Training Log Archive: blairtrewin

All Nations intervals, a good deal slower than the person I saw doing intervals in Alphington yesterday. Never caught alight but a better session than I had expected after a very sluggish warm-up. Rather humid morning, although that was a lot better than the searing heat later in the day would have been.

Warm-up and down. Felt very sluggish indeed on the way there, as previously noted.

Put in a long day at work today (there will be a couple more coming, given the interestingness of the weather this week). Normally mid-evening public transport works reasonably smoothly, but tonight the loop was closed because of trackwork, the connecting train to Flinders Street was 10 minutes late, and then I missed the connection by 30 seconds and had to wait 30 minutes for the next one. Not the ideal way to do things at 9.30 on a 34-degree night (but at least it gave me the chance to properly read the latest Australian Orienteer).

C • You could have walked? 3

Felt like a womble even by my usual swimming standards. Eventually picked up a little in the last couple of laps, but this was never a particularly good session.

This run was a bit of a moveable feast. I originally had thoughts of doing it in the morning as a run/swim double but then didn't feel like getting up as early as that would have required after the trip home last night, then made plans to do it at lunchtime but forgot that there was a union meeting then (the fact that our union meetings happen at lunchtime gives you an idea as to our level of militancy; one of our decisions was to agree in principle to a productivity-enhancing form of industrial action, a 48-hour ban on going to meetings or responding to e-mails).

Eventually ended up doing this from home in the evening. This gave me the chance to explore a few pockets of the local area I haven't previously been to, on both sides of the lower Darebin Creek. The southeast corner of Alphington featured someone doing intervals much, much faster than I'll be doing them tomorrow. Felt pretty sluggish most of the way but no more than I'd expect on a Monday.

ACT Middle Championships at Honeysuckle Creek. I was last here in 2007, at which stage I thought it was getting thick to the point of unuseability, but Craney picked the best bits of it for some good courses in manageable, though tough, terrain. (We might have to wait a while for it to become nice again - it took about 40 years for Orroral to thin out after the 1952 fire, so if history repeats itself - and it doesn't burn again in the interim - the north end of the map might be ripe for something sometime in the 2040s).

Rather hesitant on 1, a not-as-distinct-as-it-looked-on-the-map gully in a section of the map which has been a Bermuda Triangle for me in the past, but the 20 seconds or so lost there proved to be my biggest loss of the race. Settled in reasonably well and caught Martin Dent 6 minutes at 4. We were in contact with each other until 14 (unsurprisingly he was running faster - although not by the margin you might expect - but making more mistakes), a decent section for me with only small wobbles at 6 and 7. 14 was a tough uphill leg into low-vis bush - Mark Gregson caught me there but we dropped Martin. Mark then got a better line than me on 18 and got away, but I finished reasonably cleanly.

On a course like this avoiding disaster gets you a long way, and I claimed some scalps I haven't claimed in a long time (Hoggster, Andrew Barnett and Matt Doyle, and almost Grant). Ended up 7th overall, just under 10 minutes behind Leon, and probably 3-4 minutes better relative to the field than I've been used to in middle races in this type of field in the last year or two. Repeating the result in less technical terrain may be somewhat more of a challenge.

C • Some scalps? 4

Course 1 MIDDLE - Splits

ACT Sprint Championships at CIT Bruce (reportedly the fourth choice of venue after an inability to get permission for the first three options - perhaps the CSIRO people were worried that I might try to organise a demo).

Made a horrible start to this race - lost time on the first two controls in the bush, not that I was alone on #1, a 0.3m termite mound in green - not, incidentally, on the Sprint Canberra map - where the fastest split was 32 seconds but only five out of 25 broke 50. (Bizarrely, despite losing 20 seconds on this leg, it was my best split placing of the day). This was then followed by a fall, a shoelace issue, and then falling into a classic sprint trap with the uncrossable fence on the east side of #6. By then I'd already dropped two minutes or so and the rest was about getting some good practice in, which I think was more or less achieved - got through without any more disasters, at least. This weekend is mainly about getting practice in race conditions before hitting events which matter more.

Perhaps I should have expected a better result, as the latest IOF sprint rankings suggest that I should be able to beat Oleksandr Kratov, Ralph Street and Graham Gristwood (ranked respectively 325, 326 and 327 to my 323). This may or may not have something to do with the fact that I have a full set of four scores and they only have two apiece. (On the other hand, I'm one point and one place behind Nieuwy).

Course 1 SPRINT - Splits

Morning run from Royal Park (in the name of later-in-the-day logistics for the trip to Canberra). A fairly similar run to Monday - very slow start which gradually built up a bit at the far end up around Moonee Valley, but never great, and slowed to a crawl on anything resembling a hill. Back OK although this wasn't a route to really test it.

Had a rather unsettling ride back to the car at lunchtime - encountered someone on the bike path (with a wine cask next to him, much of the contents of which had probably been consumed) who let loose with 'Oy, what ya f***ing looking at ya f***ing motherf****r f***ing get back here ya f***ing c**t'. Naturally I had no intention of doing any such thing and got out of the area as quickly as I possibly could; could have been quite a threatening situation otherwise.

Switched to the pool today after last night's events; certainly didn't feel as if I would have had a lot of energy for getting out the door at 6am and going for a long run (in fact I've been a bit down on energy more generally in the last couple of days). Got into it more once in the pool and it seemed to go OK in the end.

Currently on the Guardian website: "Malcolm Turnbull refers submarine leaks to federal police". Personally, if I had a leaky submarine, the Australian Federal Police wouldn't be my first port of call if I wanted something done about it, but each to their own, I guess.

First time for a while that my back's played up - maybe it's the venue (the first time this issue flared, back in 2013, was also at this venue, in Greythorn). Didn't think there was much to be gained by trying to push through it (my tentative plans had been to use this as a fartlek session, having raced on Monday).

It would be fair to say that I hadn't been full of enthusiasm even before the start, notwithstanding the appearance of a cool change of sorts. Heat is something we'll need to get used to over the next week or two; inland southern NSW and northern Victoria look like having a March heatwave of historic proportions over the next 10 days or so, although it's still not entirely clear on how many days the serious heat will break out to the coast.

At least the unplanned early finish gave me more time to work on the papers for tomorrow night's OA Board meeting that I haven't done yet.