Run 2:00:00 [3] 24.0 km (5:00 / km)
The long run of the week, heading roughly along the shore to the central city and then out onto a peninsula extending west from the city towards Nouville. Settled down reasonably quickly. I was wondering whether my chosen route was a good one in the course of a stretch through the port and then along a road with some traffic and not much of a verge, but towards the far end got off the main road and into the back blocks, something different to what I've seen so far. This is shack country - New Caledonia's per-capita GDP is similar to New Zealand's but a lot of it is locked up in the mining industry and doesn't find its way to the broader population - and no white faces were to be seen (other than my own), but the people were friendly and the numerous dogs didn't give chase (or even, with one exception, bark).
Turning around meant going into the wind, which felt cooler if slightly more demanding. To this point the run had been going well, occasionally bordering on very well, but by 80 minutes I was feeling like I was starting to tire, and ten minutes later the tank was more or less empty - whether of water or food I'm not quite sure (I suspect the former, although it is the first time for a while I've tried to do a long run before breakfast on nothing more substantial than a few sweets). At least by then I was past the last hill, but the last quarter of the run, and especially the last couple of kilometres, was a case of barely hanging on. Didn't have a lot of energy through the rest of the day.
Someone at morning tea (in a discussion about songs that get stuck in one's head) mentioned the Scatman, something which I will permanently associate with the WOC 1995 opening ceremony (it was the backing music to the performance of the local police gymnastic team, which featured a couple of German cops using a police car as a vaulting horse). The ceremony itself was a bit of a debacle - it was on the evening after the long distance qualification and the day before the final in a town 40 kilometres away from where everyone was staying, and was therefore attended almost exclusively by people who'd missed out on the final (in those days the maximum team size was five and four could run the long, so there weren't the extras doing other events that there would be now). The timing also meant my WOC career was, as it turned out, over before the opening ceremony.