Training Log Archive: blairtrewin

Rounded out another solid month of training with what's starting to become a standard intervals session at All Nations. Took a while to get into it - the first couple of reps were slower than anything from the last two sessions - but going along pretty nicely by the end. Not as many dogs to dodge this week.

Have to go back to the summer of 2011-12 for the last time I put together two months like the last couple, volume-wise.

Going to/from All Nations. Didn't feel as creaky in the first kilometre as I sometimes do, but still no faster.

Historical epic fail of the day goes to the Sky News reporter who said of last week's events that it was the first time someone had been decapitated in France. (It's not even particularly ancient history; France was the last country in western Europe to abolish the death penalty, with the last guillotining taking place in 1977 - and the last public one in 1939).

A reasonably standard morning session at Fitzroy, after negotiating the maze to get out of my place (the council who'd closed one street didn't seem to have talked to the builders who'd closed the most likely alternative). Drifted in and out of it a bit at times, but finished it off reasonably well.

Was somewhat amused by something I saw in the paper this morning, involving a marketing consultant who was upset that he had not been paid his $18,000 fee for promoting a book by an "insolvency expert". According to the report, he "concedes he should have seen the warning signs" - the title of the book in question was "How to Not Pay Your Debts".

A fairly ho-hum lunchtime session around the Tan, pondering weighty work questions (namely, why my code wasn't producing exactly identical results when re-run with the same inputs - I eventually remembered that I'd introduced a line which randomly decided whether to round .5 values up or down, so you wouldn't expect to get exactly identical results). Got a decent run with traffic today, but lots of street life on Southbank as befits the start of school holidays.

Once again, I was reminded this evening that you know you're an orienteer when you see some terrain in an unrelated TV or film piece and think that would make an interesting map. (In this case, it's a forest-cum-Mafia crime scene in Calabria, airing as part of tonight's Four Corners).

C • Randomisation 2

State Series at Mount Alexander. Starting and finishing at the old oak grove (which used to be, but isn't any more, surrounded by pine plantation). From here, in the immortal words of Yazz and the Plastic Population, the only way is up, and this was one of the more physically brutal courses I've experienced in Australia (at least it was short). There were nearly 200 metres of climb in the first kilometre, and a few sharp ones after that, too. Didn't feel like I had much strength for the hills (and walked a few of the steeper ones), but I doubt I was alone there.

Headed out fairly late after a not-too-demanding session working on a finish with few finishers (I subsequently got to do the biggest hills again, this time collecting controls). I climbed a bit too far on both 2 and 4 (not a mistake you want to make here), but didn't lose too much time doing so. Andrew Rowan caught me (not sure whether it was 1 minute or 2) at 4 and we were more or less together until 11, where I dropped behind him a bit and saw him overshoot the control in some style while I got in and out without his noticing. On my own through the rest of it, and fairly clean (if slow) until a 30-seconder at 19. Ended up fourth, well behind Brodie and quite a bit behind Ben Goonan.

One of the locals turned up seeking signatures for a petition against a proposed mountain bike park in the area. I suspect she didn't get many. (The claim of "no community consultation" seems a bit dubious when I saw a notice in the local store afterwards seeking nominations, due a few weeks ago, for a community consultation committee for the project). Whether or not opponents of the bike park (who've also been spraypainting local trees with some enthusiasm) had anything to do with the disappearance of a course 6 control is unknown.

Names from the past department: Gary Buchan, whom I last encountered as a Tasmanian M16 (a couple of years above me, but we had some good contests in the first half of 1985 when I was running up from 14s to try to make the Australian M16 team). He's been coming regularly this year but this was the first time we'd crossed paths (which says something for my limited attendance at Victorian events this year).

I noted at the store that the old Faraday schoolhouse is on the market, although the ad fails to make any reference (even in real-estate-euphemism style) to the building's somewhat colourful history.

C • Touchy subject 1

Earlier than usual for a Saturday because of another engagement at 9. Wasn't hugely surprised to be in starting-in-the-dark-and-half-awake mode for the first 20-30 minutes, but after a brief revival through the middle section, this run fell away again and ended up being one of the more dismal I've done in the last two or three months. Didn't bother doing anything extra to take me up to the round 90 minutes.

This was familiar ground in an unfamiliar order - past the old place and along the Yarra Flats at the far end rather than early on.

