Training Log Archive: blairtrewin

QB3 sprint at Brummagen Creek, essentially one eroded side branch valley from the Macquarie River - a travelling stock reserve which could have done with a few more travelling stock (it's the worst area I've been on for seeds since Easter in Queensland, though I didn't suffer too badly from the tiger pear). It's on the Narromine side of Dubbo.

The start list offered a certain amount of ego-damaging potential - Alistair George, running up (and fresh from knocking off his father, always a landmark in any junior career, in the NOSH last weekend), was starting a minute behind me. I'm not quite ready to get beaten by M14s yet*. (As it turned out I never saw him, but he ran well and would have been about 1.30 behind me had he not punched the wrong last control).

Jock was starting a minute in front of me. I lost 15 seconds or so at 1 (running to a wrong control, but realising immediately); he lost more, and I was on him at 2. From there he was in sight more or less the rest of the way, gradually edging away from me (I caught him again briefly at 11 when he stopped to extract a tiger pear, but lost that ground again when I had to do the same halfway on the next leg). It was a lively contest for a while and I actually managed to win a split at 4 - which may be a first for me in a sprint race (maybe one of the old town legs in the WMOC 2008 final?), but was running a bit harder than I've been used to of late and was going a bit lactic by the end. Still, this was a decent result (6th in M21), 4 minutes down on Shep but 2 back on the next couple.

Biggest disappointment of the day was that the sign near Parkes which I remembered for 2007, 'You Are Now Entering The Bogan Catchment', no longer exists.

And it was impressive to see Hermann Wehner compete (and get round a course in a respectable time) on his 90th birthday. I'll certainly be pleased if I can still manage that come July 2061.

(* - I think Patrick Jaffe beat me in a Melbourne Bush-O in his M14 year, but it was one I was treating purely as a training run after 2+ hours on the Saturday).

Hard 1 Day 1 - Splits

I had a meeting at the airport today (prior to hitting the road for the first stage of the trip to Dubbo). I didn't want to spend $39 for the day on parking (nor did I want to take the bus that was organised from the city - had I done that, I wouldn't be getting out of Melbourne until close to 7), so chose the cheapskates' option - leaving the car at Gladstone Park and get the 901 bus to the airport for the price of a Zone 2 Myki.

I also wanted to get across town before the traffic got heavy, so also thought Gladstone Park would be a base for a run - definitely not familiar territory. The original thought was to do some terrain running in the middle in Woodlands Park (about 3.5k away from where I was starting) - however, the gates in the (high) southern boundary fence to Woodlands were locked, so I couldn't get into the bush and had to settle for a track run on the boundary. In the Woodlands part that was still pretty nice, although some of the country between Gladstone Park and the Woodlands boundary gave me an indication of where Melbourne's stolen cars go to die. (I also saw an advertising board for possibly Melbourne's cheapest property: a two-bedroom unit for $285,000, in the last street on the airport side of the suburb, right under the east-west flight path).

The run was nothing to get too excited about, although nothing was hurting.

One thing I was keeping an eye open for was whether it is possible to run from the airport across to Woodlands (not something I'm likely to use unless I move away from Melbourne, but might be useful for others transiting there). There is a road/track marked on the Melway which would be less than 2k from the terminal to the bush (you'd then need to find a usable gate to get into the bush), but it's uncertain from the map (and on the ground, at least from the Woodlands end) whether it's publicly accessible.

Felt fine this morning, just had the swimming technique of a drunken elephant. (The plan was rearranged again yesterday - a meeting which I had thought was on tomorrow night was actually tonight, clashing with the MFR night terrain intervals session which I will get to eventually).

Interesting discovery of the day; working out, from the small print of the national accounts data that the ABS released this week plus a few calculations of my own, that the benefit to the Australian economy through the lack of cyclone-related disruption to the mining industry this year was somewhere around $2.5 billion. Since a lot of the usual cyclone-related costs come through precautionary shutdowns (especially on offshore oil and gas rigs), it doesn't need a lot of imagination to work out that the cost:benefit ratio for investing in improved cyclone forecasting is pretty good.

I wanted a proper long run at some point before the Sea to Summit, for my confidence if nothing else, and today was the day. If the objective was to build confidence it succeeded. Unlike a lot of my early morning runs lately, I felt non-sleepy in the early stages of this one, and while the first hour wasn't sparkling by any means, I was getting up the hills with enough in reserve to suggest that this was going to be reasonable.

