Training Log Archive: blairtrewin

Headed up to Mildura today to deliver a series of talks to the Council and the community. In doing the preparation, it was clear that in this part of the world, as in much of southeastern Australia, 1997 is a major breakpoint (after then, maximum temperatures take off and rainfall drops away in the cooler months). I've long thought there was a certain symbolism in my first trip on the Melbourne-Mildura route, on 27 March 1997, on the way to Easter at Broken Hill - with the company of a massive duststorm for most of the last 300km into Mildura, which I sometimes think of as the symbolic start of the long drought (much as I think of the floods of 1996 Tasmanian Championships weekend as the symbolic end of the previous wet epoch). I'm sure many other Victorians who did the trip will remember the dust, too. I had a picture of it as my opening slide.

(In another nod to personal history in this part of the world, the shirt I wore for the talks today was the one I bought in the local menswear shop in St. Arnaud on the way to Warren and Tash's wedding, after realising on the way out of Melbourne that I'd forgotten to pack one).

The flight up was early enough in the day that trying to squeeze in something beforehand would definitely have tested my early-morning capabilities, and I knew I had some time to spare before my first engagement at 12.30, so my plans were to do something once I arrived. That part did go more or less to plan despite the shortcomings of airport transport - there is no public transport to Mildura Airport, and apparently the town only has 14 taxis which isn't really enough to cope when three flights arrive near-simultaneously (I eventually shared a ride in and hope that Australia's taxpayers appreciate the $25 I've saved them) - and I also remembered my swimming gear this time, unlike the last time I was here.

The mid-morning pool crowd is a bit different to the early-morning one - in between swimming lessons and aqua aerobics, I suspect I was the only person in the water (other than instructors) between the ages of 8 and 60. Started slowly but gradually built into it. Noticed three-quarters of the way through that my towel had been moved, and thought I'd better get out to check that the locker key wrapped in it was still there before resuming - in the process of which I got a massive cramp in my right thigh, something I've never had happen to me before while swimming (foot cramps are quite regular, but not there), and bad enough to make me grateful that it happened at the shallow end and not in the middle of a large body of water. Quickly decided not to go back in once I got out (which I eventually did via the ramp); the affected area didn't feel right even several hours later. Presumably this all has something to do with my lingering something-like-a-cold; it certainly isn't because of excessive exercise or excessive heat this week (and I don't think there's been anything particularly unusual about my diet lately either).

On the positive side, the talks went well (and the Council itself was a less challenging audience than I'd expected, given what I'd heard of the mayor's climate scepticism), my throat more or less held out through three one-hour presentations, my hip seems to have improved enough today that I'm willing to try it out on a bit of a run tomorrow, and I indulged in a sporting feast this evening, taking in the soccer, the AFL and the NRL on side-by-side screens at the Mildura Working Man's Club (yes, it's still called that). This establishment used to be in the Guinness Book of Records for possessing the world's longest bar, but sadly said bar, like (probably) some of its patrons, fell victim to the pokies.

C • Council 3

Back to the pool, still not feeling that brilliant (either in terms of soreness or health, with a cold still lingering in its later stages). Nice enough in the water and felt as if I was at least achieving something.

Don't feel as if I've made a lot of progress in the last 48 hours. At least this meant that I could sleep a bit more than I normally would on a weekday morning....

Melbourne seemed notably unrattled by yesterday's events, and I think it would be fair to say that IS's claim of "responsibility" was greeted with considerable scorn.

Early morning session at CISAC; have decided to give my hip a rest until it improves or next weekend comes, whichever happens first. Not a lot of space to work in because it was divided into two 25-metre sections and the deep half was for squad training, but found enough to manage OK. Not too upset on a morning like this that it's an indoor pool.

Left the Aranda house behind for (presumably) the last time this morning, which had a certain set of emotions associated with it. I left with a carload of goods being moved, many of them plants (fortunately this was more successful than last time I did it in the early 2000s, when I was pulled up by the police somewhere out the back of Cabramurra on suspicion of illegally harvesting flora from the national park), as well as a couple of boxes of climate records that CSIRO didn't want but we were potentially interested in.