A reasonably solid session which seemed to function fairly well in loosening my body up. My mind needed a bit more loosening up - it's been a sometimes challenging couple of weeks - but made some progress in that respect as well.

Not sure who's been following the US ultra-long thread (which has had a few side-tracks). Strikes me as being a fairly brave decision to schedule an ultra-long in late June for somewhere (Boise, Idaho) which has a similar summer climate to, say, Northam. Last time I looked, the forecast is 41 for both Saturday and Sunday. You don't often see a Canadian forecast (Kamloops) which has a number with a 4 in front of it either (unless there's a minus sign before the 4).

C • ...or it's at the time of the WRC 1998. 7

The Thursday morning long run but not quite as it usually is. For the first time in 17 years in the workforce, I was on strike this morning, along with a fair slice of the rest of the Melbourne-based public service (Canberra had its turn on Tuesday). For those who haven't been following the ongoing saga of government enterprise agreement negotiations, the government has put such tough conditions on any offers that agencies make to their staff that the proposals that have got as far as a vote (mostly involving pay rises of less than 1% per year and major cuts in conditions) have been voted down, most by 90+% margins. We haven't even got as far as getting an offer yet, almost exactly a year after the last agreement expired. (My thinking is that the government has set up a process which is designed to fail, and is quite happy to let things drag on indefinitely, knowing that if no agreement is reached during their term that means a four-year wage freeze - the same strategy the previous Victorian government used with the ambos. Perhaps someone should tell them that the failure to resolve the ambulance dispute is part of the reason why the previous Victorian government is now the previous Victorian government....).

Not being at work this morning did mean I could do my long run without having to get up not long after 5 to do it. I decided to add some relevant themes to this effort, including wearing a red shirt, and planning a route which took in a Liberal electorate office. Melbourne north of the river is a Liberal-free zone (you won't find one until you get to Seymour), so this meant crossing the river, the nearest available destination being the Kooyong office next to Camberwell junction.

The run didn't feel like it was reaching great heights, but the performance was definitely improved on a couple of weeks ago. Being later in the morning helped, and so did not being in the dark.

Being out later in the morning meant a different set of sights to usual, starting with demonstrations of just how bad the driving is outside schools at drop-off time. Also quite a lot of parents (a surprisingly large proportion of whom were dads) and small children out and about in various places.

Copa America update: Chile won their quarter-final against Uruguay 1-0. Uruguay finished with nine men. Neither of the sendings-off involved Luis Suarez, but one of them did involve a Uruguayan player retaliating to someone (allegedly) giving him the treatment made (in)famous by John Hopoate.

Original plan was to do this in the morning but things didn't go quite to plan (albeit not as badly not to plan as if you were getting a train on the Hurstbridge line this morning) and the time window was going to be a bit too narrow to get this in and still be sure of making a meeting at 9, so went for the evening instead - mostly along the Albert Park waterfront ahead of an engagement there this evening. Main focus of this was throwing four faster kilometres in (between 4.17 and 4.28), which went a bit better than I thought it might have done; a bit slower coming back into the wind.

One of the major items of attention today was the extreme cold in New Zealand (particularly the South Island). The elements required for really serious cold in the interior South Island (essentially a big dump of snow followed by several days of clear skies and light winds under high pressure) don't happen often - perhaps only once every 10-20 years - but when they do, you can get some seriously impressive numbers (I've posted here previously about the -25.6 at Ranfurly in 1903 and the work we did on that). Lowest so far in this event is -21.0 at Tara Hills, near Omarama, the lowest in New Zealand since 1995. The cold surface layer did not break down during the day with Tara Hills only reaching a maximum of -9.9 today (it was back down to -17 last time I looked; illustrating how strong the inversion is, Lindis Pass about 40km up the road was only -1). Just to show that Google doesn't know absolutely everything after all, when I put "Tara Hills New Zealand" into Google Maps, it took me to a nursing home near San Francisco.

And even by News Limited standards, photoshopping an ABC logo onto an Islamic State flag is pretty crass. (It's remarkable how many people are very enthusiastic about free speech as long as they agree with it).

Same session as last week, which may be showing a slight lack of imagination (or may not). A little apprehensive about it at the start after a poor warm-up but worked out OK, and started to feel as if I was attacking the last couple of reps which is always a good sign. Dogs are a bit of an occupational hazard here. Much milder than we've seen for a while.

Warm-up and down. Warm-up was very ordinary but it didn't seem to carry through.

