Training Log Archive: jennycas

Before a long day of house-tidying, window-washing, and party-organising. When we realised a few weeks ago that there would be 50-60 people coming to dad's 80th I had arranged a roast-meat-&-salads caterer but I was still frantically dusting (don't seem to have been home on weekends to do housework lately) when she arrrived and I had to ask the first few guests to help blow up the balloons!

Party went well and cake-decorating was a success; rosemary sprigs for trees, chocolate snowballs for boulders and controls made out of the orange & white parts of licorice allsorts :)

C • Window cleaning 6

To/from pool, because G was parked behind me and I didn't think it worth taking his ute.

Street O starting from St John's Grammar at the top of Gloucester Ave. Which meant that the first few controls resulted in a net downhill. At first glance the 5 southernmost controls on the other side of Gum Grove seemed as good as any to leave out but by the time I was halfway round the Caroline Ave loop I'd worked out that getting the remaining 15/20 would mean having to do a couple of out & backs and that these involved a couple of big hills. Oh well, I'm better on hills than I was a week ago, and it was a nice cool evening, of which the Darwinites were particularly aware :)

Knocklofty hill's been staring at me all week and I seemed to recall the circuit being less than an hour's run when we were staying just off Hill St in West Hobart 5 years ago. But there were a lot of hills to get to Hill St, when starting from Battery Point, and it seemed really hot in the sun despite being only 17 degrees and I started out at the time of Hobart's brief but chaotic peak hour traffic on the one-way system ( it used to be 15 minutes but now I suspect it lasts more like half an hour), and so I really didn't enjoy the first 30 minutes or so and the steeper it got, the more often I had to stop until my heart rate would normalise. Mt Stuart Rd required rests at 2-minute intervals. Might be a bit exhausted still?

Anyway, I thought about going back but I was nearly at the reserve, and Knocklofty really is a nice bit of bushland, with wallabies hopping around enjoying the evening sunlight. The trail has been revamped a bit but it still goes up to the broad summit ("a knoll" rather than "the knoll") and then steeply down, eventually popping out at Forest Road, which goes steeply down some more - after all, the hilltop is at 370m so you have to lose that altitude somehow. Hurried back through the suburbs admiring everyone's rose gardens (it's still spring in Hobart and the climbing Pierre de Ronsard are particularly magnificent), having finally made up my mind that I would go to the conference dinner since I'd lugged a good dress and shoes all the way to the Antipodes.

Probably unsurprisingly, I didn't get going very efficiently this morning - ate some toast at 4:30am then had weird dreams for the next few hours (if I were Blair I would probably just have got up & gone running at that time, but I'm not so I didn't) but by the end of a day conferencing I needed to stretch my legs so headed out along Sandy Bay, wondering why the casino is called Wrest Point (for years I assumed it was West Point), up by the uni then back towards the city with a bit of waterfront to finish, kind of hoping the Aurora Australis might be in port - but its webcam shows it sitting comfortably in sea ice at Davis. Fairly stop-start run and hip flexors tight but I felt better at the end than I did at the beginning. I'm not much of one for sitting still in conferences and keep thinking about all the stuff I could be doing at home instead, to prepare for dad's 80th on Sat.

Sooo tired on Sunday afternoon but I had 3 presentations to be working on simultaneously, which required both chocolate and coffee to keep me awake (not really alert) and I gave up at 11pm, started again at 6am, made it by 9 to the cancer pharmacists' workshop which I was chairing; actually the day went pretty well. Came home about 5, absolutely exhausted, had a snack and then decided I needed a nap before going for a run. Woke up about 4:30am Tuesday...

C • Apparently 2

Wouldn't say I was fully confident about this run given that I never got around to doing anything over 2hrs in training, but feeling optimistic and a little excited, although that could just be delirium due to sleep deprivation (did the clock radio alarm really need to go off at an unspecified ungodly hour in the middle of the night?). The top of Mt Wellington didn't look that far away, really, and certainly not 1270m high.

It took less than 15 min to jog from my accommodation across to the Wrest Point Casino in Sandy Bay on a perfect sunny morning (although a bit longer to walk home again later, especially up the hill to Battery Point) and I had heaps of time before the start, although it then took a couple of minutes to actually get across the start line, being a fair way back in a field of about 1400 people (the 1600 walkers started about an hour earlier, and above The Springs I encountered hundreds of them).

Up Davey St and Huon Rd in the sun I felt quite warm and sluggish but I wasn't going to worry about all the people going past me, just find my rhythm and stick to it. I felt a bit better whenever it was shady, and even started passing the occasional person. Plus it's cooler higher up, of course; by the time we got to the Pinnacle Rd turnoff at Ferntree (450m altitude), my breath was actually steaming! First 5km took about 32 min, second 5km seemed to take forever but it turned out that the 10km marker meant 10km to go, so that 40 min was actually for 6.4km.

The Springs are at about 14km, and it was here that someone was offering fairy bread to runners (also I must tell Meredith about the sign which someone was holding up: WTF Where's The Finish?) and I took a cup of Gatorade which was a bit hard to run/drink with but at least I was smart enough not to tip it over my head as I usually do with water :) While I still felt fairly ok the problem was that my knees were really starting to protest - I've had these shoes for a couple of years & should replace them - and at 16km I had to stop & stretch and let the hordes of walkers stream past me. A good thing that I admired the view here, because it turned out to be a bit cloudy at the top.

At 18km I had to briefly join the walkers, a bit demoralised because the sign at the Chalet said it's at altitude 1000m; did the next 3km really each involve 100m climb? Mind you, being at the snowline meant it was possible to see the stream of people going up the road ahead of me, all the way to the top. Remembered the muesli bar in my back pocket and with the energy from this and the next drink stop, plodded my way to the finish mats which turned out to be not right at the transmitter tower, but at the lookout (never complain if the last km is a bit short) and involved a bit of a bottleneck as everyone stood there in a crowd and shuffled forward very slowly towards the lookout shelter where we received finishers' medals, a packet of lollies and water, before hunting for the gear buses among a full carpark of about 60 buses, which were to take us down the mountain in efficient O-Ringen fashion.

Some people found the bus descent on winding roads a bit tedious but I was chatting to Gary Carroll and we were soon at the bottom, shuffling into the casino for our free meal & drink (tear-off vouchers on the bottom of the running number) which was a nice idea; although soup & fruit weren't very filling, the cup of tea went down well and fortified me for the walk back home, $60 well spent. I've had a look at how this run, which bills itself as "The World's Toughest Half Marathon" compares in times to the 27.4km Two Bays, which turns out to be about 20 min longer for the winners. So probably what I did today equated to my doing 3hr for Two Bays in 2014. Think I could have been about 10 min faster today if my knees had cooperated (2:40 includes stretching stops), and think I need to lose about 5kg before the WRC next July - not difficult to do if I make a concerted effort to run a bit more rather than staying at my desk until it's too late, and the byproduct of that process should hopefully be ending up about 1 min/km faster on this sort of run also.

C • Well done! 12