Training Log Archive: blairtrewin

ACT badge event at Ballinafad Creek, southeast of Captains Flat. In an earlier incarnation as Ed's Hollow the Australian Relays were here in 1987 - I thought I'd gone under 5 minutes/km for the first time but it turned out the map was actually at 1:12000. (My father, who was running with me - it was an M21B team - was wondering how on earth I'd done the time that I had while on his course, but it turned out he'd actually picked up a 35A map and we were disqualified). Today we went further in than usual and spent most of the time on the slower and steeper upper slopes. There is another map still further in on the dodgy track, Wild Cattle Creek - best remembered for the 1988 Canberra Classic where a massive thunderstorm broke in mid-event (a site in Gippsland had 300 millimetres in a couple of hours that day), and most of us had to be towed across a couple of sections to get out. I'd only just got my licence, and for good measure was in the Fiat, hardly the ideal vehicle for such conditions.

This was not one of my better days, with two significant mistakes. After a slightly wobbly start, Paul de Jongh caught me two minutes at 6, not something I was expecting. We both went too high on 7 (he went much too high and I didn't see him again), then I lost time in the circle too and ended up dropping two minutes on the leg. Rob Walter (6 minutes) caught me shortly thereafter. My worst mistake, though, was at 10 - a somewhat ill-defined clearing in a big gully, where I didn't see the flag and overshot to the tune of 3 minutes (not helped by misreading a tree stump with dirt around it for a termite mound, and thus convincing myself I was almost in the right place). Decent last third but it was all over by then. Also struggled a bit for running flow in the terrain, on an area where it wasn't always easy to find good lines. Craney did 55 and Rob 58; I should have been around 67-68, which would have been at least sort of respectable.

I did have one PB to show for the weekend, breaking 7 hours for Canberra-Melbourne for the first time (wanting to see as much of the marathon as I could was an incentive). There's a couple of new bits of freeway and I only took 15 minutes over dinner. (I'd rather put my road trip food money into local small businesses than fast-food multinationals, but said small businesses don't make it easy - almost everything except the pub was closed in Holbrook by 7pm on Friday, and a promising-looking outlet at the Euroa service centre was closed by 7.15 tonight).

Speaking of Holbrook, which is the last non-bypassed place left on the Hume (at least until next year), it looks like the request I put in with Briohny a couple of years back for a bypass off-ramp into the bakery is going to be more or less fulfilled - although it's actually the bakery setting up new premises next to where the off-ramp is going to be.

And I had about 20% of the luggage going home that I had coming up (the rest being split about evenly between John Harding and Bruce Bowen).

C • Its going to be a lot quieter next year 1

ACT Sprint Championships at CSIRO. A race (or perhaps no race) which will be remembered for illustration of yet another of the things that can go wrong at a sprint - electricity works (which CSIRO didn't seem to know about either) which commandeered two of the control sites, both of which were moved without warning by the workers.

I suffered more than it seems most did, losing about a minute at 14 (the first of them), but my race was well and truly shot by then anyway, thanks to a 90-degree error out of the start triangle (even after 34 years in the sport, there's always scope to find a new way to stuff up), and misreading crossable fences as uncrossable at 10 and taking an unnecessarily wide route choice, which cost 30-40 seconds apiece, plus other minor wobbles at 8, 11 and 19. Finished off by stopping too early at the last control. Not running as well as I have on other days this week (and struggled for concentration for a few controls after 14), but I think some of that may have been knowing I was in technical trouble. Had trouble at times distinguishing between crossable and uncrossable fences and walls, and took a few detours I didn't need to - perhaps the line weights on the map could use some work before the WOC trials next year.

Hoping for something better tomorrow.

At Fitzroy. Plenty of sore spots earlier on but worked them out quite nicely in what turned out to be a decent session.

This afternoon was the first time for a while I've done the Friday afternoon/evening road trip to Canberra (with a boot full of OA financial paperwork).

Took to the streets and paths of inner eastern Melbourne after watching a minor missile misfire on TV, on another chilly morning, heading south initially, then along the Yarra and Gardiners Creek before cutting north back to the Yarra at Kew. (I chose the south bank path for the Yarra - the north bank gets heavy bike traffic and can be slippery, and some of its users think they're in the Olympic time trial even on normal days, so they'd be even more likely to do so the morning after the actual Olynmpic time trial).

