Training Log Archive: markg

Public race at Wild Deer Sands following the Aus School Champs. Had a pretty good run today and pulled out the second fastest time on this course 3:25 behind Tim Robertson running the official race (I'm impressed he's still at school!). I managed to push hard the whole way and only made one significant error, about 30s on #10, and a couple of directional wobbles. It's not every day I do 5:30/km in a bush race!

Wild Deer Hard1-Men - Splits

Feeling better than I predicted ...

C • is that.. 2

Aus Long Champs at Slap Up Ck. 23rd and well down on both Matt Crane's scorching winning time and where I think I should be finishing. Quite a disappointing result, especially after yesterday's good one. The first main story of the day were three big mistakes: 1:30 on #12 because I navigated to #19 by mistake, a massive 4:30 parallel error on #17 when I lost focus around some other runners, and another 1:30 at #15 when I just couldn't spot the damned boulder. That last error was typical of numerous other small mistakes when I didn't get it right in the circle, sometimes picking the right feature but not spotting the control, which accounted for another minute or so worth of errors.

The description of the forest areas as 'pleasant running' was a cruel joke or perhaps the author was a champion hurdler. I found keeping any sort of pace up in the deadfall really hard work and by time I screwed up #17 I was flagging badly. The gel I took at #16 kicked in for a while but I struggled to lift my pace to even moderately competitive levels. My hamstrings and calves were starting to revolt late in the course and I had to stop quickly a couple of times to stretch and ward off a cramp.

Feeling quite down about it - I'd thought with a fairly solid season of training I'd be more competitive than this. I'm not sure what I need to do to improve my long distance races ...

LONG Course 1 - Splits

Event: Australian Sprint/Long Distance Championships
 

A long warm up to ensure my hamstring was going to be ok.

Final warm up. It's been months since I did a sprint so I took an old sprint map with me to get back into sprint mind-set.

Aus Sprint Champs. Finished 10th elite, 13th overall and 9th Australian overall. I was very happy with this race, I gave it everything physically and was clean almost all the way through. Lost a few seconds here and there, like at the second where I didn't hear the SI unit beep (whether it did or not I'm not sure) and went back for a 2nd go, and a couple of nearly missed turns. Unfortunately lost 20-25s at #24 when I went right to go through the little passageway between the two buildings and got thrown mentally by the trailer that was mostly blocking the passage so bailed out and went back around the other way. The splits also show that I lost about 10s on the control after the spectator control, I can only assume I was a bit slow working out how to get out of the courtyard.

M21E - Splits

Course 1 - Splits

Short run to teach my legs about running again after a massage and lots of stretching. They felt terrible as expected to begin and my hamstring gave a twinge that I feared was a bad omen but after a good 20min I did a series of run-throughs getting up near top speed and the hamstring was alright. I finished much relieved!