Training Log Archive: blairtrewin

Joined Neil for a run from his place in the evening - same loop as in January (I think), with some fairly rough trails in places in the dark, though a bit less hairy this time because it was drier. Seemed to be handling it reasonably well although Neil was definitely stronger on a couple of the sharp climbs. Still rather warm.

My side gig this week is representing the Antarctic at a meeting on possibly setting up a multinational climate centre for polar regions (Australia was asked to send someone for this purpose at short notice, no-one else could go, and I was already in town). Unsurprisingly 99% of the discussion has been about the Arctic and my main role has been to remind people occasionally that there are two poles.

C • Well the earths poles 1

Intervals session along the lakefront on the clearest morning yet - excellent view of Mont Blanc (at least until the sun came up directly behind it). Felt pretty good today and performing a bit better than last week, too; feel as if I'm in a reasonable patch at the moment.

You certainly can't accuse Global Cryosphere Watch of looking for junkets. Their next workshop is in Salekhard, Russia, on the Arctic Circle in western Siberia - in the first week of February. (I won't be there).

Speaking of matters Russian, I was somewhat surprised to learn today that the Commonwealth of Independent States still exists, sort of.

Warm-up and down. A bit of traffic on the way back.

Fairly smooth session at the pool, not as busy as it is in the evenings, after another earlyish phone hookup with back home (although at least this one was 6am rather than 4am).

On entering the office there was a sign for a meeting "Safe and Secure Management of Conventional Ammunition". Evidently the responsibilities of the World Meteorological Organisation have expanded considerably since I was last here (either that or someone else was borrowing the meeting room).

I may be a long way from home but news of two epic fails back in Australia have reached me - one being the TV station which illustrated a story on France with a backdrop of the Dutch flag, and the other being the Queensland MP who said that the threat of terrorism should open a debate on reintroducing the death penalty - something which I'm sure will be a serious deterrent to suicide bombers.

Lunchtime run, initially through the botanical gardens (which I think is the first time I've run there - they don't open until 9.30 in winter so lunchtime is the only time it's possible), then along the lake. Felt reasonably good, and less slow than usual for a Monday recovery session - I continue to be surprised with how little impact yesterday's long descent had on the quads.

It was a delightful day, sunny and calm and around 15-16 degrees, and many were taking advantage - I saw people water-skiing, sunbathing in bikinis, and even a couple of people swimming in the lake. I'm not expecting too many of these people to be doing the same thing this time next week: current forecast is snow flurries and -7.

Perhaps I wasn't quite as far from the action on the weekend as I'd thought - Grenoble was one of the places where there were police raids today, although they seem to be of the sort which involve hauling in for questioning someone who knew someone who knew someone whose second cousin went off to fight in Syria (the serious stuff seems to have been in Brussels and Lyon).

Stayed last night at Embrun, a valley town between Gap and Briancon (although the town centre itself is on a bit of a bluff). Most of the routes with potential from town looked like there was a fair bit of up to them but I decided I was up to that challenge. (Forests weren't really an option today - I saw quite a few people heading for the hills in battered 4WDs and orange vests, and the shot I heard in the distance as I was starting was a fair indicator of what they were doing).

The climbing started more or less immediately, and I suspected from the cycling kilometre-and-%-grade markers and the road graffiti (some of which referred to cyclists, albeit not the big names, and some of which referred to local non-enthusiasm about a proposal to build high-tension power lines in the vicinity) that this was a climb of some note in the cycling community. (I found out afterwards it was a category 2 climb in the last time trial in the 2013 Tour). Fairly hard work but settled into a steady grind for 5k at 7-8%, including a couple of spots where (not for the first or last time this weekend) I was thinking "how did they build a road across that without it all sliding down the mountain?". The slope eased for a couple of kilometres past a village and then turned into a rolling section for 40 minutes or so either side of the turnaround. Was feeling fair to middling through this section, a bit iffy climbing one small hill, but at that point I knew there were 8km to go and this was the last one.

I was rudely awakened from my bubble when a dog rushed out in the village near the top of the descent and went after me - a quick look confirmed a small bite (enough to break the skin but that's about it). The owner showed the level of concern that I'd expect an Australian dog owner to show towards a victim in the same circumstances - zero - but did eventually call it back. Perhaps it's as well my French isn't good enough to say anything too abusive, but I think I made it suitably clear by gesture and facial expression that (a) I'd been bitten and (b) I wasn't too pleased about it. It's the first time I've been bitten while running for nearly 30 years; it was somewhat relieving when some post-run googling revealed afterwards that rabies has effectively been eliminated in France. (There's been one case since 2003, 300 kilometres away and involving a dog illegally imported from Algeria).

Perhaps this got me fired up because I suddenly started feeling pretty good (although the descent probably had something to do with that), and the remaining 35 minutes or so of the run went pretty smoothly. Thought that finishing with 8km of continuous downhill might not have been great for my quads but no real sign of trouble as of tonight. It wasn't as special as two previous out-and-backs with big outward climbs around this time of year in recent years (the Pyrenees in 2011 and Patagonia last year), but still fairly decent.

The rest of the day involved a lot of looking at mountains with, in general, not a lot of snow on them. The Galibier was open (except for the summit bit that the tunnel bypasses) - astonishing in mid-November - so I went that way, which was as spectacular as one might expect - I'd heard that it was a pretty hairy road but it was tame compared to a couple of the roads that I did yesterday (and, for that matter, the eastern approach to the Croix de Fer later in the day).