Not a great day yesterday for the 'hood (loosely defined), with a stabbing in the Preston Market car park and a drive-by in Northcote.

Marked the winter solstice (which technically fell at something like 2.30 this morning) by going for a swim in an outdoor pool, albeit a reasonably warm one. Coming off a harder day than last week and didn't have as good a swim as this time last week, but not outrageously bad.

They do things differently in South America: the Copa America (the South American football championships) is currently in progress in Chile. I wonder what would happen in the AFL or NRL if someone's star player, in the middle of the finals, crashed their Ferrari while drunk on the way home from a big night at the casino and then got into a punch-up with the police when they turned up? In Chile they get picked for the next game.

(That game, against Bolivia, also suggested that the home supporters can give Australian cricket a run for its money in the sledging department, by singing something after a goal which translated approximately as "if you're not jumping you don't have a coast". This is a reference to Bolivia losing its coastline to Chile in an 1880s war; the Bolivians haven't forgotten and are currently off at the International Court of Justice in the Hague to try to get it back, a quest which I suspect has even less chance of happening than Argentina gaining possession of the Falklands).

Post-work session around the Tan. Felt pretty awful in the first few minutes but then settled into a decent rhythm and finished off acceptably well. Lots of traffic issues in the first 10 minutes, not helped by the presence of police at a couple of the spots where I might have been tempted normally to cross the road without traffic-light assistance.

Parents are in town at the moment (based in Albert Park) so today's run involved heading over to link up with them. The last time I tried to do a one-way run to that destination (on Christmas morning last year) it ended up falling apart towards the end. There wasn't a repeat performance today, although it didn't quite live up to the promise that it showed in the second half-hour and I was eventually not too upset to see it over, despite the lovely morning (frosty early on, but that's no deterrent to a Canberran).

After spending the first half of this run largely along the river (passing in the process the setting-up for a trail race in Yarra Bend), the second half took in ground more typical of the further end of longer runs from the years when I was living in Albert Park, crossing Toorak and Armadale to East St. Kilda, through St. Kilda (not at its best at 10 on a Sunday morning), crossing at the Espy footbridge and then finishing along the waterfront. Plenty of other people taking advantage of the good conditions (as I've noticed on other occasions recently, a large majority of the runners out were women).

Post-run pancakes at Middle Park definitely hit the spot.

I found out through this morning's paper, in the process of reading a piece about Bill Shorten's background which seemed to be based around the concept that if you quote someone who's dead they're not going to complain about being misrepresented, of the recent passing of George Seitz - it would be fair to say that this didn't attract as much public attention as that of Joan Kirner. Mr. Seitz was noted as being, against stiff competition, probably the ALP's champion branch-stacker, his career highlight being the 497 people who supposedly joined the party at a meeting held in his electorate office.

Bendigo Saturday event at Mosquito Creek. Struggling a bit for concentration at times and almost paid heavily for that with a classic gully-spur parallel error on 4, but picked it up more or less in time and managed to get out of it with the loss of a minute or so. Not entirely confident at times reading the map in the vaguer parts (how much of this was me and how much was the map is not entirely clear); running got better as it went on. Went through Martin and Asha at 8. Asha, in particular, was still close at 9 and I knew I was going to have to work reasonably hard to the finish to stay in front of them, which I was able to. (I knew I'd caught a couple of minutes on Martin, but wasn't 100% certain who'd caught who between Asha and myself).

The winning times will have come back a bit with no Bryan and no Bruce. Simon Rouse was the best when I left, in the high 41s. Don't know if anyone will have advanced on that.

C • The map 1

Slightly absent-minded this morning. My normal procedure on Fridays is to drive to the pool with the bike in the car (the flotation belt is too bulky to carry on a bike), leave the car there for the day and ride in to work. I realised once I got to the pool that I'd forgotten to load the bike. (At least this meant that I got to listen to Lachy and Matt on the ABC online while I was on the tram). Reasonable session once in, the last 10 minutes of which was spent collectively lamenting the state of Australian governance with one of the other regulars.

OA news is that our share of the ASC's found-it-down-the-back-of-a-filing-cabinet money is $20K for various Eventor developments (mainly making it more user-friendly). Toph's live coverage proposal didn't get up, though we'll be able to have another crack in the main funding round a bit later.

