Training Log Archive: jennycas

New O shoes time. And although they are half a size bigger than my old ones, it was just as much effort to wrestle my feet into them as usual. Decided the laces were improbably tight, so loosened them. Felt my heel chafing on the way to the start, so tightened them. Got halfway to control 3 and the excruciating pain under my right arch was unmanageable, so spent a couple of minutes loosening that shoe. By halfway round the course though, a blister was forming on the other heel even though I'd left that shoe tightened, and the rest of the course became a limp-jog. Clearly my feet are not the same size as each other...

As for the navigating, I actually quite like flat low-vis stuff, and the shade provided by the dense ti-trees (Leptospermum) meant it wasn't too hot. Did a couple of dumb overshootings at times though - some of them deliberate because I couldn't find an earlier singletrack through the green even though it was on the map, but overrunning the first control was not in my plan. I must have been about 30m away from it yet climbed up the embankment to avoid a patch of green, then came wrongly down a track too far south because I thought there was a track before the control when actually the mapped black line was a pipeline. Getting worse at reading the detail, I am :(

Favourite control was in an area of swampy paperbark tea tree (Melaleuca) which didn't currently have any water underfoot but instead a carpet of maidenhair ferns. This made up for all the gruesomely burned car wrecks out there, which give me the heebie-jeebies.

We spent the afternoon driving to/from the Barrington Tops, which turned out to be 3 hours each way, because I had the thought that at 1300m it would be a bit cooler than the 40 degrees down in Cessnock. And indeed, up at the Gloucester Tops it was maybe even not quite 30. Plus there was still enough water in the river to make the Gloucester Falls worth the drive - and we saw a lyrebird. On a cooler day I'd have done the 8km loop walk around the sub-alpine plateau but in any case my blister said no. On the way down, at one of the many river fords, we had to let a herd of beautiful shaggy Highland cattle wade in/drink from the river.

Broke up the return journey with dinner at a defiantly unrenovated pub in Dungog, where my steak was overcooked (if that was medium rare, I'd hate to see well done) and G's schnitzel cost a whole $10 and it was even spelled correctly on the menu unlike the economically-lettered SNIZL I saw on a menu during our roadtrip.

C • Lyrebird 2

Day 3 Hard 2 - Splits

Um...looks like there is/was a fire this afternoon in the forest immediately to the west of tomorrow's map. Thought I saw smoke in that direction when we were up in the mountains :(

Since we're staying in Kurri Kurri, I could jog to this morning's event at Pelaw Main, and was already pretty sweaty by the time I got there. Wasn't too warm in the forest though, and I quite enjoyed the event, taking tracks where possible to minimise the prickle-bush. A couple of times I missed/misread a minor MTB track or a junction, but my cross-country bearings weren't too bad and so I feel like I only lost a couple of minutes all up.

After a shower, a nap, and removal of numerous prickles from my knees, plus $12 lunch at the pub, G & I headed up into the Watagan mountains for a drive which turned out quite pleasant (also cooler than the plains) once we'd established that I did not intend for him to go 4WDing on any unofficial tracks.

On the way back we decided to look at the HEZ, the Hunter region's greatest white elephant. According to our street directory, The Hunter Economic Zone business park should in fact encompass much of the area where we were running today, but in reality there is one 5km road through the middle of the bush, with only two businesses on it but a hell of a lot of burnt out cars and tyres (the bushland area is pretty junky too; I had a control today on a burnt out wheelie bin) - and yet the visionaries went to the trouble of putting kerbs, streetlights, a bike path and bus stopping bays along this (now dead-end) road. Makes a mockery of the saying "if you build it, they will come"!

C • HEZ 5

Day2 Hard 2 - Splits

Event: Xmas 5 Days 2016
 

Heavy-legged jog around Bushman, which is what this town was known as until somebody local got the bright idea of federating all the states...some lovely turn-of-the-century architecture around, in federation style (no less) and also, since this town actually has hills - unlike any town which we passed through yesterday - I ran up to the war memorial monument on the hilltop next to the caravan park.

