Training Log Archive: blairtrewin

Joined the "Cockatoos" long run which in fact had participants from far and wide (Reuben and myself from Melbourne, Anthony Cox from France and the Hoggster just back from Oxford). I was a bit worried that in the Majura climb, once someone put on the pressure I would play the role of the 2013-model Cadel, but got up more or less OK. Tired somewhat later on, though, and back probably wouldn't have appreciated going up Ainslie as well. Lots of snow to be seen, both on the Brindabellas and on the hills SE of Queanbeyan (snow level was about 900 metres; as usual, by the time it was cold enough in Canberra the system had run out of moisture). Had a good conversation in the later part of the run on matters climate-related with the Hoggster and Anthony, who's now heading up the climate and biodiversity division in the OECD.

After experiencing the pleasures of Deli Marco, I then proceeded to Grammar to test a few route choices and suggest some consequent control placement tweaks, then had a rather icy late afternoon watching the Brumbies hang on (just). Heading back to Melbourne tonight, and will stay there for a full 12 days.

Test-running what will now not be the M21E course for the Sprint - turned out the map scale was wrong and the course was too short. If I'm doing 13 then you'd expect someone like, say, Craney to go sub-10. I think having to lengthen the course will actually be a positive - it will force a map change which removes the temptation to have nothing legs to get the distance in.

Felt reasonably good running, if perhaps not absolutely flat-chat. Got it in before it started raining in earnest.

C • Sprint distances 1

One of those days when my body refused to function up hills - not sure if I can blame this on doing the sprint beforehand. Not always confident in the navigation, partly because Bruce Ridge's already considerable number of mountain bike tracks has increased further since the map was last updated (a new one was in the process of being built today), but didn't really lose any time in that respect.

Saw Lazydave out running with a couple of Rattrays. He took the opportunity to engage in a bit of sledging - at least it related to WOC qualification and not to the fact that at the time I was being outrun up a hill by a W14.

After a full 32 hours in Melbourne, it was off to Canberra this morning (mostly for Australian Sprint controlling work, although I ended up with quite a few work things to do today). There were some parallels with Darwin on Monday - very early start before a plane trip and feeling rather sleep-deprived during the day - and the run, at the end of the day, started similarly to how Monday did, but the conditions were a lot kinder and the run got progressively better as it went on - reminding me of how much I enjoy being out in Canberra at sunset in winter.

The weekend promises to be interesting; it's not every day you see a road weather alert for snow in the Adelaide Hills.

Decided to do my long(ish) run in Darwin instead of its usual Thursday slot so that I wouldn't have to get up too early on a day when I was expecting to have got in at midnight, but that bit of reshuffling failed to achieve its objective because I'd forgotten to reset my watch alarm and thus was woken up at 5.30 anyway. (Surprisingly, I haven't paid for it too much during the day).

Certainly no danger of any issues with mist today - it was only two degrees cooler (although considerably less humid) at 7am in Melbourne today than it was at 7am in Darwin yesterday. (This isn't the first time I've come back from Darwin to an unexpectedly small temperature contrast - Melbourne's earliest-ever 20-degree night in spring came on the first night back after my first trip to Darwin in September 2001, a trip which also demonstrated that it is possible to get an international story on the front page of the NT News). This was a prelude to one of the more memorable winter days in Melbourne meteorological history, in which the highest July temperature on record (23.3) was followed by a spectacular squall line and then an equally spectacular rainbow.

A reasonable session without anything too spectacular.

I can understand a lot of the frustration doing the rounds at the moment now that the WOC finals allocations for 2014 have come out. For most of you your beef will be with the decision to get rid of qualification races in the first place; once that decision (which Australia voted against) was made, it's hard to make a strong case that our men deserved to rank in the top 22 when we only managed one point-scoring run across the two individual races in each of 2012 and 2013, and were in the 20s in both relays. The positive, though, is that the new system also makes it relatively easy to move between divisions if your team is good enough, and we're carrying forward more points from 2013 than any other division 3 team except Ireland. (Indeed, hosting Oceania 2015 gives us a decent shot of having three 2015 places). Of course our chances were damaged by losing our best runner through injury, but we weren't alone in that (it also happened to Belgium, who also just missed the cut).

