Training Log Archive: jennycas

George picked me up when I flew in from Melbourne and we met Fern & Tyson, Troy & Andrea at Brighton, went for a run along the beach (well, 5 of us did) then consumed burgers and chips and ice cream. Lovely evening for it and great company; annoying twinge from knee.

Same hill, different day, not dissimilar course configuration. I was running 3rd in an M35 relay team with Greg Morcom and Ruhi Afnan (not enough Arrows to go round so Lauren was in M21 with Ben & Simon) and when Ruhi handed over to me he said "132's not there!" so I knew that he had DNFed and there was no pressure on me - only 2 teams in M35 anyway, but the guys were going round in 64-65 and I took rather longer than that.

Stuffed up the end of the 1.3km long first leg by about 50m and a couple of minutes, then plodded south along the west side of the ridge, overrunning 3 slightly, then plodded north along the east side of the ridge for nearly 2km to the drinks/spectator control above the arena (don't need to navigate on this leg at all) then around the final loop at snail's pace. Lack of terrain fitness really showed this weekend but also I am never going to be any good in this sort of terrain with dodgy knees & ankles. Not saying it wasn't a fun weekend socially and good for spectating the rest of the relay, but by the time I had driven to Melbourne with Bruce & Blair & Fredrik (and I got the really shitty bit of the drive in the darkness with the rain and the truck spray) it was nearly midnight and I was wishing I'd just flown home with the schools' team!

Event: Australian Middle Distance/Relay Championships
 

Hmm, I am not good on hills, particularly the sort with rocky hillsides along which it's necessary to mountain-goat. This was a single hill with steep sides not unlike Mt Beckworth, and I never really got into the mapping, expecting the 'large' boulders to be bigger on the ground than they actually were, and being continually surprised by how small the rockfaces were with controls on them. Anyway, lost a bit of time on a few controls; too high/wide into 2 (Aislinn had caught me 2 min already), too low at the end of the longish leg into 5 but I thought I was too high so kept going down, overshot 9 on a danger downhill diagonal (still thinking 1:15000 from last weekend?) and was too high on 11 - I often tended to climb a couple more contours than necessary. So maybe I wasn't reading the contours very well. Grace came through me on the way to 7 like I was standing still, and Hanny/Anna passed me when I stuffed up 9, and Jas at the end as I was picking my way downhill; she just sped through the rubble. Think I ended up something like 25 min behind Grace - perhaps I should have run W35. Also perhaps I should have had more for dinner last night than Qantas' 'cottage pie'.

C • Cottage Pie 1

Oz Middle Course 2 - Splits

Pootle along the creek on a beautiful spring morning, hopefully not undoing the good work that some painful foam-rollering had achieved with my ITBs. Should be a perfect weekend in Canberra which means I will have to try even harder to not get sunburnt (I was unsuccessful at this on the previous 2 weekends).

C • Sunburn 1

Starting to catch up with myself, just in time for going away again this weekend. Back was twinging last night but didn't comment this morning.

Last of the darkness runs for 6? months. Up the park boundary with Zara/Callum (happy Callum!) and Fern. We had thought about going down Olave Hill but came back along Long Gully instead where my hands got really cold and my (now-no-longer-virginally-white) shoes rather muddy. Felt better running than I had for some weeks, to my surprise.

C • Must've been the calibre of the company! 2

Shepherds Hill, Eden Hills, Bellevue Heights, Flinders Uni. Nearly turned around and went back to bed in the first 10 min but figured I'd enjoy the scenery (if I wasn't too busy looking at my feet) on a blustery drizzly morning with some nice spring smells. I sort of did have fun but was oh, so slow! Incredibly stiff through hips & back, and still pretty tired despite crashing out not long after 7pm last night (which of course led to a wide-awake-randomly-worrying session in the middle of the night followed by some weird dreams).

Pretty weary (have had stiff neck/back/hips since last week either from strange hire car or strange beds, therefore not sleeping well) and the intended plod after work morphed into getting fast food, recounting my fairly average day to George (I definitely didn't anticipate that argument with a colleague) and deciding that since I couldn't even focus on reading the newspaper, I should go to bed even though it was only 7pm. Not sure when I'm going to get my lectures written for next week...