Training Log Archive: blairtrewin

ACT Badge Event at Picaree. Steep, particularly in the first half. I was running up the hills reasonably strongly but wasn't running with a lot of freedom across or down the steeper slopes. Improved in second half, pushed along once Ben Rattray (who started 4 minutes behind) got close to me about halfway. As it turned out he never quite caught me, although he got very close, and I ended up dropping him on a route choice to the last control (which reduced the margin of defeat to 3.40). Technically clean with only one 10-seconder in the circle, but in this sort of country I'd want to be.

Up in Canberra for the weekend and gave the local XC race a go - was hoping to catch up with various old acquaintances from my Canberra running days but they're obviously all up at the City to Surf.

Made a pretty promising start, with my various niggles not causing too much trouble, and was just starting to settle into a nice duel for 4th with Trevor Jacobs when I got a stitch at the end of the first lap, for no obvious reason. This is something that used to plague me in my early running days but hasn't happened for years. Managed to hang in there reasonably well in the circumstances (lap splits 13.58 and 14.29), and it ended up turning a probable narrow loss in a battle for 4th and 5th into a comfortable loss in said battle.

Up until last night I was beginning to wonder if I would have more opportunities this year to sing the Australian national anthem at orienteering events than I would to sing the Essendon club song at the football, but at least the tally is 1-1 now.

C • Classic 2

Fairly casual, warmed up quite quickly and a smooth run after that on a nice morning. Hip probably a bit better than yesterday.

Grinding out the kilometres for the most part without too much difficulty, but started to fade away a bit in the last 20 minutes, also hints of hip soreness returning. Longest for a couple of months.

Not as good as yesterday despite having had a decent sleep at more or less the right time - go figure....

I never expect a lot going out straight after work because I invariably feel pretty ordinary before going out, but these runs have a habit of turning into nice ones, particularly on winter evenings (and particularly once I stopped going into the wind). Building back into a 'normal' schedule. A bit of soreness in the left hip both this morning and this evening, but it disappeared after the first 5 minutes, always a good sign for an injury.

In the days when I was trying to maintain a streak of consecutive days of training that ended up lasting 6.5 years, I would have been very keen to get out early today - the 'rules of the game' were that it counted as not being a missed day as long as runs were completed on consecutive days in either the timezone of origin or the timezone of destination, which on trips back to Australia from Central Europe meant starting a run by 8.

These days I do well to string 6 days together, never mind 6 years, but there isn't a lot else to do in Melbourne at 5.40 on a Tuesday morning - having just landed and not wanting to go home because it's much quicker to go straight to work - apart from go for a run. It actually wasn't a bad run - although my often-suspect Achilles definitely suffered from 24 horus in a plane - and had some downright good patches in the second half, which may or may not have had something to do with the temperature being at least 15 degrees lower than it has been for most of the runs I've done in the last two months.

Wonder how the Bureau of Statistics will cope when I answer 'Arhus, Denmark' to the question on the Census (which is today) which asks where your journey to work today commenced?

C • Classic entry 3