Other news of the day is that Tasmanian police carried out a series of raids on bikie gangs. Amongst the items they seized were 25 firearms, four tasers, quantities of ammunition, cannabis, ice and speed, two turtles and a snake. One wonders what they will do with the last two items.

Thoughts of going out into the terrain were put on the backburner because I needed to be at work early which in turn meant going out before it was light. As it turned out I wasn't in much shape for anything - this time next week all of me will be on strike, but today it was just my back which was (and even without that I was feeling horribly sluggish). Started to approach some vague respectability in the last couple of kilometres. (Saw Grant through the window while going past, but was already running late so didn't drop in).

The rest of the day was probably at the better end of expectations - certainly challenging, but at least it was civil. It helped that the MP I was most worried about didn't turn up. (Having learned some time ago that a good way to win brownie points with MPs, especially rural ones, is to express an interest in their electorate or places therein, I made a point of compiling a list beforehand of which sites were in whose seats so I could use them as examples when the time came).

This was a run in my best traditions of logistical optimisation. My flight to Canberra was at 10.30. On the one hand, traffic across the northern suburbs gets pretty bad from 7 onwards, on the other hand, traffic going to the airport is at its worst around 7. The solution to this was to go part way to the airport and then go for a run.

My chosen starting point was Airport West (the 'airport' the suburb name refers to is Essendon), and the target the Maribyrnong in Brimbank Park and points south. I think the last time I did the Maribyrnong path as a run was a Christmas morning run with Jim in 2004 starting from my grandmother's then place in Essendon.

The first 3km wasn't greatly attractive (and getting across the Calder and the Ring Road somewhat complicated), but once in Brimbank it was well worth it. The river path feels remarkably rural for Melbourne with the Whitten Bridge (which I've always thought to be slightly ironically named, given that its principal function is to make it easier to avoid going to Footscray) the only real sign of civilisation in about 7km. Was running very well in this section, perhaps a bit less well once I climbed out of the valley - ran out of time to do the whole river path down to the Avondale Tea Gardens - but still a pretty decent session.

I'm still feeling somewhat sniffly but it's having no impact on my running. A good morale boost before tomorrow's festivities.

Feeling a bit more sniffly today but it doesn't seem to be impacting much on my running (at least not yet), so decided to continue with my plan of doing an intervals session of sorts - experimenting a bit with venues and this time tried a 10x1 minute session in All Nations Park (although not venturing onto the hill). Didn't feel as if I was really opening out properly but still not the worst of sessions. Not too wet underfoot considering the overnight rain.

Going to/from All Nations.

I'm about to go on a bit of a flying visit to Canberra - mainly for the potentially daunting challenge of providing support to our Director when he addresses a meeting of Coalition backbench MPs (including some very vocal climate scpetics) about Australian climate data on Thursday morning - my job will be to handle the more technical questions. I certainly haven't presented to such a challenging audience before, and am bracing myself for everything up to and including being openly accused of fraud on the floor of the meeting. The straight bat which once brought me eight runs in two hours is likely to come in very useful (metaphorically speaking).

(My running plans for Canberra are confined to getting out into the terrain behind our place for as long as the time window allows between first light and having to go into the office on Thursday morning, but I wouldn't be averse to, say, collective Origin-viewing on Wednesday night if anyone in the vague general vicinity of Aranda feels so inclined).

C • good luck! 10

Earlier in the morning than usual, which meant that (a) it was more crowded than usual and (b) I was starting this in the dark, which always feels a bit strange at an outdoor pool. Also a bit stronger and faster than in recent swims, which probably had a bit to do with the relatively easy weekend, notwithstanding a lousy night's sleep (I think I drank coffee too late in the afternoon yesterday).

Lunchtime around the Tan. Felt reasonable but a bit on the slow side (with a certain number of traffic holdups). Not as much street theatre on Southbank as there sometimes is (perhaps the quota had been used up by the town crier outside the Commonwealth Law Courts this morning to mark the 800th anniversary of the Magna Carta).

I've felt a bit sniffly and sneezy today, but no sign of a running impact (yet).

Melbourne Bush-O at Eaglemont Flats. Pushed this harder than I sometimes do for the Melbourne Bush-O events (which is another way of saying that I didn't do a long run on the Saturday), on an interestingly technical course - particularly the 7-8-9 section in the flat, green areas around the billabong (nice setting/mapping work by Aston generally). Went a bit wide on 9 but otherwise clean technically. Running reasonable, but felt as if I'd perhaps dropped my intensity a bit on 11 (a long leg, mostly on tracks/roads) and this showed in the splits. A bit more competitive in the results than I normally have been in this series, although still 5.5 minutes down on Patrick.

