Training Log Archive: blairtrewin

Event: State Series #4
 

It's been my best (or least-worst) week of training this year and I was hoping for a spinoff into the race, but it didn't happen - this was a fairly significant disappointment, partly because the back was giving a bit of trouble again after having been quiet for more than a week - although Sailors Creek was perhaps the most severe test possible for it (steep, and a lot of scrambling in and out of erosion gullies). Wasn't as bad as it was in Canberra, though, and the next few events I do should be kinder to it than this one has been.

I can't blame injuries for my navigation, though - two significant mistakes, about 90 seconds apiece on 9 (too low, and somehow crossed a significant track without noticing) and 13 (too high and couldn't make sense of the erosion from above), is not good enough for a course of this type. The other issue was being far too tentative, physically, on gully crossings and very steep downhills - I've never been great on these but today was particularly poor. At various points today I was shown up on this comprehensively by Patrick (who was impressive today; we tend to forget he's still only a first-year 16), and to a lesser extent by Lanita. From the course vital statistics, I'm guessing that Lanita will get plenty of chances to experience very steep slopes in the JWOC long distance....

My scalp deserved to be, and was, claimed by quite a few people who wouldn't normally expect to claim it (with a few other near-misses).

It's the first time for a couple of years that I've approached Daylesford from the south, which means it's the first time I've seen the wind turbines that I own a few hundredths of a percent of.

This is the start of a sequence of four Sunday events in four different states (I suspect this has happened occasionally before in championship season, but not outside it). Next Sunday's Tasmania, the week after the ACT, and then South Australia.

Quite a nice run on a cool and sometimes showery morning, once again heading north through alphabetical circumstance. This was my first opportunity to get multiple streets in one go - Aberdeen Road, Macleod, followed by Acacia Avenue, Watsonia (which barely exists other than as a dashed line on the Melway) and Acacia Court, Bundoora. (There's a third Acacia, in Greensborough, which will be Thursday's target).

Felt quite smooth in the first half but a little slow; picked up the pace a bit in the second half and pretty good in the last 15 minutes. Once again indicative of a return to normality (or last year's version of same). A bit longer than planned (was aiming for 65-70 minutes) because a couple of gaps I was expecting to use were fenced off, but I wasn't too upset about that.

And then it was off to get frustrated at the football.

May be as well that I didn't do yesterday's run today - otherwise I might have been underneath when it started raining truck drivers.

C • Depends 1

A fairly standard pool running session at Fitzroy. Talk of the morning was (a) the aforementioned truck misadventure (although we didn't yet know that the hanging cab was sans driver) and (b) the lack of functional showers (supposedly to be remedied by tomorrow). Not the most vibrant session I've ever had but did what it was supposed to do.

Online discovery of the day was the redneck index, whereby cities in the US were ranked according to the following criteria:

Percent of population that didn’t complete high school
Number of gun and ammo stores per capita
Number of taxidermists per capita
Number of cowboy boot stores per capita
Number of country radio stations per capita
Number of NASCAR race tracks close by
Number of Walmarts per capita
Number of riding lawn mower/tractor repair shops per capita

Top of the list was Atlanta. Deleting those criteria not applicable to Australia (6 and 7) and modifying where necessary (4), I wonder where in Australia would come out on top? My money's on Gympie.

And Shane Rattenbury's run-in with a kangaroo whilst running in Ainslie (http://the-riotact.com/nature-not-as-keen-on-shane...) has made it far as the Washington Post, surely the first time that the exploits of a member of the ACT Legislative Assembly have rated a mention there.

C • index substitute 2

From North Melbourne because of post-day logistics. It's been a long couple of days with work - normal things don't stop just because you've got all-day meetings or courses on two successive days - and I was going until close to midnight last night. Even though the Thursday wake-up wasn't as early as it sometimes is, I wasn't surprised not to be especially awake for the start of this one, and the first couple of kilometres were hard work. Never really touched great heights, but grinding out as I did yesterday, a little more slowly but still a step up on where I was on similar days a month or two months back.

