Training Log Archive: blairtrewin

Sprint on the gold-mining of Bryces Flat, in slippery conditions after overnight rain. A sprint in steep slippery terrain is a good way to draw out all my weaknesses so my expectations weren't high. Even so, this was disappointing - my fine navigation was all over the place with probably 3-4 minutes or so lost in various small pieces, and my terrain running fluency (on often very rough ground) was non-existent. Both of these will come with more time in the terrain, so I'm not so concerned in the longer term.

Ian Anderson caught me a minute quite early as we both made a mess of 4. He then proceeded to perform a perfectly executed 180 out of 4 and I didn't see him again. Finished up in a bit of a train (most of it having come from behind).

One consolation is that it's the first time for two years I've scored a point in a NOL sprint :-)

C • 180 1

NOL mixed relay at Bryces Flat. The Victorian selectors quite rightly had me a fair way down the pecking order given my current state of fitness (or lack thereof), which left me without an official partner for this. Queensland had the less common problem of too many women, which meant I was matched up with Bridget for this. First task was coming up with a good team description. First thought was the B Team but this alludes to a show that stopped screening before Bridget was born; eventually settled on B1 and B2.

B1 did her job (apart from a spectacularly inefficient changeover which featured an over-enthusiastic tag knocking my SI stick off my hand), but B2 was once again not really up to the task of racing in steep terrain. It wasn't as bad a pair of runs as the morning was, and I coped with the very steep first loop better than I thought I might, but this was still well off the pace. Got into a bit of a scrap with PatS at the end but couldn't hold him.

The good news from the weekend was that there was no trace of Achilles trouble after Saturday's warm-up, which encourages me to continue to build towards more normal training. The bad news is that I clearly have a fair way to go to regain normal speed. Four weeks between now and Easter will help, but realistically the main game for me in 2010 is now WMOC and nationals, perhaps the WOC trials if things go well.

Event: Eureka Challenge
 

NOL 1 at Chewton (multi-loop mass start). I knew my fitness was still well down and had not had a great few days of training, so my expectations were low - really this was about making sure I could get through a long race.

Predictably fell off the back of the pack immediately and was almost last for a time, running steadily but with no hill strength whatsoever. Most of this was a bit of a slog for me physically, but technically good with no misses bigger than 10 seconds or so. Almost, but not quite, got onto the back of the PatS/Reubster train early on the last loop, then had my best section of the day trying to get away from Devil, and eventually succeeding on the second long leg. (I thought the route on this one - slightly left and picking the saddles - was pretty obvious, but it can't have been too obvious because this was by far my best split of the day). Reubster, having lost time, came through me at the end but I had nothing to respond with.

Fairly remarkably we managed to miss all the storms (except for one fairly minor one after everything was packed up). Two intense storms passed 10km or so to the southwest, although the hail was smaller than it was in Melbourne.

Pool running session at Ivanhoe, with the usual crowd present. Felt a bit more lively than yesterday (a bit of a surprise after a lousy night's sleep).

At the moment the rain is falling almost everywhere except Melbourne (last time I looked, tomorrow's race venue had had about 30mm and we've had 1), although that may change. It's been a good deal more dramatic up north. You won't be surprised to learn that I've dug out a few obscure records (with the help of our resident spatial analysis guru), the best of them being an all-time Australian record for the largest area of daily falls above 100mm on any single day (about 140,000 square kilometres across southern inland Queensland on Tuesday), and in area-averaged terms, the wettest days on record for the NT (Sunday) and Queensland (Tuesday).

C • Bendigo rainfall 1

Run from near work to St. Kilda and back through Albert Park. A nice morning but really struggled through the first half, in a mode that felt as it I was on the verge of getting sick. The second half was better but I was never exactly flying. In a bit of a bad patch at the moment, although at least it's the engine that's struggling and not the body.