Great turnout - it often is here (and the Melbourne Bush-O series generally has strengthened considerably in numbers this year). Warren had to do a dash to Officeworks to run off more maps.

This weekend has been an easier one than most for a while (it's the first for several weeks which hasn't involved either a long-distance orienteering race or a serious long run). Probably not such a bad thing as I move into a higher-intensity phase of training.

And avoiding criminal activity may have been high on the minds of many who attended WMOC last year, but perhaps we need to think about it this year too - it seems that a bikie war is currently in progress in Gothenburg (although warring bikies are normally pretty good at confining their murderous intentions to each other and leaving others alone, as I know from 16 years of incident-free commuting past the Hells Angels Melbourne HQ).

C • Great turnout 7

Much earlier than usual because of the annual trip of the comrades to Ararat (my last official Ivanhoe Branch function). Started at an hour more typical of Thursdays and was as slow through the first half-hour as I usually am on Thursdays, but feeling quite smooth in the last 20 minutes.

At Fitzroy, but in the evening rather than the morning because that was better suited to the day's logistics - always feels a bit strange doing this in the dark. Quads felt quite stiff when I started out but this gradually turned into a decent session - felt as if I was working pretty well through the second half. Hardly another person in sight at 6.30 on a chilly winter's night.

Those of you in rugby states will probably know, but others may not, that an arm-wrestling competition on the NRL Footy Show last night left one of the participants with a broken arm, live on air. This will bring back memories for the old-timers, in the form of a similar incident involving Warren Key and Grant Bluett (Warren coming off second-best, though the damage healed quickly enough that he was able to run World Cup two months later) in a Wagga pub after a National League race in 1994. For a sport which doesn't really do off-field incidents that was one of the more memorable ones of our history.

The answer to how well I was going to back up after last night was not terribly well; this was not one of my better long runs of recent weeks and I wasn't too upset to see it over, although managed to find enough enthusiasm for an extra loop to get it beyond 2 hours. Headed west for something different, taking me as far as Cross Keys Reserve, which is probably better remembered for crime than for sport (it was the scene of the most brazen murders of the Melbourne underworld war when a gangster and his small-time mate were shot while watching Auskick). A chilly morning in the valleys.

Odd sight of the day #1: someone riding a bike on the Capital City Trail and pushing another (unoccupied) bike alongside them.

Odd sight of the day #2: a 'Lock The Gate: No Entry to Coal Seam Gas Companies' sign. You see these yellow triangles all over rural Queensland (and probably rural NSW too, but I haven't been to any of the NSW CSG hotspots lately), but they're probably less relevant to a block of flats in East Brunswick.

C • Odd sight #2 1

Ran street-O at Mont Albert as a tempo run of sorts (though you always seem to be slower in the dark). This was longer than most street-O courses are, and I always had the sense that (a) I hadn't done a very good job of the route choice and (b) I was going to struggle to get them all inside the hour. The bid to do the latter was further derailed by some unusually sloppy navigation for a street-O (the first one probably wasn't in the right place, but the other two mistakes were entirely my own). Decided after 14 controls that I probably didn't have time to get them all inside 60 minutes (or even inside 61, which would have been worth it because the control I ended up dropping was a 5-pointer and the per-minute late penalty is 3).

Tonight, though, was mostly about the running and trying my hand at going a bit faster again. I wasn't always comfortable doing so, but did feel a bit quicker in the second half (and the splits bore that out). A long outing for a first faster street-O and I'll be interested to see how I back up in the morning.

Flew back from Adelaide first thing this morning after a pretty ordinary night's sleep (starting to think about work stuff when you wake up at 3.45 is not really conducive to restfulness). Didn't expect a lot of the run but it ended up being fairly reasonable. A bit different to the usual lunchtime - my parents are currently staying at my aunt's at Albert Park (there's a cat to be looked over while my aunt's away, in case you're wondering why they're not enjoying my new premises) and I had something to pick up from there. This was the first place I lived when I moved to Melbourne.

Albert Park College - which had been (temporarily) Jeffed while I was living in the area - is back in action and I had to do a certain amount of lunchtime football-dodging while in transit.

