Training Log Archive: devil

Bilbys long ride, this week was corin, which I've never done before. We set off with the cotter - uriarra group. Once again lance had graced us with his presence - Gary was straight onto him when he got on the front and started riding at granny pace. I had a bit of an inward cheer when lance joined the medium bunch leaving a good group including lee, rhiannon, eliza and a mountain bike dude who's name I forgot. It was pretty steady down to the turnoff to corin, then we all settled into grind mode for the climb. Up at smokers flat we stopped and were going to go back down, but eliza wanted to go to the dam after someone said it was undulating so we headed down - it was downhill, but there was the chance to refill water bottles at the bottom. I felt a lot better on the climb back out than I did going up the other side, and the ride down made all the climbing worth it. We went back via point hutt, tuggo and woden. I had a long spell on the front along through here and was pleased that I still had the energy.
Breakfast at all bar was finished by the time we got there so I just had coffee. Getting back on the bike I started to cramp a bit, luckily it worked itself out after a few minutes. Was a bad influence on lizzie when I got home by heading out to the pie shop for lunch.
Distance is a bit of a guess, but expect it's not far wrong.

C • Pie shop 2

Very slow ride home from work through the ridges. Tracks are getting quite dusty.

The orroral valley classic 20km. A nice 5am wakeup for this one, but was a cracker morning with a bit of mist in the orroral valley as we drove up there. Over a hundred entries so a good atmosphere. I wasn't expecting much from this after five weeks of pretty poor training backing up from bilbys and summer series. At the start alex matthews headed off by himself while a little pack that included me and horsy formed behind. There was a bit of sorting on the long climb which I took very steadily. Once we were over that, puffy charged past and took a few others with him; I decided to be conservative and just settled to a good 4.30 pace. Had a gel at the turn, and saw that there were a few people not too far back including loiuse and fast kate, so there was a bit of incentive to keep it solid. Enjoyed the long downhill and felt reasonably good over the last few km with good strength on the pinches. It would have been good to go under 90 minutes, but the run served its purpose as a harder long run. There was a close finish in the women's race with fast kate nearly running down louise and a good run from ba sprinting the last km to hold onto 3rd place.

I had a sub-optimal park for orienteering so running up and down to the assembly area was a good warmup.

Summer series at Red Hill. Lucy had set interesting courses that had a few route choice options - I think I made the wrong choice a few times, particularly not seeing the obvious route along the road on the long leg from 5-6. This route also involved collecting quite a few grass seeds.

Did a proper warm down for a change seeing as I'm doing the orroral run in the early hours of tomorrow morning

Loads of people at bilbys tonight - and a warm evening especially compared to Japan last week. Usual warm up stuff and stuffing around.

A good old fashioned set of 1km/200 recovery. I was running with Keith who was evidently trying to do a slow set, the first two were perhaps a bit quick because horsy was running just in front of us. I was originally going to do 8 but was starting to feel some hammy soreness so stopped after 7.
Splits
3.44 1.08
3.47 1.09
3.53 1.06
3.56 1.36
3.58 1.12
3.56 1.09
3.59 1.22
Running in lane 2 all the way so they were a little over 1km

Did a lap with trent, rhiannon and eliza, then another with keith who had done the extra km.

Evening run on the ridge, mainly single tracks - the middle 6km was quite solid - at least compared to last weeks runs.

Another run in the snow - it was a bit warmer than the last few days. After that we were taken to a distillery then it was off to the airport. Scored a free upgrade from tokyo to sydney so got a good sleep.