This was a good run in the window between when I woke up and when my body ran out of water. That covered the stretch between about 7 and 11k. The rest was pretty hard work, particularly the later part on a morning which might not be humid by Darwin standards but was for a southerner (dewpoint 20) - and especially as a bubbler I was expecting to get water at was broken. Still, I was happy to be able to fight it out and get through the distance I originally had planned, including a final loop through the CBD to make up the distance (having earlier gone out to East Point and then out through Parap and Ludmila). The bruised (or possibly worse) backside from a couple of weeks ago seems to be showing some signs of improvement at last, too.

Got everything I came to get done done, but it's a long way home; didn't get in the door until close to midnight (and making that flight was a closer-run thing than I was planning on, thanks to the taxi turning up 25 minutes late - not the first time that this has happened to me in Darwin).

A good night's sleep makes a big difference. This might not have been a spectacular session, but it was decent - a solid set of intervals on the parklands near the Esplanade - and certainly chalk-and-cheese from yesterday. Even felt less sore in the areas which were sore yesterday, too. Felt like quite pleasant conditions running; was surprised when I checked how humid it was (dewpoint 19, which you'd only see a few times in a normal Melbourne summer).

Among the quirks of the trip up yesterday were the outfits of the girls sitting in front of us - one in Smurf pyjamas and one in a pink rabbit suit. Would have been a bit less unexpected if they'd been ten years younger (at a guess they were 12 and 14 respectively).

Warm-up and down, during which I learned that the rule about turning traffic giving way to pedestrians doesn't seem to apply in Darwin. (My other traffic issue came at the other end of the day - our bus went round a corner so fast that I slipped off my seat and ended up facing backwards in the aisle).

C • Ooops 1

Lunchtime swim at the Casuarina pool, very conveniently located just across the road from our Darwin office. An outdoor pool surrounded by green lawns on a sunny 32-degree day is definitely where swimming is meant to happen, but as I've noted before at this venue, 32 is clearly far too cool for the locals - there was hardly anyone else there (and it's school holidays, too). A decent swim which got better as it went on. Time is a guess.

There were a few good discoveries today, not all of them directly relevant to what I was looking for. The funniest was the 1968 inspector's comment to the effect that the observers appeared unenthusiastic but he could understand anyone who'd been stationed in Katherine for 14 years being unenthusiastic; the most bizarre was the observer who had evidently had enough of getting up for 3am and 6am observations and made them up instead (whereupon he was advised that his services were no longer required); the most poignant was the note of a 1932 site move necessitated by the premises being needed for the construction of a home for "half-caste children", what we know these days as the Stolen Generations (in fact the timing and location was such that the girl referred to in Kevin Rudd's apology speech probably ended up there).

I'm in Canberra this weekend for Sprint Champs controlling. Current forecast maximum for Saturday: 7.

It's Monday so it must be Darwin - the latest in my sequence of regional office visits, on the grounds that it's cheaper to transport 70-odd kilos of me to Darwin than it is to transport a similar quantity of paperwork to Melbourne (passengers are known in the airline game as "self-loading freight" for a reason).

My expectations of this run, done at the end of the day, were not high. I'd been up since 5 (or 4.30 Darwin time), off not a lot of sleep thanks to the cricket, and the conditions were rather different from anything I've experienced lately (although not excessively humid by Darwin standards). The run, which went along the coast as far north as the museum, proceeded to live down to expectations, only just starting to loosen up in the last couple of kilometres.

No crocs on the front of the NT News - a killer octopus (apparently found not too far away from Darwin) took the honours. To my less than overwhelming surprise, there are still occasional fireworks two weeks after Territory Day.