This run was fairly flat on the whole, centred on the valley of Moonee Ponds Creek, but there was one very non-flat bit at the far end - the O'Hea Street climb in Pascoe Vale (parallel to Bell Street and a few hundred metres north of it). It's reputed to be the steepest street in Melbourne (peak gradient is either 30 or 31% depending on which website you look at - as you can imagine, it holds a bit of interest for the cycling crowd). I wasn't moving very fast up it, but the back held out, more or less, which is a good sign. The run ended up longer than planned, partly because having set my target I didn't feel like turning around a few hundred metres short of it, but mostly because I got caught in a dead end in a big bend of the creek coming back. Faded a little at the end.

You can never accuse American weather of being boring. As some will know, it was an unusually cold March/April in central parts of the country, but it's warmed up very suddenly. There were parts of Minnesota yesterday where it was reaching the high 30s (C) in places where there were still frozen lakes. Omaha had their earliest-ever 100F (38C) day two days after they had their latest-ever sub-freezing night.

Morning session from near work down along the bay to St. Kilda and back inland. Never felt especially smooth, but was essentially a normal run as it existed this time last year - this means that significant progress has been made, as churning out consistent 5-minute kilometres at comfortable training pace is something which hasn't been possible for most of this year. Still remains to be tested on hills or in terrain (Sunday will provide an opportunity for the latter, and probably the former too), but I'm feeling a lot more optimistic than I was this time last week.

Not as windy on the waterfront as I thought it might have been.

10-interval set on the waterfront at Fishermens Bend. Main challenge today was the wind - a stiff WNW which meant the odd-numbered reps were a lot harder than the even-numbered ones (the difference in time averaged 3-4 seconds). Took a couple of intervals to get going but moving pretty well after that; a bit hard to gauge relative efforts because of the difference between upwind and downwind. Body again behaving itself.

Warm-up and down.

I woke up briefly around 3.30, checked the EPL scores on my phone (I might have been tempted to stay up for it if the Norwich game had been on Foxtel, but their games were Man U-Swansea because it's Man U, and Sunderland-Southampton because both sides were fighting to stay up, not just one). Didn't really get back to sleep, and thought I might have paid for it but it didn't happen.

It's tempting to say that I spent this swim with "On The Ball, City" (reputed to be the world's oldest football club song, and possibly its longest) running through my head, but it didn't happen. A reasonably standard session, on a morning which hadn't turned too wintry yet. As those from southern states of Australia will know, football club songs, and the atrociously bad post-match singing of same, are a feature of Australian Rules football (quite often the tunes are taken from elsewhere; I'm sure I'm not the only person who's heard the French national anthem, something you get quite a few opportunities to do if you're a regular WOC attendee, and started mentally singing "We are the boys from old Fitzroy/We wear the colours maroon and blue").

C • Red button 1

Monday evening runs have largely disappeared from the scene this year but tonight was a resumption of it for me, doing one after picking some things up in west Ivanhoe on what felt like the first night of winter, with the crispness that comes a few hours after rain.

Picked up the latest in the street list early on, Abercorn Avenue, Ivanhoe - not exactly unfamiliar territory, as it leads to one of the Darebin Creek footbridges and features on most of my longer runs southwest. I then took to the Darebin Creek bike path to check out the newly-opened extension under Heidelberg Road - which I would have said proceeded at glacial pace, but it took three years to build the last 100 metres and I can't think of any glaciers which move that slowly. (That's before you even get onto the main Darebin bridge - after years of delays it's finally been funded, but the planning permit had expired and Boroondara Council, probably illegally, refused an extension so it's going to have to go to VCAT again. I've given the Boroondara Council and the people who vote for them sprays in these pages before from time to time, and perhaps they deserve another one).

And then a switch flicked, and the second half of this run became the best I've had this year, easily. You always feel like you're going faster in the dark than you actually are, but this was flowing very well, nothing was hurting, and by the end I didn't want this to finish. Hopefully this is a sign of things to come.

C • Bike path 2