Training Log Archive: TheInvisibleLog

Clara would call this a 'token effort'. Given the wether lately, any effort is admirable.

C • weather 2

Pushed a little further today for my 'long run'.

Xmas is bad news for the forest. Found lots of new rubbish dumping activity on the ride. Many big boxes and associated polystyrene padding. IN a few weeks the next problem will be new trail bike tracks. Lots of new trail bikes can be heard being driven around back yards, driving neighbours nuts. Soon enough the neighbours will get relief when parents let them loose on the bush. This town is bogansville!

Token warm up before test run. Not too much warm up available in the knees yet.

Setting a benchmark to measure my training outcomes. I haven't been this slow on this run since 1998. No coincidence this was the year of my previous knee operation.

I decided to run yesterday because my back was stiffening up. That is always a warning of impending back problems. Of course, the running inflammed my knee a little, forcing me to choose the bike today instead of running. Achieved a good hour of exercise, but at the end my back was very stiff and sore. Had to repeat some of my back loosening exercises. That only helped a little. So tomorrow I will have to have a run to loosen up the back.

How will I break the cycle?

Faster than two days ago, which is amazement. It felt really slow and was quite hard work. Perhaps the perceived effort score should be 4 or 5. Just underlines how far I have to go to recover fitness. I really am starting again from scratch. I know from past experience that it will take 8 weeks to enjoy running again. Which will correspond with the start of the orienteering season. Thats a good reason not top slack off between now and then. Also a good reason to be very careful and not overdo the running early. Bike tomorrow.

Glad I wasn't booked for the 5 days.

Learnt a lesson. Run every second day. Ended up icing the knee. Was good to see Andrews dam half full. When we first moved to Bendigo the dam was used for an annual bath-tub regatta fund raiser. No event for 8 years.

Second Christmas Present!
First post-op run. Only slight knee pain, but it was in the other leg. Main constraint was lack of aerobic fitness.
Tis amazing how good it feels to run again, even for so short a time and so slowly. Reduced back pain! Mood improvement! The post-run glow of self-righteousness in the shower!

A Christmas Present:
After 10 dry years in Bendigo, serious rainfall was becoming a story told to children. You had to be a teenager at least to have an memories of heavy rain. But I had hope. I had spent a week watching the weather models, and they were all showing significant rainfall, though initially disagreeing on the exact day. I was printing of the maps each night and showing them to Julie. Sensibly, she was reminding me of all the other times the models had misled us with broken promises. But models started to agree on Friday as the day, and at lunchtime the rain began to fall, gently. I rang Julie and offered her and her bike a ride home in the car, and she accepted with little delay. By 5.30pm we had received about 25 mm and the sky looked to be clearing as we drove home. I mused that it would be lovely if we could have some serious rainfall for a change. Twenty-five millimeters was on the bottom end of the 25-100 predicted by Blair's mates. On cue, as we turned into our residential street, the rain started to fall in buckets. It kept falling for 25 minutes and added 25 mm to the rain gauge. Then it stopped like a tap had been turned off and the sun arrived. I decided this was the time for my first exercise since the operation... a bike ride out to the White's Ruins map to see the creek. So I hopped on the bike and headed off to the bike path that leads to the bush. It was there that I realised this was what the pedologists and dabblers in regolith studies call an 'episodic event'.

For some years there was a debate in the salinity research community about the study of watertables. One crew was running 3 year experiments and measuring the impact of different vegetation on watertables. Another crew as arguing this was futile because the recharge happened every so often in episodes of extreme rainfall and sheet flooding. Episodic events. The geomorpologists and regolith scientists are firmly of the episodic school. After failing to even wade up the bike path (and a good thing too as I subsequently discovered massive steel grates had been dislodged by the force of water escaping from drains) I was even more determined to get out in the local bush and see what was happening. But by a more circuitous route. The main creek through the White's Ruins map was in flood. I could hear the roar of rapids while still 500 metres from the creek. That is a very rare event on any map around Bendigo. It was probably happening on all of them. The creek was too dangerous to cross. So I snapped some before and after photos. I might not see this again.
Where my standard run crosses the gully. I wasn't too keen to cross here.