Residences past and present were a theme today - having taken in my first place in Melbourne on the lunchtime run, I headed out to the second this evening, in the name of checking which of my large collection of keys worked in which locks and leaving those that worked in something behind for the new owners when they take possession on Thursday.

On the way to this was a session at the Ivanhoe pool. Most of this was fairly mundane - coming off a weekend which was a bit less demanding than race weekends sometimes are - with one hairy moment when my left Achilles suddenly started hurting quite sharply after pushing off at the start of a lap. This led to a moment of mild panic - surely I haven't done an Achilles while swimming? - but the pain faded away and was gone after another couple of laps.

C • Swimming injuries 1

A middle distance (not a championship one) on terrain unlike anything I've ever run on in Australia - flattish limestone country, with low irregular hills (a bit sand-duney, though without quite the intricacy in the contours) with a bit of rock on them, and lots of coastal vegetation with gaps in between, rather like Cantara before the gaps disappeared. (Cantara was perhaps the most similar experience, although the contour features here were more subtle).

I'm well aware that my record in flat technical terrain leaves something to be desired and was concentrating particularly hard to stay in contact. Rarely felt completely in control but got through most of the course successfully, the only wobble being at 10 where I misread a flat knoll as being on a ridge rather than off to its side and lost a minute or so. Fairly smooth physically, without a great deal of speed, and was again the standard distance behind Simon (although John was much closer today).

This weekend was definitely well worth coming over for, particularly today; not sure if it can be made to work, but it would be great to see a national carnival out this way someday, perhaps in 2018 (and I think Port Lincoln, like Broken Hill, is one of those places a lot of people have always meant to go to but never quite got round to it). Excellent show put on by the local club, as well - I think Port Lincoln is the only town under 20,000 in Australia that has managed to sustain a local club long-term. (Smaller places have had clubs but none have lasted - mostly they've folded once their founder(s) move on).

And flat limestone terrain with lots of vegetation detail is very relevant to certain types of Hungarian terrain, which may or may not end up being something of interest to the considerable number of talented M/W16s who were here this weekend.

C • I am one of them 3

SA Long Championships at Mount Dutton - one big granite mountain (there are a few of them) rising out of the plains of lower Eyre Peninsula, and with one of the better views (out to Coffin Bay and the ocean) of any walk to the start I've had this side of Switzerland. Spent much of the course going around the upper slopes before dropping down late; as expected, the most challenging controls were going downhill into detail, and I didn't always have a lot of confidence doing that, but generally hit the controls OK.

One mistake of any size - 5, where I didn't read the vegetation properly and went too low, losing perhaps a minute. Caught up to John, who'd missed it by more, there; he led me through the next few but I got through him when he made a mistake at 9. Went wider than I needed to to stay in the yellow on the long leg 12-13 and probably lost a bit of time doing that, then got through the last bit without ever feeling technically comfortable doing so. Reasonably happy with the uphill side of things, especially the hill strength - didn't have to walk anything. Was my standard-these-days 35% or so behind Simon, and a similar distance ahead of John (I don't think that trifecta would have paid very much on the TAB).

Trot around Coffin Bay with Jenny early on before a day of exploring, first up a bit of a hill/lookout to the east of town for a decent view, then along the foreshore to the other side of town. Didn't feel totally inspired but then it was fairly soon after I got up. Watch was doing strange things today (unless you think that I really had a kilometre split of 8.30 followed by one of 53 seconds); not sure whether or not this could be explained by proximity to the local mobile phone tower.

Exploring involved going down to Memory Cove (rough track, good scenery, nice weather), and finding out the limitations of the new vehicle in handling sand dunes (somewhat to George's, occasionally vocal, disappointment).

Ecmo may be interested to know that his picture occupies pride of place in the front window of the Port Lincoln tourist office.

First time since I've moved here that I've checked out my new local - Northcote. It's within long walking distance (15-20 minutes) on mornings when I don't have a plane to catch, and has a good long deep end in the outside pool, although I think Fitzroy will still be my preferred option. The one negative is the showers, which appear to operate on a drip irrigation system.

This was a pretty early session due to aforementioned plane (to Adelaide and then Port Lincoln), coming off a late night because I was in an IOF teleconference from 5.30 until midnight (with a bit of a break for their lunch/my dinner). Didn't feel as bad as I thought I might, and didn't feel as sleepy during the day as I thought I might, either. (Not being at work probably helped, although it would have been an interesting day at work after the publication of a new data set and associated paper overnight in the US establishing that global warming didn't stop, or even slow down that much, in 1998).