Took a slightly different route choice home, through Uriarra, Wee Jasper and Adjungbilly, coming out on the highway just north of Gundagai (this is about the same distance as the freeway, but has about 30km of dirt and took 45 minutes longer). Haven't been this way since a couple of 1980s school camps (and hadn't been past Wee Jasper at all). Big sheep station country before you get to Wee Jasper (the biggest is, I believe, owned by Rupert Murdoch); a few once-grand homesteads near the road which have seen better days (as indicated by a couple of overgrown tennis courts), and placenames once familiar from the front of the Canberra phone book like The Mullion. (Some of the small rural settlements around Canberra didn't get automatic telephone exchanges until the mid-late 1980s, so before then the front of the book had copious instructions about which places/phone numbers required you to contact an operator, and how to do it). After the initial climb out of Wee Jasper, there's a lot of pine forest and recently-flattened pine forest between there and Adjungbilly (and a few eucalypt patches), but as with the Brindabella route, a lot of it's blackberry-infested and I didn't see anything of sufficiently high orienteering potential to be worth mapping in such a remote spot.

Another later (slight) diversion to places familiar as signs off the Hume took me through Baddaginnie; Warrenbayne and Winton will have to wait for another day. Also spotted was the Yellow Brick Road. If you've always wondered what's at the end of the Yellow Brick Road, the answer is Benalla Electric Motor Rewinding, which I don't recall making an appearance in the Wizard of Oz.

Jim Sawkins Classic at Ratall Creek. I came here not really expecting a lot, but also remembered that I was sick for this event four years ago too and got through it OK. Got dropped by the pack immediately, as expected, and was hoping to settle down into a solo run, but the hip didn't warm up as I'd hoped and I was struggling a fair bit on the rougher ground; decided that next week is the main game and slogging around for two hours wasn't going to do that cause any favours. Lost concentration after I'd decided to call it a day, and dropped a minute or so on 7 (an area where the vegetation had grown up a fair bit), and then ran to a wrong number on 18 on my way home - was almost not going to bother looking for the right one, but decided I'd better just in case a wrong number had been put out and I could tell someone to fix it.

Ended up dead-heating with Martin Dent and Craney - they had a sprint for the finish (won by Martin) but had both punched the wrong 18...

On the way out to the event I saw the light-rail construction site on Northbourne Avenue, with signs pointing out that this was part of the original 1912 Walter Burley Griffin plan. Presumably the next step in implementing the 1912 Griffin plan will be to replace the War Memorial with a casino.

Hip was pretty bad last night (quite uncomfortable to walk on in Albury, although a few hours in the car probably had something to do with that), but much better when I woke up - though a head cold was added to the mix of issues. Both of these were manageable while running without giving me a lot of confidence about getting through 13k tomorrow, especially if the cold takes a turn for the worse as it was looking like doing this afternoon.

The run itself was one of my classic (short) Canberra ones - one I won't be doing again in its current form (or at least from its current start point) - round the base of the Aranda bushland and into the northern part of Black Mountain reserve. Even the more modest hills were a struggle today. Spotted somebody putting out controls for today's Black Mountain event, which I didn't run because of a clash with my social calendar (namely catching up with an old school friend I hadn't seen for about 18 years and had totally lost touch with until he popped up on social media a few weeks ago; now that I know the variety of things he's been up to the interim, which include three years cycling through Central and South America, managing a guesthouse in Guatemala and an aid program in PNG, it's not surprising he's been hard to find).

One feature of this run which you don't normally see in these parts was a burnt-out car next to Bindubi Street. A few weeks ago, four cars were set on fire in an Aranda street, possibly the most exciting thing that's ever happened in the suburb (in a criminal sense).

Original plan for this morning was to head into work first thing and then do a run from there. I thought that a spanner might have been thrown in the works when the 6.58am ABC radio cross to the Bureau didn't happen because of a fire alarm, but by the time I got there whatever had been happening was no longer happening - and then my hip was no good anyway...

Hit the road to Canberra tonight - doing the Friday night road trip for the last time with the family home as a destination (my parents are moving to Victoria next month). On a frosty night, part of me was occupied in the later stages tracking how the temperature varied with the topography, especially in the hillier areas. It's probably as well for family sanity that late-1970s cars didn't have thermometers.