Training Log Archive: jennycas

Had intended to do sand dune intervals but was very tired and thirsty this morning (not sure that a late night with night O at Lucky Hit will be ideal before the twilight rogaine) and after jogging 3 laps of the Snake Pit at not much less than 4 min each, gave up and ran up the beach to the North Haven breakwater & back. Exhausted legs didn't really want to bounce on the seaweed either. But it was a gloriously calm morning to be by the ocean, if getting a bit hot in the sun already, and parents enjoyed coming along for the drive/walk/brunch.

Fun mass start night-O on a warm evening after a fairly complicated day - we ran through Veale Gardens off South Tce with artificial hills & waterfalls and a stream running through the rose gardens, plus the courses went through playground and parkland area beyond.
2.9km 17:43 (it helped that I knew where some of the controls were because I'd put them out)
2.8km 18:10 (legs getting tired now and I lost the pack because of the queue at the control which had been put into the middle of the pond)
My parents enjoyed walking around the short course as "rogaine practice" too.

Past the lake, up to the trainline, back down the creek with Zara/Callum & Des. Nice cool breeze and a longer run would have been good (a byproduct of the exercise-every-day-for-a-month experiment seems to have been that most of my runs were too short lately) but I had to be home in time for online OA Board meeting.

My punctuality was, however, ruined by the fact that our phone line/internet seems to be down, and although there's Skype on my very old laptop, it wouldn't accept my new Telstra USB modem, and I decided in the end that it would be quicker to install Skype on the new laptop than to install Telstra on the old one - but then had no idea of my login & password!

Got there eventually...probably not a worse faux pas than the time I came home from Thursday night run so hot & sweaty that I figured I'd just sneak off for a really quick shower, and hoped no one else on/in the Board meeting would notice my absence for 5 min (this was a false hope).

I like to think I was efficient by my standards but it's equally possible that I lost track of laps because I was hungry (dinner was tasty but not very filling last night) and inadvertently skipped a couple...

Sprint qual & final, set by you-know-who. We had about 20 people, so the top half from each heat went through to the A final and there were even "chest" numbers for them. I was never going to make the A final (all those stairs within courtyards in the qualifier, and my legs felt horrible) so settled for trying to have a decent run in the B final which was on the southernmost part of the campus, my favourite section. Apparently Ben got me by a minute though.

Qual 1.8km, 13:26 (I took the long route down the ramp to the finish rather than sliding down the embankment)
Final 2.2km, 14:20. Stefano said these distances were both measured on optimal route choice.

Tired tight legs on a hot night. We all went to the bottom of First Falls (still trickling) then the others were going to do hill loops but I thought I'd need to stop & stretch too much, so headed up past Giant's Cave, then up the Hogan's Hill singletrack, but I had to stop to catch my breath every couple of minutes on the ascent. I guess that makes the run into sort of intervals, right? Knees weren't sure what they thought about the descent either, but tastebuds and tummy were both happy with the yiros which I procured on the way to OSA meeting afterwards.

I wanted to run in Sheps, thinking it might be a bit cooler there, so I cheated & drove to the park (thereby cutting off the boring half hour in the suburbs) to do the 3-hills loop. Hill ascents were tough on fatigued hamstrings but the rose-gold sunset as viewed from the ridgeline was glorious.

Oh dear, my bearings were all over the place today. I attribute this partly to the fact that for the first 20-30 min my feet were so painful that I couldn't focus on anything else (hopeful that this will improve as I break in the new O-shoes but am conscious that sore arches were a problem in the last pair of O-Rocs also). And Bridget went past me like I was standing still, which makes me think that I haven't actually been doing any productive training at all lately; it's just been for a colourful log on AP. Was very inefficient in the waterholes section too, partly because of taking a while to find good crossing points between them and also because in the low-lying areas I had to trawl through the thigh-high pennyroyal mint plant, which has flourished more than I've ever seen it before due to the wetter summer.

Went out on my MTB to collect pink tapes, and particularly enjoyed riding the boardwalk section through the waterholes. Pity that it's fallen into disrepair and is getting a bit rickety, because it was only built by forestry about 10 years ago! I've always been a bit scared of bikes but am rather fond of Juliet because she's so comfortable, so maybe I should put a bit more effort into taking her on rougher tracks.