Training Log Archive: blairtrewin

First proper Sunday long run of this cycle in something of a grand tour of Barcelona, having decided that the hills north of town probably weren't as good as they looked for training - no obvious signs of foot tracks on the map and running on narrow mountain roads close to a big city is asking for trouble (something I found out in Lisbon a few years ago). Normally doing this in near-winter would make it easier but in fact the conditions (a humid 15 degrees) weren't so different from typical early-morning conditions in Melbourne at this time of year.

Started out with a fairly similar loop to yesterday's run, seeing a crowd early on who turned out to be waiting for the gates to open at the local polling booth - comprised mostly of those of an age old enough to remember when Spain was a military dictatorship and therefore that the opportunity to vote shouldn't be taken for granted. It is election day in Spain, with the (conservative) Popular Party expected to win easily. Their banners, along with those of the Catalan nationalists and the Greens, have been much in evidence; the Socialists have been hardly visible, which makes me wonder if they've given up on Barcelona themselves and are running dead in the hope of playing the Catalan nationalists into a balance-of-power position. (There must be a few local socialists because Barcelona must be one of the few places in the world where there is still a street named after Karl Marx). And there were no sausage sizzles, or any other food, in sight, but that may just be because no self-respecting person in this part of the world eats lunch before 2, or dinner before 9.30 (it felt a bit strange eating after, rather than before, last night's football game, which ran from 8 to 9.50).

Hit Montjuic around the half-hour and this time did it properly, up past the Olympic Stadium, which looks very unimposing until you look in and realise it's a sunken bowl. By this time it was clear this wasn't going to be a smooth run with various sore bits making their presence felt intermittently (the back being a bit annoying on the steeper climbs), but it wasn't getting any worse, and I was happy enough settling into the grind, firstly across the waterfront and then up into the northeastern suburbs before heading back.

Going past the Sagrada Familia cathedral (commenced in the late 19th century and currently expected to be finished sometime between 2020 and 2040) at around the two-hour mark, a blister on my toe suddenly exploded - perhaps not believing in God has caught up with me. For a few minutes it was painful enough that I thought I might have had to cut the run short (not that a beeline home would have saved more than 10 minutes at that stage anyway), but it settled down and I got through the final half-hour more or less OK. A hard-working session which I'll want to become a bit less challenging by the time we get to February, but the first one of the season is always a challenge.

Also a challenge was getting to Tortosa - the train stopped a couple of stations short, after a trip down a coastline which was showing rather too much evidence of what happens when property developers are allowed to do what they like (much of it using money which turned out not to exist), and we all got transferred to buses, which then went a very roundabout route. The reason why became obvious when the amount of water in the vicinity of Tortosa was visible - severe flash flooding from 106mm of rain last night (Barcelona only got 0.6). This is not the first time meetings of WMO expert groups on extremes have coincided with extreme events (previously we've had a Dutch heatwave and a western Canadian snowstorm). The water is gone from town but the mud certainly isn't. Outside of the flood clean-up zones the place was absolutely stone dead on a Sunday afternoon - it was quite hard to find somewhere to get some lunch - but at least that means I'll get my last talk written without any distractions (other than AP). Might suffer a bit from lack of fluid replacement because I'm not prepared to risk drinking the tap water in a flood zone and there doesn't seem to be anywhere open to buy the bottled variety.

In Barcelona from the hotel (directly above the station, and one of the better ones I've stayed in). Went out before breakfast for the first time in a while and took some time to get going, then settled into something reasonable if not brilliant. Started out by going north and west as far as the Camp Nou (where I'll be headed again tonight, having discovered, somewhat to my surprise, that it was still possible to get a ticket for Barcelona-Zaragoza), then south onto the lower slopes of Montjuic where the 1992 Olympic stadium is - those who remember the 1992 marathon will know that this involves a bit of climbing, although I didn't go all the way to the top. Ended up coming back past the bullring, which will need to find some other use now because the Catalan government has banned bullfighting as of 1 January and the last fight took place a few weeks ago.

Well, they've already found something else to do with the bullring - it's a shopping mall. Presumably the bullfights of recent years were held somewhere else.

Lunchtime swim, feeling reasonably OK. I rarely get through this session in Geneva without at least one additional bruise; today's was a pretty solid kick in the ribs by an overtaking breaststroker.

Had some back tightness during the day, though not in the swim; I think it's to do with having a chair at work which isn't that comfortable, so hopefully next week will sort it out.

Demos of the day: the Iranians (as usual) and the Eritreans. The square outside the UN building is so well-suited to demonstrations that one almost wonders whether it was designed for the purpose.

Off to Barcelona tonight, ahead of a couple of meetings in Tortosa (about 150km southwest) next week.

Stepped out the door to the first clear morning since I've been here. I wondered when I saw the stars whether I might have regretted not going back inside for some gloves, but -2 was warm enough to be able to cope without.

