Training Log Archive: blairtrewin

This is not a PB for the longest solo drive home after a major event - that remains as the 930km after the 2007 SA Championships in Burra - but 890km is still a fair way. The last couple of hours did take a certain amount of the same mental application as was called on for eight-contour climbs out of the second-last control earlier in the day; my legs felt as if they were on the point of cramping several times. I made it home a few seconds after midnight.

I did take the opportunity to do a site visit at Wyalong (and didn't even notice until I downloaded the photos this morning that there was a very photogenic storm cloud and rainbow in the background - not sure if it's quite calendar material, but I'm still happy with it).

The trip did teach a lesson about how much fuel you save when sitting behind a truck as I was for 70km out of Narrandera. It also told me just how many local councils in all directions proudly proclaim themselves as the "gateway" to the Riverina ('nothing to see here but least we're on the way to somewhere!'). I guess Coolamon was hardly going to put up a sign which said "Welcome to Coolamon Shire: Highest Sexual Assault Rate in NSW".

A bit later than usual, having taken the decision from the benefit of recent experience that arriving better-rested half an hour later at work was worth a couple of hours of extra productivity once I got there (it's good to be in a workplace which offers that flexibility). Not as stiff as I was expecting to be, and a decent swim even if I did drift out of it a little bit towards the end.

Perhaps sitting for 11 hours in a car isn't such a bad way to recover from a long race. This was a remarkably smooth run in the circumstances, heading out at lunchtime on the Tan in nice running conditions. Never felt remotely uncomfortable; a very encouraging performance. We'll learn more in the remainder of the week.

There were a couple of good omens for this event. The previous time I'd run on the Rydal map (albeit starting at the other end) was the first of my two career National League wins (admittedly in just about the weakest men's field ever to contest a National League race), and the last time September 11 fell on a Sunday I won my first Victorian state championship at senior level. I didn't win my first NSW championships at senior level - NSW and WA remain the only holes in that record - but I did get closer than I thought I was going to, ending up second 4 1/2 minutes behind Shep.

The race didn't get off to a good start when I lost a minute on the first control, a mountain bike track bend (perhaps I should do some training on green courses because my most significant errors both days this weekend were on green-course controls). I won't blame distraction by trying to work out who was the Little Foot who did the time calls on the start robot.

It settled reasonably well after that, but I didn't feel as if I was going all that quickly, an impression reinforced when Lachlan went through me at 4 and I only stayed sort of in touch with him through to 7 because he lost a bit of time on a route choice to 5. (I wasn't sure whether he was on my course - I knew he was entered in M20 but thought he might have changed to M21 and filled the vacant spot two minutes behind me, but in fact it was just a common section of our courses). By then Josh wasn't too far away from me, and through mid-course it was looking as if the only way I was going to finish 4 1/2 minutes behind the winner was if he was the winner (and that even then hanging on within 30 seconds of him was going to be a stretch).

Josh pulled away from me on the long leg to 12 - with hindsight he would have been better off not doing so - but I knew the race was only just starting then, with some serious climbing in the last quarter of the course. I was reasonably happy with my strength in this section, particularly the tough last climb out of 17 where I was trying to tell myself "this is where Cadel makes his move", but was still surprised to get to the finish and see no Josh, and still no Josh for the next few minutes. At first I thought I might have taught the youngsters a thing or two about pacing in long-distance races, but it turned out he'd actually made a massive parallel error in the mountain-goat country at 13 and put himself squarely in "if I were going there I wouldn't be starting from here" territory. Without that mistake he would have won.

It may say something about my racing style that on a day when I came a competitive second in a field with only three real contenders (although Kas, until he punched the wrong last control, and Alex gave decent accounts of themselves), I only won one split of 19. Notwithstanding this, I was reasonably happy with this and will get a bit more confidence leading into the championship season.

An oddity of the M21A field was that only one of them (I think, unless Boadhan is 21?) was between 21 and 35, and that one only just. The limited field was a bit disappointing; obviously I didn't expect many to come from Victoria, but the timing of this race made it an ideal lead-in to the bigger things to come and I thought there would be a much stronger NSW/ACT presence than there actually was. State championships certainly don't carry the significance they once did (although the increasing strength of the NOL has a bit to do with this).

C • Little Foot Voice 1

C • significance 9

M21A - Splits

Event: NSW Middle & Long Champs
 

NSW Middle Distance Championships at Gardiners Gap. This was an area I last ran on at the 1997 NSW Championships and chiefly remembered for three things, all of which had at most indirect connections to a fairly forgettable performance: (a) it coincided with a very well-publicised car crash in Paris (b) I came within a second of being beaten on kilometre rates by Cassie (who later came pretty close to beating me outright when she ran M21A on the second day of the 2000 QB3; I suspect that being beaten by one's little sister is not something one would live down in a hurry) and (c) the very narrow gap between cliffs which proved to be so narrow that Scotty got through easily, I got through not-easily and Jock didn't get through at all and had to take a detour of several hundred metres.