The first 40 minutes were excellent despite a couple of shoelace stops. Didn't quite live up to that start and tired a little in the second half, but still managed to keep things going for my longest run in a couple of months. The flow was helped by a very good run with the traffic - had expected a few interruptions traversing Hawthorn and Kew at peak hour but had an absolutely clear run.

Slightly later than usual as I had to pick the OA books up from the auditors (a mere four months after I'd expected to do so). A decent run on a coldish, foggy morning, heading out along the Banyule flats then up to the Viewbank weather station and back through Rosanna. Still various sore spots. Had a bit of a detour at one point as the bike path is closed temporarily, allegedly for 10 days, but we have enough experience of such closures turning out to be for 10 weeks or 10 months (hopefully not 10 years) for me not to be terribly confident that it will be open again next week as scheduled. (There are two recent examples in Melbourne - one still ongoing - of bike path closures which were supposed to last for a couple of months running more than a year overdue).

A lunchtime session on a day when I was struggling a bit to get into things at work (this sometimes happens the day after finishing something big), but got going reasonably well on the run, on the standard Tan lunchtime route. Again a few sore spots in both hamstrings - sitting down for long periods doesn't agree greatly with me at the moment - but these didn't restrict me on the run. (This may not make for the easiest of trips to Canberra this weekend - I'm driving because I have a mountain of OA paperwork to transport, far too much to take on a plane - but at least in a car I can stop and run up and down the roadside for a bit if I need to).

The Galileo Movement is a climate change sceptic organisation which gets a bit of press from time to time (and boasts Alan Jones as a patron). It was in the news again yesterday after its director was quoted as saying that climate science was controlled by a cabal of "international banking families". Anyone familiar with the rantings of the lunar right will know exactly what "international banking families" is code for. Anyone brave enough to ring up Alan Jones's program and ask him why he's continuing to associate himself with a group whose director is peddling Jewish conspiracy theories? (Meanwhile, if there are buckets of Rothschild money out there, I certainly haven't seen any of it yet).

Significantly faster than any other swim I've done in recent times, for no obvious reason - got going nicely after the first couple of laps. ('Fast' is a relative term - at its fastest I was still only going a few seconds faster for one lot of 100 metres than the much-maligned Australian relay team were doing for four of them). Definitely felt like I was putting a bit of work in.

As always in winter, Fitzroy was in 'nice once you're in' territory.

It's been a good day, with my best swim of the year and the submission of another significant paper (with a whole 9 1/2 hours to spare), and that continued with my best interval session of the year, a 10x1 minute session on the south side of the Yarra. Sometimes this can be a bit of a nothing session but I felt pretty pumped for this one, and despite never feeling entirely without sore spots, kept getting faster and faster (again a relative term compared with some of you, but it was good for me). No distance measurements unfortunately. Kept shifting my start mark back to keep the running time at 1 minute and ended up about 35 metres further back for the last one than the first.

I've had a few false dawns in recent times in speedwork sessions after coming back from overseas, so won't get too excited yet, but there were some promising signs in the Lausanne sprint before I altercated with a log the next day. At the very least it suggests I have something to look forward too on the next couple of weekends.

Going to/from Yarra's Edge.

I clearly wasn't the only person scrambling to make the IPCC deadline - so far today the journal I edit has had 12 submissions. Normally it takes us three months to get that many.

The plan was a run starting from outside the Fitzroy pool followed by a swim. Wasn't entirely awake for a lot of this run, but nevertheless started to flow pretty well by around halfway and certainly ended up better than Monday runs often do (probably a product of an easier Sunday).

And then I discovered I'd left my wallet at home, which meant it will have to wait until tomorrow before I swim one lot of 100 metres slower than the Olympic relay teams do four of them, and resulted in some reworking of transport plans, going back home and then getting the train. It may have been as well that I wasn't on the bike, because there was a bit of action today on my usual commuting route, in the form of the police paying a visit to a well-known local social club with an interest in motorcycles. Presumably they suspected that illegal activity was taking place on the premises. I can't work out what could possibly have given them that idea.