And there were plenty of hills - none of them big (the largest climb in one go was maybe 50-60 metres), but from 1 to 19k, on a loop which went through Viewbank, Montmorency, Glen Katherine, St. Helena and Greensborough, there was barely a flat section longer than a couple of hundred metres. The run gradually built as it went on, and once the route finally flattened out after Watsonia, I was ready to step up a gear (even putting in what passed for a sprint to get across the main road 1.5k from home while the railway crossing gates were closed). Felt a bit tired for the first time on the last hill before home, but still had quite a bit of distance left in me.

The wall came later; it wasn't my most productive day at the office. (At least I didn't have to handle too much of the backlog from two weeks of the public feedback form on the Bureau website not passing on material as it should; in a hotly-contested field, the craziest item received via said form was probably the correspondent trying to recruit us to the cause of the campaign for Schapelle Corby's innocence).

A few niggles (both foot and Achilles) surfaced at times, but never lasted for more than a kilometre or two. A couple of streets bagged, both at the far end - Allipol Court and Allumba Crescent - last really remote ones for a while.

Came across my local state MP at the station on the way into work. He doesn't know how things are going to turn out either.

And clear, still mornings in June aren't supposed to be warm....

This didn't quite happen as planned. I had a 5am teleconference today, and thinking that it would go for an hour at most, my original plan was to shift my long run to today so that I had only one really early morning this week (and to give myself a chance to go to the Thursday night terrain session for once).

As it turned out, the teleconference went for nearly two hours (not that I was feeling that awake for most of it anyway, so the long run might not have gone that well had it happened), and I only had time for a more normal Tuesday run, which was done around the Yarra in the Studley Park area. It had some good patches (and is better than it looks because a lot of the tracks were very greasy and slow in the drizzle), but was starting to fade a bit by the end.

News of the day is that a poll has found that Tony Abbott ranks fourth in the list of most favoured Liberal leadership contenders, behind Malcolm Turnbull, Someone Else and Don't Know. (Just like the Gillard years, such polling results are driven largely by the views of people who would never vote for the party whoever was leading it, but it's nice to see this particular media boot on the other foot).

Swapped Monday and Friday sessions this week (in a week when there's going to be quite a bit of reshuffling from the usual - yes, I know, dangerously radical thing to do) because I'm not sure I'll find deep enough water for pool running where I'm likely to be for the Friday session. All fairly standard; not as much stiffness to work out as usual given a lower-volume weekend than usual.

I'm doing the Adelaide Sea to Summit in a couple of weeks (partly in pursuit of a better Six Foot qualifier than the one I already have from my dismal Two Bays performance in January). I entered last night and was impressed by the vast array of titles on offer in the drop-down menu on the online registration form. Tempting as it was to call myself a Monsignor, a Rear-Admiral or a Wing Commander, I settled for a mere Dr (and hope this doesn't make the organisers think that I have the capacity to do anything about it should anyone suffer medical misadventure on the course).

Lunchtime on the Tan. Par for the course for this session. No horse calling cards to dodge this time, but plenty of meandering pedestrians on Southbank.

Content-matching algorithms on social media sites can produce some strange results, but I was still rather bemused that a Facebook link to the latest NSW Stingers blog post had as its "related sites" (a) something about drought in Walgett (b) a nine-year-old doing a 540-degree turn on a skateboard on a half-pipe and (c) a rugby league player being acquitted in a Queensland court of assaulting another player. There's a very tenuous connection for (a) (albeit less tenuous than the connection between the 70th anniversary of D-Day and the abolition of the carbon tax), on the basis that the Stingers post mentions QB3 at Dubbo which is sort of near Walgett (what's 300km between friends?). There's an equally tenuous connection for (c) because the assaultee is a former member of a NSW sporting team (no, the reason for the acquittal wasn't on the grounds of it being legal in Queensland to thump NSW Origin players), but I'm struggling to see any connection whatsoever for (b).

C • 540 degree half pipe 1

Melbourne Bush-O at Plenty Gorge. Felt a lot better running than I did on either Thursday or Saturday, but still a bit surprised by just how far down I was (and some of the people who claimed my scalp). Reasonable technical run in the first half; a slight wobble at 9, then dropped 30 seconds to Jim (who'd caught me at 6) on a route choice 9-10, then an annoying 45 seconds or so at 12, where I couldn't work out whether the control was in the depression inside the knoll and climbed it to no avail.

Impressed that we got 128 entries on a wet day; my usual rule of thumb is that rain knocks 30% off the numbers, suggesting that we might get close to 200 next time if the weather is decent.