Training Log Archive: blairtrewin

Woke up with hints of a cold, which may partly explain my dismal performance yesterday - often my running gets hit a day or two before I feel any actual symptoms. This morning was the Running Festival's pack runs, mostly through the old Green Hills, and the plan was something in the 75-90 minute range, so the advertised 16km loop sounded ideal. It wasn't as much of a pack run as I thought it would be, because Liggo and Kathryn cut back at the 10km turnoff, then the next group I found myself in kept going to do a longer one, so I was on my own throughout the second half. Turned out Joshwa was sitting a minute behind me - if I'd known I would have cut back.

The run was OK at cruise speed, but hard work on anything that resembled a hill.

The ACT is not renowned for plain English, so it was not surprising to see en route to the next session, within the space of a couple of kilometres, signs to the Resource Management Centre (the tip), Domestic Animal Services (the dog pound) and the Alexander Maconochie Centre (the new jail that doesn't have any prisoners yet because the security system doesn't work).

Mass-start relay practice at Sparrow Hill, with four separate sections. Feeling pretty unwell by this stage in the afternoon and couldn't really attack this with any real intensity - the rating is probably a reflection of intention rather than reality. Couldn't really keep pace with anyone other than the stragglers, except at the end, and a couple of careless errors in the low visibility too. Nice area for training, though.

The concept of the weekend was good but it was a pity that I wasn't able to do it justice. The trip home was rather tiring as well (didn't make it back until after midnight).

Sprint training at Uni of Canberra. Didn't feel as if I was going all that fast, but handling the navigation OK (a bit more local knowledge than last year helps).

As those who've been following a somewhat feisty discussion on my Facebook page will know, I've been doing a bit of work lately investigating the meteorological background to the 1851 Victorian bushfires, which has involved a fair bit of newslpaper-trawling. Just to show that some things don't change, the big news of the day (before the fires started) was a move by the liquor licensing authorities to control rowdy behaviour at the races by banning the sale of alcohol at the St. Kilda racecourse.

The orienteering race at the Stromlo Running Festival. Felt ordinary from start to finish and got a very ordinary result (although it looked a bit worse than it was because I think most other people took at least one route through the "uncrossable" marsh). It's tempting to blame the heat (34) but the problem with that was that I felt as bad at the start as I did later. Also got tangled up a couple of times in awkward erosion gully crossings - I don't recall it being as junky as that in 1991 (and it probably wasn't).

Was a bit surprised that Simon sat behind me for most of the last loop - I suspected (correctly) that he wasn't trying all that hard at the time. Made a silly mistake on a late control which saw him go through me. A pretty disappointing effort.

Event: Stromlo Running Festival
 

Swim at Ivanhoe before hitting the road for Canberra. Felt very sluggish early on but settled down OK.

Stopped off at Benalla to check potential control sites for the sprint. The grass isn't anywhere near as bad as it was at the end of November; what it will be like in early October is anyone's guess.

First foray into Night-O for a very long time, at Bluetts West - so long that I suspect at least one of the participants hadn't been born the last time I did one.

I don't normally run on Fridays these days and treated it as a slow training session. This meant I fell off the pack immediately, but it also meant I was out on my own which meant I think I got more out of it technically than would have been the case in a pack. Only one control where I had any substantial trouble, although a couple of others which I was grateful to see. Only ran one of the two loops.

The latest chapter in my experiment with long interval sessions - 20 x 400 at the Clifton Hill track on a 2.5 minute cycle. Really happy with how this went - unlike last week, never really tired during the session until the last couple of reps, and never slowed down at all.

I wasn't quite sure what pace I could sustain during this session; after the inevitable slow first one, I settled into about an 83-84 pace which dropped to 81-82 by number 9 and stayed there; this is probably about 3km pace for me these days, perhaps even a little faster. Still holding 82s on the 19th and 20th reps, although it was getting harder to hold it together on the final straight by then. Definitely good to have a session where I stressed my body and it responded positively, and a good counter to the equivalent session last week.

Warm up/down from the intervals session. Starting to feel a bit wobbly on the way home, a pretty good indicator of having worked hard during the session.

I'll be on the 7.30 report either tonight or Monday night (depending on what other stories come up - the interview was recorded on Tuesday). Might get a few people excited, although I don't think I said anything especially controversial.

Morning run after a very poor night's sleep which I'll probably pay for this afternoon. As seems to be usual these days, took a while to loosen up but reasonable once I did, gradually gaining pace but never particularly fast. Dealing with a strange foreign substance falling out of the sky for much of the run.

On the way into work, saw a few people who clearly hadn't read the piece in the Herald-Sun about the corner of Flinders and William Streets playing host to one of the state's most lucrative red-light cameras.

Street-O at Forest Hill. Got caught by surprise by the 'go' signal and found myself 50 metres behind Adam almost immediately. I wasn't making any inroads on that after four controls (and was also struggling to make ground on the bunch of Scotch boys just behind) and went for the radical-route-choice option, thereby finding myself on my own (at least as far as A course runners were concerned) for the rest of the night. From there the question was going to be how the route choice (one of several options on an interesting course) worked out. As it happened it didn't make a lot of difference as our options were of similar length (although Andrew Baker found one a couple of hundred metres shorter). I next saw Adam on an in-and-out exiting from what was my second last, and knew then that I had no chance - the gap was about 45 seconds in the end, I think. Not sure what became of the Scotch boys but I assume they made a mistake somewhere.

Running solidly with similar pace to last week whilst going solo most of the way, but I'd still like to be much closer to 4 mins/km (as an aside, I suspect control punching is worth a minute or two over the course as plates on the ground require more slowing down than a stand does, but I've never tried to measure it). Had a couple of surges later on when participants 20 or more years younger than me on other courses (it was the first night of the schools comp) took my presence as an opportunity to sprint flat-out for 200 or 300 metres.

Stopped at a traffic light on the way home and put the time to good use taking a swig from my water bottle, then looked sideways and saw that the car in the next lane was occupied by a fellow participant doing the same thing.

The traditional fartlek loop at Banyule. Felt not-so-energetic on the warm-up, quite aggressive on the sprints themselves, but I must have taken a while to warm up because my time for the first loop was still pretty slow. The second loop was much more like it - 9.23 is not stellar but it's definitely an improvement on recent weeks. A pleasantly cool morning for the first time in a while.

Swim at Fitzroy. A promising start, putting some extra effort in to deal with a bit of slow traffic (yes, even slower than me) in the lane, but drifted back into the usual mode soon enough. A bit of top-of-foot soreness in the right foot for no obvious reason (particularly as it wasn't detectable either walking or running) - felt a bit like the Birdsville Track syndrome (overuse of accelerator foot) of the July 2007 trip.

A lunchtime run because of a meeting this evening, which meant confronting some reasonably hot conditions (32 degrees). Felt rather dry, especially later on, but running reasonably smoothly. Might cause a bit of confidence to return for hot-weather running after some bad recent experiences.

This evening's map-and-fire update - I suspect a fairly significant part of Lake Wombat has burnt. This fire is likely to cause trouble further south on Friday.