Training Log Archive: simmo

Event: Sprint Into Spring Race 1 - Eltham College
 

Sprint race at Eltham College, Melbourne. Quite a few hesitations and small errors and a couple of bad route choices, but finished 9th behind several kids (Keys and Arthur's) and Jenny Bourne. Good map by young Aston Key, although the scale was a little foreign to me (1:2500), but quite a hilly area and I was cooked by about 1.5kms in.

I also jogged around the 1.9km Easy course with my 6yo nephew Kobi doing the punching and taking the credit for 2nd place at his first orienteering event.

To the Wilhelmina Falls in the Murrundindi Scenic Reserve.

Final day on the Rail Trail. We had looked at a road ride map that someone had left in our accommodation, but on driving around it we found that a) it had a very steep and long uphill more suited to a race stage, and then a long, even steeper downhill on a gravel road that was littered with windblown branches, also two sections totalling about 6kms on the highway. So we decided to go to Yarck for lunch, the Giddy Goat being open today. This involved two Rail Trail sections we had done on previous days, but 60% of the ride was new to us. Uphill to the Cheviot tunnel then a great downhill into Molesworth, before joining up with the Yarck section at Cathkin. Very nice countryside, rolling hills with green paddocks tinged with cape weed yellow, views of higher, forested ranges in the distance, some forested sections on the trail, and an interesting section along an embankment with wetlands either side. Trail surface mostly good. Excellent home-made Cornish pastime and salad at the GG, followed by passion fruit vanilla slice, coffee not so good as the others we've had though.

Thoroughly recommend the Trail - doable on any type of bike, except an expensive road bike. Our old roadies with 28mm tyres were great.

Still got flu symptoms - chesty cough and blocked sinuses.

Bonnie Doon to Mansfield on the Rail Trail and back. Best surface of the trail so far, very hard, compact black gravel - almost like bitumen. However, with constant drizzle on the return ride, surface dust turned to black slush - all over us and the bikes. Found a very good coffee roasters in Mansfield, and the ride was almost swoop-free with just the one half-hearted pass several feet above my head - he must have been trying out for Collingwood.

Another day on the Great Victorian Rail Trail, from Cathkin to Alexandra on a spur line, then back to Cathkin and up to Yarck on the main trail. Very nice ride to Alexandra with a couple of hills and nice downhills. Good view of the Cathedral Ranges from the highest point. Had coffee and raisin toast in Alexandra, just as well we did because our planned lunch stop, the Giddy Goat in Yarck was closed. Cold with the odd bit of drizzle, but a good day except for a couple of persistent magpies, although only one of them got us in both directions of the ride.

Great Victorian Rail Trail from Yea to Trawool. Trail very soft in places making for hard riding. Missed the rain which had already happened earlier, and then came again not long after we finished. Didn't go all the way to Tallarook, which would have been another 30km there and back. Great scenery, especially alongside the Goulbourn River, and near Trawool where there was a property which looked ripe for a granite orienteering map. Trawool turned out to be a blink or miss place, but we found the Schoolhouse Gallery which did a very nice Devonshire tea - scones were excellent and we bought a jar of the home-made Plumand Youngerberry jam. Bikes were covered in crap after the ride and had to be hosed down.

Event: City Beach North (Metro Series 2)
 

Arrived in Yea, weather ok despite forecast rain, so we went for a warm-up ride to the Cheviot tunnel. When we got back to Yea I noticed PP's rear light missing so we went back 2km and found it still flashing. Track surface not too bad considering recent rain.