The other news of the day is that we've got the word from the Sports Commission on funding, and it's reasonably good news on balance - the total amount we'll be getting is actually slightly up on this year (and that doesn't include the extra funding round mentioned in the earlier comments thread). However, it will all be directed at participation in some form or other, and we almost certainly won't be allowed to use it to fund national teams, so we will need to do some rearrangement of what we spend our "own" money on if we want to be able to support those at something close to the existing level.

One of the hazards of running from a new place is that occasionally you'll find yourself going further than intended, realising when you're 30 minutes from your planned finish time that you're still 40 minutes from home by the shortest practical route. Such was the case this morning - I'd planned on 2 hours or maybe a bit shorter, but ended up being at the long end of midweek runs. This ended up working out fine - while I'm not fast at the moment (and, despite feeling more awake at the start than is usual at this time, the start was just as slow as other recent Thursdays), I'm in a nice spot with respect to endurance - rarely in the last two or three years has something in excess of 2 hours felt so easy.

Finishing late put me behind schedule, but I was a lot further behind schedule after dropping my bike off for a service and making the mistake of getting the Smith Street tram in peak(ish) hour - would have been better off walking to Clifton Hill station and getting the train. That wasn't to be my last transport issue of the day - one of the downsides of Fairfield is that expresses don't stop there, so it only gets a train every 20 minutes or so in the evening peak, which makes for a big gap when one of those trains is cancelled.

Maybe the fartlek loop I picked out last week wasn't such a good one; it turns out that parts of it turn into a mudbath in the wet, and now that it's wet it will probably stay wet for the rest of the winter (El Nino notwithstanding). Mudbaths aren't great for trying to run fast on - not that I was really in the right frame of mind to run fast this morning anyway. Decided there were better options after the first loop and kept running sprints up the bike path towards Thornbury, but in a fairly uninspired way.

Headed out early for a practical purpose, namely that of hopefully being able to get the bins at my old place out in time. Achieved 50% of this goal (the normal bins had been emptied but not the recycling ones), so will need to delegate someone to do the rest of the job next Monday night (I'll still be in SA myself). Didn't achieve the goal of having a decent run - this one felt sluggish all the way, even on the downhill stretches through the parks of west Ivanhoe later on (normally a good section).

Starting to get a feel for how long it is home from various reference points; last night showed it was 7 1/2 minutes from Victoria and Mitchell (good running intersection name, that) and today 8 minutes from the Darebin Creek footbridge.

Today's update in the talentless local talent department: an alleged car thief appeared yesterday in the Dandenong Magistrates Court. He was readily identified because of some documents he left behind in the dumped, allegedly stolen car - namely his bail paperwork for another offence which had his name and address on it.

A classic cold outbreak morning which fell squarely into the "nice once you're in" category. This was a reasonably nondescript swim although picked up a bit in the last couple of laps.

Today's nomination for least successful criminal of the day goes to the person who attempted to hold up a petrol station in Bundoora at knifepoint. The attendant told him to go outside and collect his money from the ATM, locked the doors and called the police. At this point one might have expected the (alleged) offender to have scarpered, but instead he apparently believed that the ATM was going to start spitting out money, because he was still standing next to it when the police turned up to arrest him.

Not quite as per the original plan for this evening - I'd dropped my car in to get something fixed this morning and was planning to do a run from there once I picked the car up (in the name of avoiding some traffic by going home later), but the car wasn't finished today, and in any case I realised that what I was planning to cook tonight needed 50 minutes in the oven, so I went home, put said cooking in oven, waited for a heavy shower to pass (which was only a temporary help - I got collected by the next one 25 minutes later) and headed out the door. Felt better than I thought I might have after yesterday (with the help of some spring from a pair of new shoes), but still nothing special.

I realised on seeing a few people around the streets with torches and maps that there was a park/street event on in these parts tonight. Didn't see any controls (I don't think the Monday night events use them?).

Heard the news of Joan Kirner's passing just before setting out. I came to know her a bit in post-political life, partly through ending up on her table at a few quiz nights through a mutual friend (this also ended up in a weekend at Hotham which was the prize the year we won; she, and everyone else in the group, declined to join me in running from Hotham to Feathertop and back).