This time my long run was contained entirely within the borders of Switzerland, heading west and north-west with a section on riverside tracks around a loop of the Rhone. I hit this section after a increasingly good first 40 minutes, with just enough light to venture off road (even 5 minutes earlier would have been a problem). Slower through this section, which contained some rough tracks in marginal light (and some places where the fallen leaves made it hard to tell what was track and what wasn't), but still feeling good. It became more challenging after 70 minutes - starting to feel some back tightness again, especially on the uphills which there were a few of at that stage. Started to get a second wind in the last 15 minutes and finished off well. A pretty nice session. Sunday will be more of a test; will be aiming for 2.30 (and I get the impression that any worthwhile long run in Barcelona is going to involve some fairly serious hill-climbing).

A Swiss resident was in the news today with some rather dinosauresque comments on football and racism (I saw the interview, live, on CNN last night and thought 'did he really just say what I thought he said'). Football authorities have some form in failing to notice racism or similar - after all, they once sent a delegation which failed to find any evidence of sectarian songs being sung at a Rangers-Celtic match. It will, though be somewhat ironic if Blatter goes for this rather than for (at best) turning a blind eye to rampant corruption.

8x400 on 2.5 minute cycle. Didn't feel especially awake when I arrived and perhaps not in the first rep or two either, but being joined by one of the locals for a rep got me going, and then settled into something reasonable: 82-84 is not quite what I was doing at home (and I won't be happy with this session until some times start to begin with a 7), but it's a lot closer to it than last week was. Maybe Swiss tracks aren't longer than 400 metres after all.

I never particularly enjoy this type of session while it's on, but usually feel good afterwards, as I did today.

Had some geographical investigation fun today in the course of checking out the temperatures for 'Central America' (2011 is on track to be the fourth-warmest year on record in that region, but the first three are all in 1871 or earlier and based on sparse and possibly dodgy data). The boundary of the 'Central America' box is 30N, which takes in a bit of the southern US, and I was checking out which American locations might have contributed pre-1871 data to this. It turns out that the 30N parallel runs through the New Orleans metropolitan area, although the parts of town where a 19th century meteorological station might have been are south of it.

And I've discovered that there is such a thing as Occupy Benalla (or at least a Facebook page for it). Possibly our Benalla correspondent might enlighten us as to whether there's any evidence of an occupation (and if so, where it is and whether the local authorities are taking as vigorous an approach to it as in Melbourne). Wouldn't actually be surprised if a certain former WOC team member who has connections with Benalla has something to do with it.

C • I'm a 3

Going to/from the track. Lots of creakiness on the outward journey.

Headed west, encountering some nice bits but also a few more main road crossings than I'd hoped. Lots of stiff/sore/tight bits this morning and they didn't really loosen up - not one of my better sessions.

The falling of the autumn leaves is well under way and some impressive mulch mountains are developing. Most impressive of all is the one in the grounds of the UN building, which is higher than the highest point of Kiribati, Tuvalu, the Maldives and probably some other UN member states I haven't thought of.

Went out on this one a bit annoyed with Microsoft over a slow-installing automatic software update which was stopping my computer shutting down (ended up aborting it with no apparent harm), but settled into quite a pleasant evening run, with none of the sore bits from this morning. Felt like it was just about to turn really good when it was time to finish.

Some mental calculations suggest that the weekend's Venice event probably contributed somewhere between 1 and 2 million euros to the Italian economy. This means that all it would take is to organise one of these every weekend for the next 20,000 years and Italy's debts would be cleared.

One of the local paper headlines yesterday didn't require much translation (as long as you knew that Berlusconi's nickname was 'Il Cavaliere') - 'L'uscita del Cavaliere - festa i piazza'. Must say I didn't see much evidence of any festas in Venice's piazzas (although that might have been different had we been a bit later for dinner - we walked past the Occupy Venice camp just before his resignation was announced), but then most of the people in Venetian streets are not actually Italians.

Also saw the splits from Sunday. Going left on our long leg (5-6) cost me a minute or so - obviously the crowds on the Rialto bridge and surrounding streets (the right option) weren't as much of a barrier as I thought they might have been. The splits also suggest that either my start wasn't as fast as I thought it was or others were slowing down more at the end - my late splits were a little better than the early ones.

Some new company for today's run in the form of Rebecca Minty, who's moving here early next year to work for an NGO which campaigns against torture (she's a human rights lawyer) and is over here at the moment, partly for a meeting and partly to set things up for next year (including trying to navigate the challenging local real estate market). Her mission is to try to convince countries in the Asia-Pacific to ratify the Optional Protocol to the Convention Against Torture; I had assumed said protocol was signed only by countries that would never dream of practising torture in the hope of embarrassing those which do, but in fact not even Australia has ratified it yet - ostensibly because of a federal-state dispute over who is responsible for independent inspections of detention facilities, but one wonders if a desire to keep open the option of outsourcing the torture of the Mahdoub Habibs of this world to countries like Pakistan and Egypt has something to do with it. (You won't be surprised to hear that the Americans didn't even bother turning up to the meeting).

The run itself was a fairly straightforward out and back along the lake shore from her hotel (which is fairly close to where I stayed last time) as far as the swimming area on the south side of the lake. Definitely knew that I'd been in a race yesterday (and that perhaps I hadn't had as much sleep as I would have liked, thanks to a combination of a 11.45 p.m. arrival last night and a 4.30 a.m. telemarketing call on my mobile), but not too bad on the whole.