The reason I wasn't keen to cross is because this was below.



A broad gully. Note how the leaf litter is absent. This used to be covered in dry leaves.

The leaves swept away by this overland flow at least 100 metres wide.

From Dec 2007 flas...

Things looking up. I jogged 10 metres last night!

Saw surgeon today. Spent 30 seconds on the consultation and then 10 minutes on the issues surrounding the training of medical specialists. I think I may be riding on the weekend. A run will be my Xmas present to myself.

My Joan Benoit day. Apparently she ran a marathon 12 days after an arthroscopy. A fortnight ago I saw that as an inspiration. Today I just think she was mad.

Knee is improving. Spent two days lying on my back continuously icing various parts of the knee and surrounding muscles. Didn't feel like getting off the bed. I have since discovered this was not an effect of the operation, but of the pain killers I was prescribed for post-op pain control. Cunning ploy to convince me to stay on bed rather than testing the knee. Memo.. be very careful with pandeine forte, or anything with codeine phosphate as an active ingredient. By day 3 I was working on some data analysis at the kitchen table. Its a sad state of affairs that i was itching to get back to work. That is the second lesson from this experience... be very careful about retirement. Its now Sunday and I am really looking forward to getting stuck into some more work... note... work as in real work. Not endless tedious meetings, emails and administrivia. I think I hate these so much because they distract from the research part of the job. If I hated the work content, I would probably look forward to a day full of meetings, as many others seem to.

Now for the observation of the day.... I think I may be able to match Blair's standards today.

Bendigo Orienteers is working on a new govt funded project to promote orienteering to the masses... well the lowers SES communities to the wets of Bendigo. Basically, everywhere between Bendigo west to Adelaide is below national SES medians. This includes the small towns such as Inglewood, Wedderburn, Dunolly that orienteers drive through every now and then. It also includes the western 'suburbs' of Bendigo... Long Gully, California Gully (Easter 2006 sprint) and the main western commerce centre of Eaglehawk. Eaglehawk has one supermarket. Its an IGA, situated in the sort of old unreconstructed warehouse setting that would no longer be seen in Melbourne. I do much of my shopping here, as I like the unpretentious honesty of it, I drive past it on the way to and from work, and it has a great bottle shop. (it also reminds me of my own pretentiousness. I often get frustrated at the lack of gnocchi, good dried pasta, fresh noodles etc). The owner is an unreconstructed wine buff. He persists with promoting wine to what is basically a beer community. This means he is constantly looking for quality cleanskins to suit the local market. The shelf on the left as you walk in is the cleanskin display, wall to ceiling. Recently the owner did a deal with Trahna and the cleanskins actually had a label. Not nearly as good as most of his true cleanskins offerings I thought. But this week, in the midst of the display was a little plastic 'bin' with two unlikely bottles on Managers Special. I had to take a poor quality phone camera picture there and then. I thought this one would be far too much for the shop lifters to resist.

Its not a label I have ever seen on my kitchen table. In fact I have only tried this label once in my life, and I didn't buy it. Take a closer look at the price tag. That might confirm your suspicions.

Thats right. Two Grange 2001 magnums. Lower SES showing upwardly mobile tendencies? Or marketing faux pas?

POSTSCRIPT
After recounting this log to Julie she told of her visit to the Eaglehawk IGA this morning. The police were called to the bottle shop. I wonder why?

C • Grange 3

Day 1 is better than day 0.

Surgery Day

C • How did it go 2

Operation today was quite entertaining. It was hard to decide whether to focus on the action on the screen or listen to the insult-strewn theatre banter.
Here is the tissue causing all the problems.



Tomorrow is day zero of the recovery.