Training Log Archive: blairtrewin

NOL Long at Belanglo. I was expecting this to be a long race from the start and was mentally preparing for something in the order of two hours. As soon as we hit the eucalypt it was time to reassess expectations; the eucalypt part of Belanglo has greened up a lot since I was last here in 1996, and two hours was going to be conservative. With my lack of a base this meant I also made my pace conservative, perhaps a bit too conservative as I was caught early by Michael Adams.

My line into 3 was poor, unable to find a good way down the cliffs, but otherwise I was solid technically for the first 13. It certainly didn't take long to realise that the map had serious printing problems, with dot point features (principally boulders and high points) barely visible (they printed at about the size of a single rocky ground dot), and cliff line gaps, important here, also hard to see. (The green was also fairly meaningless - almost the whole eucalypt area was light green, and the mapped green wasn't discernably worse than anything else). Shep went through me (six minutes) at 13, a little later than I expected (turned out he'd lost time early). I had my first time loss at 14, 30 seconds or so, and then a more significant one at 17, one of the aforementioned invisible knolls, with about 2.5 minutes gone. Jules (who also lost time here) went through me and I didn't expect to see him again, so I was quite surprised when he went through me again 30 minutes later at 23 (he'd lost major time at 18 and 21).

We hit the spectator control, with what I thought was about 30 minutes to go. I was together with Steve Todkill at that point and holding up OK physically, and edged away from him over the next few controls before losing it again with a 90-second mistake at 29 (my fault this time, although the map print again didn't help). The last few controls were fearsome with two gorge crossings; I couldn't run much up the steep hills, but otherwise held it together to the finish.

I can't say I was really racing here, but at least I got through a very long and physical race which will count for a bit later on. As a WOC trial it was disappointing; I don't have a problem with a long WOC trial (in fact I think it should be set to a winning time of 105 or thereabouts, since that's what WOC races have actually been won in in recent years more often than not), but I do have a problem with it being held on such a badly printed map.

C • No results and no News 15

NOL sprint at Macquarie Uni. A reasonably solid effort but not enough to make the points. Took a bit of time to get properly into it and was caught by Kez by 7 (both of us taking a slightly suboptimal route choice). Held on better than I thought I might have (with some help from small mistakes on his part), but didn't have an extra gear for the finish. All in all a reasonably par sprint result at this point in my training.

There was a schools cross-country race happening at the same time, although this was nowhere near as incompatible a combination as the 1988 double-booking of the Canberra showgrounds involving the ACT junior road 10km championships and a street machines meeting (the cloud of burning rubber passed through on each lap must have had performance-enhancing properties because I ran a PB). On the evidence we saw, a fair proportion of the field were there not because they were good runners but because they were lousy rugby players.

One of the people attending that caused some confusion when they asked where the GPS cross-country was, creating visions of some technology-assisted sport (perhaps a local variation on ARDF?), but in fact the GPS (=Greater Public Schools, in the English sense of "public") were the group of schools involved. Acronymal confusion is not totally foreign to me - at various times I've had dealings with four different ASCs (Associated Southern Colleges (the Canberra equivalent of GPS), the Australian Securities Commission (now ASIC), the Australian Sports Commission and the Australian Science Communicators). My favourite is that one of the terms Americans use to describe what we would call a superannuation account is an Investment Retirement Account, which I believe landed an American company operating in Britain in hot water when an item appeared in their accounts for 'IRA contributions'.

C • It's actually an Individual Retirement Account. 1

NOL Middle at Wattle Ridge. Some signs of potential in this run but brought undone by two erratic sections, one between 9 and 12 and the second over the last three controls.

Felt good in the warm-up (especially for a second race of the day) and started steadily with no real time loss in the first eight. Small misses (15 seconds or so apiece, although the splits suggest I lost a bit more time than that on 9 - perhaps a poor line through the cliffs) at each of 9, 10 and 11 spoilt that, but the worst was yet to come - I went up one spur too early on 12 and ended up relocating on 13. Lost about 2.5 minutes there. Settled back in for a while after that, catching Evan at 14 (a control I was very unsure about but hit OK), but then lost it over the last three, overshooting 20 by 30 seconds or so, drifting very wide on 21 (but ultimately not losing much time), and very unsure on 22, the (bingoish) last, making use of the streamers. 20th was ultimately a disappointing result - a decent run would have been around 49 which would have put me on the edges of the top ten (at 8 I was in ninth).

Hill Top was the former home of a certain notorious figure more commonly associated with tomorrow's venue, not that this is widely advertised (you couldn't really expect them to put a sign at the entrance to town, 'Welcome to Hill Top, former home of serial killer Ivan Milat'). It is unknown whether the pits in the vicinity of the last control are to do with either his activities or police investigations into his activities.

