Training Archive: Tooms

In the 7 days ending 2008-04-13:

activity

time

miles

climb

Adventure Race

67:17:25

MTB

2:00:00

Total

69:17:25

[csv]

18:30

0:00

» now

Saturday Apr 12
	Adventure Race 8:25:03 [3]
	slept:5.0
	Early rise, drive to Buchan Caves and an orienteer to start with. 2 maps provided, one at 1:50,000 with contours and no minor tracks, the other probably 1:10,000 with all the caves tracks but no contours. I spend 5mins after start copying tracks onto the 1:50,000 map while jen and support drew in the route for the rest of the day on the other maps we'd just been given. We were one of the last teams out and went very slowly to start with as Jen had a sore knee and my feet were tender and sore. As we went though we began to find more and more teams in their matching sponsors uniforms crashing and bashing around the scrub looking for controls in the wrong spot. Some had taken both maps, some only one map, some were just not good navigators. One control on the big waterfall we hit a creek track junction 100m down from it to find 4 teams there. One headed downstream, immediately followed by the team with me earlier when I'd pointed out the waterfall 100m upsteam!! We turned right, the two other teams didn't follow (as we weren't wearing matching gear I think) and we were back at the junction before they'd left. We finished this leg well and as we left on the bike were passed by the Stingers and a strong mixed team. At the cave we had a 1:1000 map but struggled to find the entrance. Similar to tRicky who went down a hole that wasn't the entrance but manged to fall onto the first control!! In the cave was bedlam, teams everywhere seraching for one of the controls that was about 10m up and tucked behind a rock. We found it eventually, headed out only to be told by race officials that we had to go back as we'd exited the cave from the wrong end. Apparently you had to exit at the other end. Back we went and quickly got to the narrow crevice to exit. Jen pushed me out, I pulled her out. Onto the bike and we were passed by tRicky, Mountain Designs and a mixed team but we caught Danielle's team and passed MDs when they hit a rock at speed. Finally the last paddle leg, some dopey teams didn't take a map - dopey, dopey, a 3D river is much more complicated than a 2D map with a fluroy line on it to follow. Flat river paddling for 6 or 7km, then about 500m of dragging and carrying to the ocean, a launch in the double plastic kayak that we survived (although the photo makes it look like we're gone for all money), one CP located and the final 4k or so to the finish. All over. 10th overall, 4th mixed, hours and hours behind but the attrition rate was very very high.

	C • Great result Tooms and MTBJ... 7
Friday Apr 11
	Adventure Race 15:20:00 [3]