That gap wasn't a gap on the 2011 edition of the map. That wasn't the only thing that had changed about the map - it turned out that it was printed at 1:7500 by mistake, although I don't think anyone really noticed while they were out there. (I did think some things came up quickly in the less slow areas but the idea of an incorrect scale didn't occur to me). It's probably as well for the winning times that the courses were 25% shorter than advertised.

The course itself, as one might expect of a middle distance course in sandstone country, concentrated on the heavy rock, including three smallish loops from a pivot control. (I thought there was a pretty good chance that at least one person would miss a loop, and today's victim was Josh). For a lot of the course I felt I was running the course reasonably well technically, although not really attacking the terrain as much as I should have been. The wheels fell off a bit towards the end, though. On 16 I chickened out on going down a mapped gap and then made a bit of a mess of the control too, on 17 I was a bit wide (on a control I'd already been to three times), but then I screwed up the second-last control, a watercourse that should have been just about the easiest control on the course. Those misses accounted for about 4 minutes between them. For a while I thought my cunning plan of running M21 to avoid the faster opposition on the same course in M20 and M35 might have worked, but then Shep put a deserved 10 minutes into me (without errors it still would have been 6).

Lithgow is a nice setting but is still rather devoid of eating places (particularly if you want something other than a variation on meat-and-veg). Like a lot of others I ended up eating a mediocre pasta at the Lithgow Workers, where the mood was a fair bit better than it would have been the following night after their rugby league grand final loss in Orange.

Melbourne's longest dry spell in the cooler half of the year since 1899 ended not long before the start of this session, and the process of ending it was still under way as I got in. It was a bit of a novelty to be doing this session is reasonably heavy rain - no great drama in the pool but the chair I left my towel under wasn't as effective at keeping the rain off as I thought it would be...

This seemed a fairly routine session except for a moment about halfway through when I got a nasty cramp in my right calf - I've felt on the verge of cramping during this session a few times before but this is the first time it's happened properly. I'm a little surprised as the weather isn't warm and yesterday's session wasn't really out of the ordinary. It settled down within a minute or so and didn't recur.

The rain was clearly a novelty for Melbourne's drivers, too, judging by the long list of accident reports on the radio (although I suspect a few crucial words were missing from the statement "there's been a collision between the Tullamarine Freeway and Pascoe Vale Road").

On the road to NSW Champs this afternoon.

One of these years I'll learn that trying to burn candles at both ends is a Really Bad Idea and that attempting to do a long early-morning run after a late-night teleconference is asking for trouble. (At least I shouldn't have another late-night teleconference this year; the next hookup is when I'm in Geneva).

I headed out at 6.10 but didn't wake up until 7.45. I did manage to avoid doing anything too stupid in the intervening interval and kept pumping out the kilometres, somewhat unconvincingly, in the vague general direction of Surrey Hills (where I had some maps to drop off at Belinda Dale's place). Started to come good in the last half-hour (in advance of a less than productive day at work). From past experience I should be fine after a decent night's sleep.

And an AFL investigation has found that Dean Wallis is an idiot. Most Essendon supporters worked that out at around 4.45 p.m. on September 18, 1999.

C • DW 1

Felt a bit spaced-out this morning, although a bit better towards the end. Never a great run and some moments where it was a real struggle, especially up hills. A bit of a pity to waste a nice morning for it.

Random fact of the day: the Australian Defence Force puts more money into music in Australia than the official arts funding bodies do.

And it looks like the weekend's system for NSW has lost most of its moisture - it will still be very cold but I'm now not expecting anything more substantial than a few snow flurries with little or no accumulation.

C • "Flurries" 3

Repeat of last week's session, 3x1k on the Tan. I didn't enter this with a lot of confidence after this morning's ordinary effort - although the warm-up felt better than that, it wasn't as lively as last week. It therefore came as quite a surprise to do something significantly faster than last week - 5-6 seconds faster for each kilometre than last week, finishing off with a 3.44. I'd still like to be faster - wouldn't we all? - but this is pretty reasonable progress at an end of the season where progress is definitely good news.

Going to/from the Tan.

As with last week, a bit early in the morning for this type of session, and my mind was wandering at times with thoughts of 5 July 1900, but did manage to crack 10 for the first time in a while on the second loop, without ever feeling particularly sharp.

I've been in the ALP for 20 years, but tonight was the first time I've seen a chook get raffled. This may say something about the branches I've been in - the ACT, Albert Park and Ivanhoe are all hotbeds of chardonnay socialism and the raffle prizes tend to reflect that.

C • 5 July 1900 9