A sign indicated that the St. Kilda Busking Festival was running from 7 February to 23 May, which is almost as enduring as the Melbourne Bicycle Centre's bike sale. A shorter-term feature is the Grand Prix, for which construction is well under way (in the days when I lived down this way, I knew it was time to switch from fartlek to track intervals when grandstands started to be built on top of my then fartlek circuit).

I made the mistake this afternoon of reading the comments on a newspaper web story about cycling. One of these days a sufficiently desperate political party is going to run on an aggressively anti-cyclist platform, and they'll probably win more votes than they lose - invoking hatred of unpopular minorities always has potential for that, and it's a bit too unsubtle these days to whip up hatred of Muslims or (except possibly in the NT) Aborigines.

Street-O at Scotch but not as we know it - involving a trip from pre-start to start the likes of which I haven't seen since the 2008 World Cup in Norway, then three sections on large-scale maps, which were actually in colour. (Scotch College isn't short of a dollar - I recall hearing at a sports forum that the annual budget of their rowing program was greater than the annual budget of Rowing Australia). Still a scatter format, with a fair bit of route choice on the first map but not so much on the next two.

Not to put too fine a point on it, I felt horrible - almost back to square one*, hopefully something which is temporary. Quite sore on the first hill but at least that disappeared. Was with Bryan, who wasn't having a great night either, for quite a bit of the way, eventually just pipped by him after failing to realise that he was going to drop my last control and therefore my 50-metre break on him wasn't going to be enough. Still a fun format (and it meant not having to cross the railway line, which can make events here a lottery). Bruce won fairly comfortably.

Science news of the day is that I discovered that four years of data from Halls Creek had been entered in our database under the wrong site number. The flow-on consequences of this look like being that we have significantly underestimated the rate of warming in the Kimberley. Naturally I expect that in the interests of fairness and balance this error will get as much airplay on Andrew Bolt's blog as the stuff about Darwin which he's been going on about ad nauseum.

(* - "back to square one" is originally a sporting term. In the early days of radio, the BBC described where the ball was on the football field by referring to a grid published in the 'Radio Times', and "back to square one" meant the ball had been passed back to the goalkeeper).

C • Square One 2

C • Data quality issue 3

Another session on the fartlek loop. Felt pretty unpromising at the start, and even less so when I got a stitch in the middle of the first loop, but that disappeared and the second loop was a bit better - a whole 1 second faster than last time (9.49). Soreness early on but had disappeared by the end.

At one point I passed someone counting bicycles. Sadly I was unable to contribute to today's tally as I put a nail through my tyre last night. I didn't think changing a tyre on an almost-new road bike would be easy and it wasn't - even with the help of Lachlan (who's staying with me this week) it was a half-hour operation.

This afternoon I was trying to find out exactly where in Victor Harbor the weather station was, and fed its co-ordinates into Google Maps. The quirky thing was that the sponsored ad on this Google link was a government ad about the evils of ecstasy. Is this meant to be saying something about what goes on in Victor Harbor during Schoolies?

C • Try looking up the Gold Coast then... 3

Finally got back into the hang of things halfway through this swim, and felt reasonably good (and like I was working reasonably hard) through the remainder of it. Fitzroy was a bit quieter this morning than it has been; perhaps the first day of autumn had something to do with it (and it was a reasonably autumnal day as well).

A real estate sign near Fitzroy pool promises "City Edge Excitement". One could imagine this being a euphemism for all sorts of sins ("get to see a few bashings and a stabbing or two out the front every Saturday night!"), but in reality the only obvious negative of the property is very heavy traffic.

Lunchtime run because of the evening meeting I thought I had last week, from work. Generally reasonably routine, and nothing as exciting on show as there was with the O-week antics this time last week. No real evidence of soreness once going which is encouraging; I'm seeing a pattern of struggling a bit when I push the envelope but coming up reasonably afterwards.

I thought I was heading into a frantic afternoon with both a monthly and seasonal climate summary to write, but the relevant maps didn't run until this evening because of computer problems so it will be a frantic morning tomorrow morning instead.