Sunday Mar 16 |
 | Run race ((orienteering)) 1:04:25 [4]**** 8.5 km (7:35 / km) +400m 6:08 / km | |
| spiked:26/30c |
| ACT event at Buckenderra, always a fun area. A 30 control course in 8.5km, which suited me fine given that technical training is what I need at the moment. A solid run with only one error of any size, going into the green a bit early at 7 and losing 45 seconds or so. Probably my best section was in the middle, after catching Jo at 9 and working reasonably hard to get clear (yes, I'm comparing myself to the women again), and was fortunate enough to nail the bingo 15 (in a swathe of unmapped green). Shep caught me 3.5 minutes at 25 (after a long uphill slog through the open on 22 and 23), but was obviously cruising because he didn't get away at any speed until I suffered a Catastrophic Shoe Failure coming out of 27 (there's always something new to experience, even after 1500 events). It would have been a real problem if it had happened earlier but I was able to manage the last few hundred metres (not very fast), although it felt like running in thongs. Not a bad hit-out. A pretty warm day (high 20s) but not impossibly hot; good preparation for what I expect in Dubbo.
(To insert another gratuitous 1986 reference and make a connection to today's Grand Prix at the same time, my left shoe now isn't in much better condition than Nigel Mansell's tyre in Adelaide that year).
Things you wouldn't have seen 10 years ago: Shep sitting calmly behind me for 100km as I drove the Monaro Highway from Cooma with cruise control set at 102 or thereabouts.
Reinforcement of suburban stereotypes department: The Charnwood fete was taking place yesterday (we saw it on the way out to the wedding), and one of the featured events was the Best Mullet competition. (Lachlan was stuck out there for a lot longer, playing in a band). |
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| C • 102km/h 5 |
Saturday Mar 15 |
| Run tempo 37:00 [4]*** 6 km (6:10 / km) | |
| spiked:49/51c |
| Sprint orienteering intervals at ANU, four different loops with 2-3 minutes in between. Went pretty well on the whole although courses weren't, on the whole, as tricky as a sprint course can be (although the loop with 23 controls in 9 minutes was a lot of fun). Feeling quite sharp at times. Lost a fair bit of time on the first loop through committing myself to a route choice through a marked gate which turned out to be locked. Thrown a little at times by the angled north lines. Again pretty warm. |
| Run 15:00 [2] 3 km (5:00 / km) | |
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| Warm-up for the sprint training session. |
Friday Mar 14 |
| Run 1:30:00 [3] 13 km (6:55 / km) | |
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| Joined Ecmo for his last run as a free man. Surprisingly, much of it was an area I've never run in before - probably because when I lived in Canberra I wasn't in the habit of driving somewhere to run, and it was too far from home to be reachable running from there. Started high on the hill near the sewage works (we send our crap to Adelaide as well as our hot air), then down into and across the Molonglo and Murrumbidgee rivers and into some terrain on the far side - reasonably rough. Mostly small tracks for the remainder. Distance is a guess.
To continue the 1986 references, the run took us into some bush on the west side of the Murrumbidgee near our base for a two-week camp in year 10. At the time I thought it looked potentially mildly interesting but too small to be usable (of course, in those days there was no such thing as a middle distance, let alone a sprint). Came back through another occasional school camp venue, Camp Sturt (or the remnants thereof - it wasn't rebuilt after the 2003 fires).
The run itself was nothing particularly special but handled the grind uphill at the end OK. Nice to be out before it got too hot. |
Thursday Mar 13 |
| Swimming 33:00 [2] 1 km (33:00 / km) | |
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| Down at Belconnen pool. Pretty slow and sluggish. Didn't see any band-aids.
The general consensus at the meeting I was at was that the single action which could best facilitate inter-organisational cooperation in climate change research would be to shoot all CSIRO's lawyers. In Victoria we have considerable capabilities in such fields, although a number of the leading practitioners are deceased or currently incarcerated. |
Wednesday Mar 12 |
| Run 51:00 [3] 10 km (5:06 / km) +300m 4:26 / km | |
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| Up Black Mountain in the early morning, with Nick (a friend of Cassie's who's currently staying at my parents' place) and a friend of his. A bit sluggish on the early climbs but not too bad on the major ascent, and coming back was fine. Nice morning for it but I wouldn't have wanted to have been out too much later.
It seemed just like old times when I was standing at the bus stop this morning alongside some of the people from my old school, but I was reminded that it definitely wasn't 1986 when my mobile phone rang with a request for an interview from a radio station in New Zealand. |
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| C • Easter Weather? 6 |
| Run race ((orienteering)) 27:38 [4]** 5.6 km (4:56 / km) vdot: 39.2 | |
| spiked:16/17c |
| ACT twilight event at Commonwealth Park. A few good sprint-type controls at the start and end (although 1:7500 wasn't really a large enough scale to do justice to it), and a running race in the middle which I wasn't fast enough for, although felt reasonable. Rob did 24 and Eric 26. One slight miss when I couldn't tell the difference between the end of the pond and the start of the watercourse. |
Tuesday Mar 11 |
| Run intervals 40:00 [4] 9 km (4:27 / km) | |
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| 8x400 at Clifton Hill on a 2.5 minute cycle. First track intervals session I've done this year. Took a long, long time to get going - progressively got faster, but even on the fastest reps I was only doing 78s, which is a second or two slower than I was doing this session last year, not a hugely encouraging sign.
I went up to Canberra tonight for a while - I'd always planned to work from there for the weeks either side of Easter with the combination of the various events and Ecmo's wedding, and then it turned out I had a meeting here Wednesday/Thursday anyway. Will be nice to spend a while on the old home ground - the longest time I will have spent in Canberra since I moved out in 1994.
Did my first interview today on the Adelaide heatwave, and probably not the last (they set a new record today - for any month - with their ninth straight day over 35, and if current forecasts are correct look like they might stretch it out to 16 or more days). Southern Victoria hasn't got the worst of it yet but will from Thursday onwards. The most spectacular numbers so far are from Eucla - averaging 14.5 degrees above normal for the month so far, and they've already equalled their record for the most 40-degree days in a month. |
Monday Mar 10 |
| Run 41:00 [3] 9 km (4:33 / km) | |
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| Pretty sluggish early on, as is to be expected after a hard day yesterday, but got going reasonably well in the second half. Got out there before the heat was too excessive. Some sore spots on my feet, which were trying to develop blisters yesterday but didn't quite manage it. |
| Swimming 32:00 [2] 1 km (32:00 / km) | |
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| A pretty mundane loosening-up session at Ivanhoe, not one of my favourite pools. |