C • a certain notorious figure 2

Pool running session, at Ivanhoe this week because of logistics associated with going to the airport this afternoon. Not too bad a session although the small area of the deep end at Ivanhoe makes it a less good venue than Fitzroy for this type of session. Felt like I was working reasonably hard.

The Tan. Had hoped to go close to (or under 14) but didn't manage it; my endurance has come a long way in a few weeks but the speed hasn't followed it, yet. (The hard week coming in wouldn't have helped, but there are greater goals months down the track which that is serving). Felt reasonably smooth, but lacking a top gear, and better on the hill than in most earlier rounds. In a few good scraps at various stages, notably with one of my colleagues who was 20-30 metres in front of me for the first half; I passed him with 1k to go but didn't have a lot of confidence that I would be able to defend the lead in the home straight, and so it proved.

Km splits 3.42, 3.51, 3.42, 3.41.

To/from the Tan, with more traffic lights than usual.

The Herald-Sun posters today would have confused an overseas visitor (or anyone else who doesn't know about football): 'Cat Tells - My Drug Shame'.

I was worried I might have aggravated my Achilles in bizarre fashion this afternoon when I managed to roll a table on wheels into it while setting up a room for a talk, but after a few painful minutes it seems to be OK.

With the reshuffled week this was a bit of a nothing run through Viewbank. Achilles a bit tight for first 20 minutes but OK by the end, encouraging after the hard work of the last few days. Lacking strength up the hills. A little bit of nuisance-level rain most of the way.

This week is being reshuffled a bit, mostly because of the weekend, so it was a rare instance of a long run on a Tuesday (which did mean three in five days). It was the coldest day of the year so far, and having woken up to the sound of rain, I checked the radar to see if there was a break in prospect. There wasn't (not that it would have affected my plans if there had been), so I gritted my teeth and prepared myself for a couple of cold and wet hours.

The first half was reasonably routine, although slow even by the standards of my recent long runs (a dark wet morning probably carries some of the blame for that), heading into town as far as the Studley Park bridge. Had a bit of an intimate encounter with some mud coming out of Studley Park just as it was starting to get light; this was a bit of a shock to the system but obviously woke me up, as the run got significantly better from then onwards. Felt quite strong through the second half, and particularly through the last half-hour, once I realised that this run was a bit longer than planned and therefore there was some work to do if I wanted to get home in time to make the 8.17 train. (The incentive here is that the 8.17 usually has seats, the 8.26, which is coming from further away, almost never does except in school holidays). I didn't think I'd run the last part fast enough, but managed to set a new end-of-run-to-station PB of 13 minutes (and that included having to wash quite a bit of mud off various body parts). More normally I count on 16.

In general the last few days have given me quite a bit of confidence about my ability to last 110 minutes (which is what I expect to be looking at on Sunday) better than I would have a few weeks ago. Whether I'll be able to do it at any sort of speed is another question.

I also note that the quiet streets of suburban Canberra have been introduced to the expression well known to Melburnians in the Underbelly era, "the victim was well known to police". In the extremely unlikely event that anyone here finds themselves on the wrong end of a drive-by in a Canberra street, technically most of us would be known to police (at least we would be known to Constable Frogga), but I don't think that's quite what the media had in mind. (Visiting Vancouver a few years back when one of the local gangsters got shot revealed that this euphemism is used elsewhere in the English-speaking world, too). It is a bit of a standing joke that no-one has been convicted of murder in the ACT courts for years, and hence someone on a blog referred to the unfortunate events as the first known instance of a "drive-by manslaughter".

A new venue for the Monday morning swim because of the location of the Monday night run; the Brunswick City Baths. As the name suggests this is a somewhat venerable complex (if not showing its age quite as much as Hawthorn), but it's a pool and it has water and it wasn't a bad spot to swim. One thing which was a bit disconcerting was that the deep end was 5 metres deep (presumably it was used for diving, although there's no board there now), but the sites were angled rather than vertical; I was swimming in the outside lane and kept feeling as if I was being pushed into the centre. A fairly sluggish session.

Monday night run from Jasmine's in Brunswick. Fairly quickly split into a short group and a long group, which meant I had Reuben and Vanessa for company, and that's all. Headed down around the zoo and Princes Park, and past the monument which marks (unofficially) the spot where the first of Burke and Wills' six wagons broke down (they lost another two before they got to Essendon).

The run took a while to get going, but was in fairly standard Monday night mode by the time 15 minutes were gone.