Training Log Archive: blairtrewin

This isn't my first time in Victoria. I came here in 1993 on the way to that year's WOC (having made my plans before narrowly missing the team): I was doing honours at ANU that year and that was the best way around the problem that the supervisor with whom I very much wanted to work (a feeling which was mutual) was on sabbatical in Canada for the second half of the year. It was a week which featured one of the epic runs of my life, a 3 1/4 hour effort - the first time I'd been so far - which started at the far end of a coastal walking track which was a good deal more rugged than I was expecting, in a year when the main significance of September 11 (for me, anyway) was that it would have been my brother's 21st birthday.

At the time, my supervisor's older son was also the subject of one of my occasional forays into talent-spotting. Simon Trevitt is now one of the more obscure figures of Australian orienteering history - one Easter, sixteenth in M12A (says he, looking back to the days when it was possible to come sixteenth in an M12A race in Australia). I'd first seen him as a six-year-old tagging along on a first-year field trip, going through Namadgi light green as if it wasn't there. Three years later, he was still a wonderfully fluent natural terrain runner - and fit enough that he joined me for the opening kilometres of several runs that week (although not the 3 1/4 hour one), not bad for someone who was still (just) in single figures - but never quite came to grips with the navigational side of it and disappeared from the scene a year or two later. These days he's living in Sweden.

(My other major piece of talent-spotting around that time can, I think, reasonably be counted as a success, even if he never quite made a WOC team and most of his championship wins have come in North America rather than Australia).

Today's run initially took me to what was temporary home ground in September 1993, the suburbs a few kilometres northwest of the city, before cutting east across to the university where our meeting has been this week. The aim was then to go down to and along the east coast but my map memory wasn't quite up to the job and I hit the coast at a dead-end, realising after that that this run was going to be a bit longer than I was planning on. Came back after that by the shortest feasible route.

This never sparkled as a run - and was a bit weak on the hills - but was a good honest effort, ending up as the longest run I've done in almost a year, and feeling as strong in the last quarter-hour as at the start. Again the surfaces were a real mixed bag with some good snow, some ice and some bare ground. Given that I was reasonably happy with the pace, particularly at the end when I started to get onto consistently cleared ground. It snowed for much of the last hour, although without any accumulation, and I did my first ice-induced face plant of the trip with about 30 minutes to go (fell into a snowbank with no lasting damage).

I'm now on the long trip home (which may be longer if the weather throws a spanner in the works at either Vancouver or LA).

Spotted on the way into the ferry terminal - a variation on a sign which I'm told provided much amusement to SA schools teams of 1990s vintage: 'Congestion Ahead When Amber Flashing'.