back down. Steve was cramping but I fed him some jellybeans and we finished at a trot, with 5 min to spare. It would have been easy to just hand in our control card and say "we got the maximum score" but I checked it twice to make sure we'd really been to all the controls, because I couldn't believe it. I was also disbelieving when I talked to Dave and his mate Mark, who he'd recruited at the last minute because Ryan was injured, and found out that they didn't make it to 43/73, so we had beaten them! (I guess that marathon runners have great endurance for 3-4 hours, but then fall in a heap.)

It got cold and dark very quickly, and it took a long time to process results. By the time of the presentations I was wearing tights, thermal pants, track pants, 5 layers on my top half, plus gloves and beanie! By the time we got back to town at 10:30pm I was completely buggered, but we'd seen the partial lunar eclipse on the way home, and were happy not to be camping :)

C • congrats 3

It rained coldly and bleakly both ends of the day and I figure I'll get plenty of that sort of weather on the rogaine tomorrow. (On the bright side, think of all the orienteering emails I've achieved while waiting for it to stop raining so I can walk home from work.)

C • overland track silliness 2

Train line - Lower Waterfall - tank - steps - Long Gully loop with Tyson, Fern, Zara/Callum, Steve & Aidan. (Nicole, Steve says hi, he remembers you & Richard.) Tonight my legs still had the memory of yesterday's hills, so I wasn't hugely sprightly, but that's okay, because that descriptor is reserved for little old ladies trying to get across the road...

Oh, and I've worked out why all the TV camera crews were lining up trying to get access to the gated retirement village around the corner from us, while I was walking the dog this morning. Apparently Julia Gillard's parents live there.

Up through Randells Reserve to the BP at Belair (32 min) and back down Gloucester Ave. I felt good, for no obvious reason. There was a warmish dawn breeze which made me think of spring, but which actually means that the rest of the day will be bloody freezing. I saw a plane coming in to land over Glenelg, but because I was at a higher altitude than it, the optical illusion created was that the plane was sailing on the ocean!

C • Sorry! 1

North Adelaide loop with Bridget, Simon, Fern, Tyson, Robin and Vanessa, also with some untimed fartlek intervals thrown in. These were mostly 60-90 sec I'm guessing. V and I did a lap of the uni loop as warmdown and when we finished everyone had gone already, so we went and had dinner by ourselves.

Tyson: "I can't be bothered running, let's just go to the supermarket."
Bridget: "Let's do a supermarket run!"
Simon: "Let's go down the creek a bit first to make it long enough to log on AP."
Jenny: "First item on my list is 3L milk, so I'll leave my grocery shopping until the drive home."
All of us: "My quads don't like the downhills today :( "
Fern: "Going uphill is much easier" (as we struggle up Keith Rd).
A good time was had by all....Tyson was the back-pack-horse, but we told him it was rogaine training for this weekend!

http://www.sarrc.asn.au/Maps/satccoursedesc_map.pd...

Firstly, this wasn't as steep as anticipated (the race info described 985m of ascent and descent, which turned out to mean 492.5m of each)

Secondly, this wasn't as painful as anticipated, or else I handled it better than I thought I would. Actually quite pleased by how I dealt with it mentally, even though I became all too aware that my core stability and consequently my hill-climbing ability, is sub-optimal currently. Also pleased with my decision to carry a jellybean stash and a couple of salt tablets :)

The contentious age-based "wave starts" didn't really materialise; there was just a string of starters in single file up the slippery singletrack Pioneer Women's trail, and then some overtaking to be done. Next year I'm sure they'll start people based on anticipated time! At about Eagle on the Hill the 50+ guys started passing me - first Harry Waterhouse, bouncy as usual, and then Peter Allcroft, frothing at the mouth about how rude Harry had been in pushing past people at the bottom.

From 50-70 min my neuroma was annoying me, and this coincided with the steepest/roughest climb. I heard footsteps behind me which turned out to be Fern - she's tough on hills! This was at about the 10km mark - 62 min. I was glad to already know (from my Yurrebilla training run) that the Wine Shanty track is by no means flat and that it goes around a number of spurs before reaching Greenhill Rd, also happy to be feeling stronger on this section and I pulled away from a few people. Down Chambers Gully my legs were starting to cramp so I stopped to stretch my hamstrings and hoped that my quads would hold out okay. 20km was at 1:52, so 50 min for the next 10km.

I wasn't sure whether the course was actually 23 or 24km, having seen different distances reported, so didn't know how hard to push the last climb up Dashwood Gully, and then I was surprised by a 500m sprint straight down Dashwood Rd to the finish. I was sure that we were meant to rejoin the Pioneer Women's Trail switchbacks, which was in fact the case, except that the course markers got it wrong yesterday. Probably not a bad thing given the slipperiness of the PWT descent, which only Bridget got to enjoy (on the 12km).

So, Simon did the Arrows proud by winning the men's in 1:41, and Lauren likewise the women's in just under 2hrs. Rory McComb did 2:06 apparently, not sure about his dad. Fern & then Zara weren't far behind me, and Tyson's was a valiant effort (was this the longest run you've done, Mr T?).

Poor Lauren could hardly walk by the time of the presentations, she'd strained her groin in a slippery slide. She came up to me with some ice, followed by a girl who I afterwards realised must have been the first aid officer, who started giving me advice on not letting Lauren walk anywhere etc. I looked at this girl slightly blankly and she said "Aren't you her mother?" (I told George last weekend that I wasn't keen on the photos he'd taken of me because you can tell that all my wrinkles are 35 years old....) Anyway, Simon kindly carried Lauren to the car, saying as he did so " Bridget is going to kill me!"

I'm glad I did this race as it's the first long run I've felt confident about since Cradle Mtn. In fact I found myself thinking that the Six Foot Track isn't even twice as long as this. It has a LOT more up and down, though.

C • Told you it would be nice -... 1