(I assume that Lautaret-Galibier-Telegraphe-Croix de Fer has been a Tour stage at some point? Would be an epic on a bike).

The only real negative to the weekend (apart from the dog) was how little was open (in the business sense) - I'm sure the local food is good but no-one seemed particularly inclined to sell any at this time of year. I thought I might end up having to resort to Macca's - in France! - but ended up finding somewhere that sold plastic-wrapped baguettes, which I settled for in the circumstances (it was 2.30 by then). The rapidity of this lunch meant that I got back to Grenoble 40 minutes earlier than my booked drop-off time, all of which was consumed circling the city in search of a petrol station which would accept a form of payment other than French credit cards.

Security update: saw numerous soldiers in one stretch, but I assume they were on a regular training exercise and not keeping the Galibier safe from any would-be jihadists. There were a couple of cops outside the Grenoble station, and a couple of officials at the almost-permanently-unstaffed customs post at Geneva station who didn't seem to be doing anything other than looking stern.

I went to bed last night hearing of a shooting in a bar in Paris (which, on the facts as they existed at the time, could conceivably have been one of the local gangs at work) and got up to learn that it was something much bigger.

My assumption (correct so far) was that any major issues would be confined to major cities ('major' in this context meaning places bigger than Grenoble). As my weekend plans do not involve any major cities I saw no obvious reason to make radical changes, the one concession being to reverse my planned direction. (The logic here was that if the Galibier is closed - something I've heard conflicting reports about - the only realistic alternative coming from the north was the motorway into Italy through the Frejus tunnel, and if border controls are being reimposed that could have some nasty traffic jams).

The run was a get-things-out-of-the-way-early affair before heading for the hills. I'd last been to Grenoble en route to the 1996 World Cup final in Villard-de-Lans in the hills about 30km away, which featured challenging limestone terrain (although not as extreme as WOC 2011), possibly the worst collective navigational perfomance ever seen from an international field in the men's B race, and an opening ceremony march through the town which was so slow and dragged on for so long that a few of us ducked out to the side to buy ice-creams. Grenoble itself is one of those places where running options are either flat or vertical, and as I wasn't in the mood for vertical I went along the river to the university and back. Hardly anyone out early but starting to be a bit more life later.

Spent the rest of the day mountain-exploring, although it does feel a bit like cheating to go up l'Alpe d'Huez in a car. (Only saw two cyclists - I suspect you'd be able to add a couple of zeroes to that number on a Saturday in summer). Going down the other side was definitely one of the more white-knuckle drives I've done, with a single lane, no guardrails, a surface littered with small rocks fallen from above and a sense that the whole thing could slide into the valley at any moment. I certainly wouldn't argue with Tony Martin's assessment (although I hope they at least cleared the debris off the road before the Tour came that way).

November is very much the low season in the mountains. I'd had thoughts of a nice lunch in a mountain restaurant somewhere, but there were few signs of life in the side valley where I was in the middle of the day (an indication of when the tourist season is in these parts is perhaps given by the noticeboard at the start of some walking tracks which had on it the weather forecast for 28 August). Even in Bourg d'Oisans, a quite substantial town, the "fermeture annuelle" signs were ubiquitous and the choice turned out to be between kebabs and pizza. (It wasn't easy to find anywhere open to stay once the daylight ran out, either).

As for the previous night's events, if you didn't know they had occurred, nothing would have seemed obviously unusual in this part of the world (at least if you stayed away from TV; seeing someone captioned as "Vice-President de Front Nationale" on the screen when I was having lunch made me thankful that I don't understand enough French to know what he was saying). There certainly wasn't a visibly increased police presence (quite possibly because the local gendarmes have been redeployed to places which have a higher risk rating than completely-out-of-season winter resorts), and the only visible sign was one town-hall flag at half-mast. I see it as a good thing that life seems to be carrying on more or less as normal; one of the points of terrorism is to try to stop life carrying on more or less as normal.

C • life as abnormal 2

Morning swim. More people blasting past me this morning. Not as much sleep as I would have liked - got home pretty late after going to the ice hockey (which went to extra time and then a shootout - first time I've seen Geneva win on several visits).

This weekend's plan is the French Alps - getting the train down to Grenoble tonight and then picking a car up there in the morning. From there it depends a bit on the weather - tomorrow is forecast to be colder than recent days (freezing level around 2000m) but not much precipitation. (From the route-planning point of view, the landslide which forced the re-routing of this year's Tour is unhelpful - the road is still closed and it's quite an important link in what I'd originally had in mind).

No trip to Geneva is complete without at least one cross-border run, and this morning was it. A rather plodding effort but happy with my endurance; first time for a while I've been out beyond 2 hours. Had forgotten that getting round the northeast end of the airport isn't particularly pedestrian-friendly (especially on dark foggy mornings), but found some good route options after that, not least the small back road to return into Switzerland - I'm used to France-Switzerland border crossings which are marked only by a small sign and a notice saying that if you've got anything to declare please go to a bigger crossing, but this crossing didn't even have those - the only indication (other than my map) that I'd actually crossed an international border was that the colour of the house numbers had changed.

On Monday, for once, there was no protest outside the UN, but today there was a one-man operation with a sign (it was too dark for me to read what it was about). On Sunday afternoon I saw a small demo outside the British Museum and initially assumed it was Greeks wanting their marbles back, but it was actually Falun Gong.