Swimming 32:00 [2] 1.0 km (32:00 / km)
Did this in the evening after discovering in the morning that I'd left all my swimming gear at work last week (and you can imagine how pleasant the towel was after having being rolled up wet in a bag for four days :-). Was rather wishing I didn't because I never got going at all - shoulders pretty stiff for no obvious reason. First time I can ever remember being rained on during a session at Fitzroy (being rained on at all in Melbourne these days takes a bit of doing).
Run 49:00 [2] 9.0 km (5:27 / km)
Very slow Monday night blob with Dion and Nicola - the crowd has got pretty thin lately. Leg 3 of the Monday night triathlon (although I haven't logged the ride to get here). Felt very ordinary throughout, perhaps a little better on the final loop. Maybe I haven't got through the cold I thought I was getting last week as well as I thought I might. Best part of the night was definitely the food at Lentil as Anything afterwards.
As regular readers of this log will know, I often use my runs when travelling to explore places that most tourists wouldn't get to, and a piece I read on the weekend emphasised that I really have got into some weird and wonderful places. The run in question was through the industrial back blocks of Ust-Kamenogorsk, Kazakhstan during the APOC tour in 2004. It turns out that, in a past life, the Ulba Metallurgical Factory was a top-secret Soviet nuclear installation, and the article on the weekend was about what happened next. The Kazakhs inherited several hundred kilos of highly unstable weapons-grade uranium on independence. They didn't want it. The Russians didn't want it. The Americans didn't really want it either, but they wanted even less for those who might want it (like Iran, Iraq, North Korea or Osama bin Laden) to get their hands on the stuff, so they arranged to haul it away under cover of darkness and fly it halfway around the world (refuelling in mid-air because no country would allow them to land with such a cargo) to be reprocessed in Tennessee. Not sure how long all of this has been public knowledge for, but it would have been fun to have known it while we were there...