Training Log Archive: blairtrewin

Event: Monash Uni Indoor / Outdoor Sprint
 

The indoor/outdoor race at Monash. I missed the Monash event last year (although I've done an indoor event in Denmark) and was looking forward to this one. It turned out that Frederic was reasonably kind to us indoors, although I lost a bit of time at 7, on a somewhat confusing mezzanine. An excellent sprint course once we got outside with plenty of options; I missed all the traps, but had a silly wobble when I lost concentration coming out of 27. Running better than I have for some time, although tiring a bit at the end; was in a few decent head-to-heads during the day (most frequently with Jim). Also one of my better sprint results for a while, clearly within 50% of the lead (Brodie did high 21s, though he'd have gone under 21 with a clean run) and a fair bit further up the list than during Sprint Into Spring, although Clare still got me by one place.

Must have been a consistent run because, if you count the 10-way tie on a 13-second leg as being the midpoint of that place range, I placed better on the course than on any split. Also of interest from the splits was that Daniel Stott, getting more back into orienteering now after a decade or so away from it (and now in Melbourne, and with a daughter old enough to be getting keen), completely blitzed the indoor section - 30 seconds ahead of Brodie - before losing time once outside.

This was definitely a fun experience, although there's probably a limit to the number of buildings you can do it in in Australia.

Took the chance of already being out east and a lack of other commitments to get up into the Dandenongs for the first time in years, which was nice (seeing forests with tree ferns is a reminder of how many such forests have been lost to fire in recent years). Getting lunch was a bit more challenging than I expected - I walked out of place number 1 after standing unacknowledged for 10 minutes at the 'please wait to be seated' sign, at place number 2 I cleared that hurdle but was then ignored for 20 minutes after sitting down. (You get the sense that solo diners aren't especially welcome on weekends, although neither place was full so it wasn't if I was taking up a table that could be more lucratively used by others).

Started with plans to head east, but about 10 minutes in felt as if my tyre was getting low, and thought it best not to be stranded too far away from home if it gave out. As it turned out it got no worse so I ended up doing a rather convoluted route, never getting more than about 3km from home, and going round in ever-decreasing circles once I decided I wanted to take it out to an hour. Felt rather unenergetic in the first 15 minutes but got going eventually; lots of curves, corners and intersections which slowed things down a bit.

Things to consider with modern technology: I went out with Bruce to check out the area for one of the March sprints, and he needed to remember to switch off the function which auto-uploads his track from test-running the course.

Initial plans for the morning were abortive (I've really struggled with the mornings this week), but got out at lunchtime, and after some initial difficulties got going after 10 minutes or so. For the first time in a while from work, I headed east as far as the Swan Street bridge (not quite up for a full Tan loop yet), in the process getting to see that the Australian Open precinct has swollen more since I was last there (I think rain is going to be more of a threat to the early part of the tournament than smoke). Still finding this harder work than a flat 35 minutes should be.

The conditions in the Yukon have been radically different to those which prevailed at NAOC 2018. It's been dropping below -40 in Whitehorse and to -50 further north - there was a news story I saw about how Forest Pearson's 8th-grade son rides to school on -40 days (they make them tough up there). Also in the news was an account of how some people, having crashed their car in the middle of nowhere in -50 or thereabouts, set the car on fire to stay warm. (Not sure this was a brilliant idea on a number of counts, but they lived to tell the tale).

Once again couldn't see the city from Clifton Hill, but this time it was drizzle rather than smoke which was responsible (not that drizzle and smoke are necessarily mutually exclusive, as we found out Monday last week), so no impediments to a session. Didn't feel that great through a lot of the session, but got through it without too much trouble (and the drizzle had cleared for the ride in).

One bit of anecdotal evidence that a lot of people have cancelled or truncated holidays; the traffic is well and truly back at out-of-holidays levels.

The house next door (derelict since I moved in here) disappeared while I was at work. Rumour has it that the demolition permit ran out next month, so I'm not holding my breath that this is necessarily a precursor to the imminent building of something (or even the removal of the rubble).