Thursday Apr 10
	Adventure Race 18:30:00 [2]
	slept:5.5
	A looong stage. Started at 530am in the dark with a paddle/run. 4 controls and only one person had to stay with the boat. We left the shore at the tail of the field and paddled to the far end of the lake figuring that it might be lightish by the time we got there that'd make it easier. A perfect plan as we watched many many teams searching for the control. Eventually I saw a light heading back to the shore and I asked Jen to aim for that light. Consequently we made up about 10 places here as there were people everywhere but the right power pole - and the control was on the ground at the base of the pwerpole! Onto the next control and here I asked jen to abandon me and meet me around the next headland and I'd get these next two on foot. This worked really well and we left behind another 5 teams or so. For the final control we beached about 300m early as I figured it was faster for me to run across the rocks than us paddle in shallow water. I found the control fine by following outbound footprints and on the way back came across Robbie a bit miffed that Mounty was still out there looking for the flag. Somehow we were one of the earlier teams back to transition and beat our support crew there by some 20mins. Oh well, time to eat and dry. 17km or so walk/jog next through 3 controls and then downhill for 10km to next TA. Saw no-one till near the end where 3ks early we saw a team trying to cross the river! Again we beat our support crew into TA, this time only by 10mins. Lots of teams didn't follow their race instructions here and got penalised 2hours by using the highway and the southern route rather then the northern route. Twits. A loong MTB next, nominally 4hr winning time and we took 6. Lots and lots of walking pushing the bikes. Even the top teams must've walked some of it was we saw footprints in places. Then a very very steep descent down Wombat Spur which had "MTBjen" tearily want to change her alias to "Grandma Jen". There were times where my back wheel was just locked and sliding and this was steep for two bursts of a kilometre or so. We stopped to drink in the creek at the bottom for a while and were both pretty stuffed for the remainder of the ride, legs empty, bodies not happy. Made the paddle start by about 520pm which got us on the water by 540 and so we had daylight to start with for the 2-3hr paddle. We took 4hours and it was less than pleasant as the water level was very low. Hard to pick the correct channels in the dark too. Lots of stumbling and pulling her Ladyship down the river on this leg. Very glad to be out of the boat and on foot, verrry c-c-c-cold too. Looking forward to the rogaine ironically. Onto the rogaine and (maybe due to the cold?) changed our plan from a direct 300m climb up the spur to slightly more roundabout route through farmland and along a track to the same spur. We figured easier walking and a nice close attackpoint rather than long bushbash. Fine in theory except that the control was vertically a bit too low on the spur. We went down, stopped, came up to the unmapped track, then went down again further, located it then came up and continued. Lots of other teams here. Then I crashed, physically and mentally. Probably mentally triggered the physical as I was dark on myself for stuffing the control up. Having endless kilometres of track walking ahead didn't help. Took a special concoction of Dr Jen's to perk me up, you know, the one that consists of 3 carboshotz, 2 no-doze pills and 2 ibuprofen tablets! Endless wandering, 40min blackberry and English Broom infested creek crossing, cut bleeding, millions of prickles, 3 in the morning, crawling along wombat tracks, crossing the foggy river, frozen feet, more blackberries and a steep river bank, hot and sweaty so soon after being cold and shivery, finally, the CP and the fire. Bonus, only about 20km to go and two more 400m or so climbs. Saw Danielle's team yet again here. Sunrise just after the massive greedy climb. Then both battling microsleeps as we followed the ridgeline. Found teams that had been 'shortcoursed' up here but real sunshine seemed to help me mentally and I began taking some proper navigation decisions that enabled us to pass them all and make up some good time. It's so hard coming from WA and from and orienteering background to make sense of 20m contours - a single brown circle can mean a knoll 39m high!!!! That's like Reabold Hill and caught us out a few times. After the 6km or so track walk up another mountain we were optimistic about the dwownhill XC leg to the river junction, woo-hoo, nearly over, should be back in by 1pm-2pm. Not to be, the regrowth was terrible and constant. Stumble, stumble, duck, lift, push, stumble, slip, flick. Came within earshot of another team, never saw them. Heard a crack. Then a big crack. Thought it was the other team pushing a dead sapling. Then the big crack turned into a long-creak, the kind of creek a big tree makes when it falls. It fell, took another dead tree with it and smashed down in a debris-laden cloud of bark, leaves and dust. Scary, only about 50m away. By now I was walking like a cowboy due to bad chafing, some nasty bits of blackberries and sticks had made there way down to where teh sun don't shine and caused a bit of havoc. Undersetimated how slow we were travelling and went down the wrong steep gully to the river, fortunately the strongly flowing river enabled us to shake a team that had limpeted themselves onto us. Control on the junction and then 3 closeish controls to go. But..... the canyon was full of boulders, the sides were precipitous and there were