We then went to visit The Dish (AKA Parkes Radio Telescope) and took back roads through Wellington to Gulgong where we lunched (and were thankfully able to obtain fuel) and then although I'd been keen on the Bylong Valley Way, realised it would take too long and also I wasn't doing too well on winding roads in the ute. So we headed through towards Cassilis instead, and were intrigued immediately after crossing the headwaters of the Goulburn River to see a sign to The Drip. This turned out to be a cliff overhang along the river (flowing, but only wading depth with some deeper pools) about 1.5km from the car park and to which many people had walked in their swimsuits! I have a feeling that there may have been a NSW champs rogaine near here a few years ago?

By the time we left The Drip it was after 2:30pm and we still had 300km to drive to get to Newcastle - oops. So our only stop was in Merriwa, where I found Pluto! This has solved a 10-year old mystery for me; along the road from Coonabarabran to the Warrumbungles are signs representing various planets, based on a scale model of the solar system which has Siding Springs Observatory as the sun. And I had always wondered how far away Pluto is...the other thing I found in this town is that you can still get HavaHeart ice creams; the heart-shaped choc-dipped vanilla ice creams which I'd thought had vanished some years ago.

C • The Drip 1

We got to the event site at Islington Tafe at least 14 min before starts closed - thank goodness the Hunter Expressway has been completed since my NSW road atlas was printed and although I didn't get much of a warmup it was still fairly warm so I was happy not to have run any earlier. Fun course at 1: 3000 so things came up very quickly, including controls which were on other people's courses but I took care to read the numbers. And descriptions too, but that didn't stop me from not realising that control 5 was on top of the little grandstand. A couple of minor misreadings of the control circle, plus I went too wide where a fence was actually mapped as crossable, but these were small things compared to going in the wrong entrance of the Christmas tree shaped maze on the oval at the finish because I somehow had my map turned around 90 degrees after the creek crossing. Public humiliation is the way to go - but seriously, we should have a maze more often.

Found excellent fish and chips afterwards :)

Day1 Hard 2 - Splits

We left home not long after 7am and stopped for the night in Parkes about 7pm. G kindly did all the driving and my job was to be a well-behaved passenger, which seemed to involve consumption of a lot of "sometimes foods" (although I'm sure the vanilla slice from Ouyen bakery was highly nutritious) in an attempt to avoid feeling sick from car travel or from overheating. At Goolgowi the car thermometer said it was 40 although that's probably an overestimate. Surprised to learn that Goolgowi was only settled in 1923, after the railway line to Hillston was completed. East of there the vegetation's still nice and green - lush even - since the September rains and between West Wyalong & Forbes still quite a bit of water is lying around in paddocks and billabongs.

Decent group of us for a Christmas morning run :)

Robin & Adrian & Simon & Bridget turned back before Echo Tunnel; the rest of us went up past the waterfalls to the top of the park (I was ridiculously slow on hills) and if the tap had still been there, we might have considered a longer run out to Station Rd, but we were all thirsty so went down through the redwoods to get a drink at Karka, from whence John, Stefano, AK and Andrew Mogs headed back, whereas I wanted to go back up to Upper Sturt Rd and down inside the park boundary, so Zara kindly came with me, but it turned out a bit too hot in the sun for TinselDog. Got to see the results of her guerilla tree-decorating though - a native cherry makes a great Christmas tree.

Had intended afterwards to do a couple laps of Blackwood forest to break in new O-shoes and get a decent distance/duration but I just didn't have the energy. Nor, as it turned out, did I have the time - spent the entire day doing dishes, cooking, hosting (parents for lunch, and repeated the sequence when friends came for dinner). So we haven't got around to packing for the road trip to NSW yet.

Stayed up last night to make gingerbread biscuits; got up this morning and iced them. Then proceeded to cook roast pork with all the trimmings for when parents and SLE came around for lunch, which was clearly a success, since they didn't leave until nearly 6pm :)

When it cooled down a little, I went for a leisurely ride. Very pleasant and peaceful at the far end of the valley but there was a real wave of warmth as soon as I came back to the suburbs. Getting hungry by the end despite having felt at post-dessert time that I'd never need to eat again!

Coounting down the to-do list before the 25th. We're running Belair at 7am that day due to the 40-degree forecast, which hopefully won't result in the park being closed.