For the second day in a row, the atmospheric conditions threw a curveball for my plans, which were to do the Wednesday night street event at Mitcham. It was expected that a wind change would go through mid-to-late afternoon (which would clear out the smoke) and that there was a chance of storms with that. The storms were more intense than expected, and although we didn't get the 44mm in 30 minutes and 110 km/h wind gusts that Avalon did, I thought 'this could be trouble' when there was a lightning strike close to the rail line at Collingwood station. It was indeed trouble; we were stuck for 40 minutes before going back to Victoria Park, at which point I thought that walking home 45 minutes in the rain was a better option than waiting for buses (having heard that some people were still waiting at 8pm, I think I got that one right, although with lightning still about, some of the parkland sections were a bit nerve-wracking).

Eventually got in the door at home at 7.02 (about 1.10 after I'd planned), which obviously meant I wasn't going to get to Mitcham for a 7.00 start (especially as, as I was to discover on the run, the traffic was still at middle-of-peak-hour-in-school-term levels), so plan B was to go back out into the rain, which was starting to ease by then, and do something roughly equivalent to the C course I would have done at Mitcham. This worked out reasonably - I was certainly warmed up - although it was still rather hard work for what should have been an easy 30 minutes, and the quad gave me enough indications on the small hills here to suggest that it might have been problematic on the larger hills of Mitcham.

As you might imagine, Darebin Creek was pumping.

Finally got home to dry out properly, get something to eat and then launch into a teleconference about the finer details of OA constitutional and governance amendments. #somepeoplehaveallthefun

Knowing that today was going to be bad for smoke, I'd planned to do an indoor swim, but that plan hit a snag when the City of Yarra decided to close its indoor pools as well as its outdoor ones (perhaps they could have used the overzealous health and safety person responsible for that decision over at Australian Open qualifying).

I wasn't going to give up that easily and decided to have another go after work. Thinking that Northcote (where the indoor pool was open and the outdoor one wasn't) would be impossibly crowded - it's often difficult in the evenings even when the outdoor pool is open because it gets a lot of squad use - I decided to try Ivanhoe. It was pretty crowded too, which made for what felt like a rather broken session, but in the end it didn't go too badly.

The early Pilates session, having ascertained first that there wasn't much which had come up overnight on the work front which required my attention. Seemed to be a reasonable session and quad held up OK.

Planned to go for a post-Pilates run, knowing that it might be my last window of opportunity to do something in reasonable air quality this side of Wednesday evening (there was a layer of smoke aloft, making for an interesting-looking sunrise, but it hadn't yet reached the surface). Reasonable on the flat, but going up (short) hills was a bit of a trigger for the quad, so was reasonably cautious with it when going uphill. Not an especially convincing session.

The deadline passed at 9.59 (whereupon I headed out for a celebratory coffee with the other Bureau person on the lead authors' team). Our chapter was submitted with four minutes to spare.

One of the things which happens when there are big fires around is that the authorities pay more attention to remote rural properties than they usually do, which may be a problem if your remote rural property has things you'd prefer the authorities not to know about. This isn't the first time the country between Braidwood, Bungendore and Captains Flat has allegedly been used for nefarious purposes, although it was also the scene of one of the more notorious national-security-related media beat-ups of the 21st century when a bush block used by a Lebanese bloke from Sydney for the shooting of wild pigs (not in short supply in that part of the world), in the hands of the Daily Telegraph, became a "terrorist training camp". (Somehow, if it really was one of those, I doubt we'd have got permission to run rogaines across it).

(One other revelation here is that the "locality" of Harolds Cross, whose Census population of 53 would seem to be overestimated by at least 50, has a Wikipedia page, albeit a small one. It's also a fine example of an Australian place which bears little resemblance to its northern hemisphere namesake - the other Harolds Cross is a Dublin suburb - although not as much so as St. Kilda (the Melbourne one)).