log jams and blackberries. And the controls were not quite in the right spot. We got them ok eventually, but stuggled to comprehend how teams did it so fast in the dark. Mind you, if we'd been there 12 hours earlier we may have been a bit more coherent. Came into Angler's Rest TA at 320pm. This time our support crew were early, 9 hours early, but had had a lovely sunny day chatting to other support crews and sipping red wine. Here we were 'short coursed" as we were 20mins late. This was a good thing, as the penalty was the slowest team's time plus our own time for the leg. Given we were so stuffed it only ended up being a small penalty, particularly as I rode the 2hrs back to Omeo standing up as I was unable to sit and pedal on the bike seat. I doubt I could have made the trails riding. Absolutely stuffed now, straight into the car for a 2hr drive to our accomodation. At the hotel the barman said to my dad after dinner "He's not going to be going far tomorrow!" Apparently Jen and support crew agreed with him. I got the needle out and went to work on the blisters on my toes and managed to drain plenty of fluid. Also liberally went to work with the vaseline...
Wednesday Apr 9
	Adventure Race (Keen AR Stage 2) 13:01:07 [3]
	slept:7.0
	Today was an enjoyable day on the whole. Mickey-mouse MTB to start with to split the field, then a long MTB up over beautiful Bogong plains to Bogong Saddle, then an 'orienteer' over Mt Bogong and back to the saddle, followed by another MTB ride to Bogong town, a proper orienteer and a ropes course followed by an MTB ride to Mt Beauty. From looking at the maps thenight before we saw that the first control on the wishing well 1km from the start was circled in the wrong place on the map (we'd run through wishing well yesterday). I guessed this may confuse the teams who headed that way and there'd be a bit of milling around while they sorted it out - so we went the opposite direction and got theone in the town first. This turned out to be a good idea and as we headed out to the one it the wrong spot the other teams were coming back from it still. Consequently on the ride up out of Falls Creek we ended up in a group of about 5 teams for the long climb over the crispy frosty snowgrass. Once we hit the downhill parts most of those teams rode away from us as we aimed to conserve our bikes and our body's structural integrity - the drops over the edge were rather steep! Saw tRicky and his teammate for the frist time just before Bogong Saddle. The orienteer was a c-shaped course following a walking trail for the first two controls and then an XCV option down a long spur. Lots of faster moving teams around us here, but some had a few minutes trouble spotting the beer can nailed to the snowgum so often passed us several times. We trotted the flats, walked the ups. Made up a lot of ground on two teams by contouring around Bogong rather than going over it and popped out in the saddle rather than too low like some teams. View from up here amazing. Down the spur XC was ok to start with, had recaught tRicky by here and stayed with him to next control. Lots of regrowth once we'd dropped 300m or so and it was over our heads and tough to stay straight. In the end we hit the river and spent 20minsslipping our way along the river to the hut the CP was in. Found some teams illegal map of "Bogong High Plains Area" lying in the regrowth... Coming up from the hut we passed tRicky again as he lost the faint track and then we had two of the teams who were with us before coming back the other way!! - they'd done the entire 'C' shape course again in reverse rather than join the two ends of the C with the XC spur! That'd cost them and hour and god only knows how much extra energy. NExt MTB ride was predominantly downhill and we were passed by only one team here, again on the steeper stuff, but since they stopped to navigate at every bend we didn't lose too much time. Passed big Tom and the SES crew chainsawing logs off the track too. Final part of the leg was along an abandoned railway line which made for slow riding as the sleepers were too bumpy to ride and the railway bed outside the sleepers was often only a foot wide at times so we had to keep stopping to change sides. Some creek crossings too made for tentative stepping from suspended sleeper to suspended sleeper 3-5m above the ground!! Into Bogong and we found out we were doing pretty well, we'd even seen two teams making massive nav mistakes out there so I guess that helped. We stocked up on food and Coke and the first O control needed me to swim 15m to an island, punch it, then come back to TA. Not as cold as the creek we were in earlier to so no worries there! Over to the climbing and we had about a 20min delay waiting to get going on the ropes as other teams were already there. No other teams arrived till we finished though so unfortunately we didn't hold anyone up. tRicky came in as we left. MTBjen very happy to be off the ropes course!!!! Onto the final ride and the mapped road went through an operating construction site "no public access". We asked at the site office if there was a way through and they said they'd seen teams going around. So back down the hill, up the hill to the site office on the otherside of the fence and onto a 600m 90min+climb mostly pushing the bikes. Sunset as we hit the control on the top of the hill and it got pretty cold for the descent to the downhill MTB tracks that we had to follow (taped) into Mt Beauty. I was very cold and tired about 15mins after finishing, took a long hot shower and hot food to get remotely back to normal once we'd driven back ot Falls Creek.
Tuesday Apr 8

	Event: Keen Adventure Race
	Adventure Race race (Keen AR Stage 1) 4:00:25 [2]


	Adventure Race race (Keen AR Stage 1) 4:00:25 [2]

	The weather was nice all morning and looking good for the 2pm start. A chairlift ride up to the ski area above falls creek was reminiscent of heading to the start for orienteering in Switzerland! Today's stage was find two checkpoints on foot, 3 on the bike and I think 4 on the paddle around the lake. After that was an 'orienteer' to finish. There were two extra controls to be collected in the village either on the bike or orienteer. The start was very fast - like an orienteering relay start with people dashing off really really fast downhill through the rocky alpine grass. From partway down the hill at the rear of the field we could see the front teams heading away from the first control, they were properly racing. We stuck to our plan of slow and steady, even for this stage. Coming back from the 2nd control we cut down the hill on a walking track rather than use the ski slope back at the start - this saved some climb and also meant for a faster descent for us not-quite-mountain goats. We'd made up a couple of spots when we got back to transition. Onto the bikes and we collected the two "extra" controls on the way to the lake. Here we saw the first two of many clueless teams who had (1) not read their instructions properly and (2) couldn't read the map very well. This gave us a bit of hope for the longer stages! (One team was on foot instead of their bikes and shouting "you should be running, not on your bikes" the other were looking for the checkpooint about 50m from TA rather than 400m. First control on the MTB, no probs, saw Robbie and Mounty heading back to start the paddle here. 2nd control on some snowgums caused us trouble as it wasn't there. Well, it was eventually but someone had broken the branch it was tied to and hidden it in some rocks. Nice. Then a steep but rideable climb to Mt McKay to answer the question... lots of controls as this year's race were Q-A rather than checkpoint. Reminds me of the old metrogaines... lots of potential to trade answers or use your support crew to cheat if you weren't fastidious about rules. By the time we started the paddle we realised our guesstimate of being 30% behind the winners was way wrong, and we'd better up it to 50% or worse, but our other guesstimate of being in the last 25% of the field was bang-on! Paddle was easy, across the lake a couple of times and broke our rudder. Not so good. Starting the orienteering we worried about making it back by dark (6pm) as it was a bit more "full on" than teams were expecting. We got our first taste of hills with a steep walk up a chairlift slope and then had a bit of trouble locating a quarry. Turns out the mapped chairlift was in a different alignment to how it was mapped. We worked this out a bit later when we did find the control! Ominous signs for the accuracy of the maps. Met another team at the chairlift who said "Have you found 'N' yet?" We said "No, we're looking for 'O'." As we wandered on I heard them say "They could be selling us a red herring!". We wandered on and found 'O' in the quarry. N was easy, and the last one P was on a boulder next to a walking track. As we found the unmapped walking track the sunset was great and we could see 5 teams searching in the wrong place up ahead. A few more spots made up.
	Adventure Race race (Keen AR Stage 1) 4:00:25 [2]

	The weather was nice all morning and looking good for the 2pm start. A chairlift ride up to the ski area above falls creek was reminiscent of heading to the start for orienteering in Switzerland! Today's stage was find two checkpoints on foot, 3 on the bike and I think 4 on the paddle around the lake. After that was an 'orienteer' to finish. There were two extra controls to be collected in the village either on the bike or orienteer. The start was very fast - like an orienteering relay start with people dashing off really really fast downhill through the rocky alpine grass. From partway down the hill at the rear of the field we could see the front teams heading away from the first control, they were properly racing. We stuck to our plan of slow and steady, even for this stage. Coming back from the 2nd control we cut down the hill on a walking track rather than use the ski slope back at the start - this saved some climb and also meant for a faster descent for us not-quite-mountain goats. We'd made up a couple of spots when we got back to transition. Onto the bikes and we collected the two "extra" controls on the way to the lake. Here we saw the first two of many clueless teams who had (1) not read their instructions properly and (2) couldn't read the map very well. This gave us a bit of hope for the longer stages! (One team was on foot instead of their bikes and shouting "you should be running, not on your bikes" the other were looking for the checkpooint about 50m from TA rather than 400m. First control on the MTB, no probs, saw Robbie and Mounty heading back to start the paddle here. 2nd control on some snowgums caused us trouble as it wasn't there. Well, it was eventually but someone had broken the branch it was tied to and hidden it in some rocks. Nice. Then a steep but rideable climb to Mt McKay to answer the question... lots of controls as this year's race were Q-A rather than checkpoint. Reminds me of the old metrogaines... lots of potential to trade answers or use your support crew to cheat if you weren't fastidious about rules. By the time we started the paddle we realised our guesstimate of being 30% behind the winners was way wrong, and we'd better up it to 50% or worse, but our other guesstimate of being in the last 25% of the field was bang-on! Paddle was easy, across the lake a couple of times and broke our rudder. Not so good. Starting the orienteering we worried about making it back by dark (6pm) as it was a bit more "full on" than teams were expecting. We got our first taste of hills with a steep walk up a chairlift slope and then had a bit of trouble locating a quarry. Turns out the mapped chairlift was in a different alignment to how it was mapped. We worked this out a bit later when we did find the control! Ominous signs for the accuracy of the maps. Met another team at the chairlift who said "Have you found 'N' yet?" We said "No, we're looking for 'O'." As we wandered on I heard them say "They could be selling us a red herring!". We wandered on and found 'O' in the quarry. N was easy, and the last one P was on a boulder next to a walking track. As we found the unmapped walking track the sunset was great and we could see 5 teams searching in the wrong place up ahead. A few more spots made up.
Monday Apr 7
	MTB 2:00:00 [2]
	shoes: Bike, Merida
	Rode to Mt Beauty from Falls Creek (downhill all the way) via a dodgy fire trail to Bogong, then on the road from there.

Training Archive: Tooms

Saturday Apr 12

Friday Apr 11

Thursday Apr 10

Wednesday Apr 9

Tuesday Apr 8

Monday Apr 7