Training Log Archive: jennycas

Event: Australian Middle Distance/Relay Championships
 

Hmm, I am not good on hills, particularly the sort with rocky hillsides along which it's necessary to mountain-goat. This was a single hill with steep sides not unlike Mt Beckworth, and I never really got into the mapping, expecting the 'large' boulders to be bigger on the ground than they actually were, and being continually surprised by how small the rockfaces were with controls on them. Anyway, lost a bit of time on a few controls; too high/wide into 2 (Aislinn had caught me 2 min already), too low at the end of the longish leg into 5 but I thought I was too high so kept going down, overshot 9 on a danger downhill diagonal (still thinking 1:15000 from last weekend?) and was too high on 11 - I often tended to climb a couple more contours than necessary. So maybe I wasn't reading the contours very well. Grace came through me on the way to 7 like I was standing still, and Hanny/Anna passed me when I stuffed up 9, and Jas at the end as I was picking my way downhill; she just sped through the rubble. Think I ended up something like 25 min behind Grace - perhaps I should have run W35. Also perhaps I should have had more for dinner last night than Qantas' 'cottage pie'.

C • Cottage Pie 1

Oz Middle Course 2 - Splits

Pootle along the creek on a beautiful spring morning, hopefully not undoing the good work that some painful foam-rollering had achieved with my ITBs. Should be a perfect weekend in Canberra which means I will have to try even harder to not get sunburnt (I was unsuccessful at this on the previous 2 weekends).

C • Sunburn 1

Starting to catch up with myself, just in time for going away again this weekend. Back was twinging last night but didn't comment this morning.

Last of the darkness runs for 6? months. Up the park boundary with Zara/Callum (happy Callum!) and Fern. We had thought about going down Olave Hill but came back along Long Gully instead where my hands got really cold and my (now-no-longer-virginally-white) shoes rather muddy. Felt better running than I had for some weeks, to my surprise.

C • Must've been the calibre of the company! 2

Shepherds Hill, Eden Hills, Bellevue Heights, Flinders Uni. Nearly turned around and went back to bed in the first 10 min but figured I'd enjoy the scenery (if I wasn't too busy looking at my feet) on a blustery drizzly morning with some nice spring smells. I sort of did have fun but was oh, so slow! Incredibly stiff through hips & back, and still pretty tired despite crashing out not long after 7pm last night (which of course led to a wide-awake-randomly-worrying session in the middle of the night followed by some weird dreams).

Pretty weary (have had stiff neck/back/hips since last week either from strange hire car or strange beds, therefore not sleeping well) and the intended plod after work morphed into getting fast food, recounting my fairly average day to George (I definitely didn't anticipate that argument with a colleague) and deciding that since I couldn't even focus on reading the newspaper, I should go to bed even though it was only 7pm. Not sure when I'm going to get my lectures written for next week...

Through the forest down to Frank Smith Park and up through the orchard with F&T and Troy after a messy day at work.

I figured I only had about 80 minutes in my legs because I haven't run for longer than that in, oh, months - and so my aim was to get as far through the course as possible before I ran out of legs. Hoped that the terrain would be pretty similar to Boboyan where I'd had a reasonably clean run in May, and so it proved to be. The first few controls were a bit too easy, I thought, especially when I could see the flag from 50 m away; but I guess you did have to be on exactly the right bearing in order to achieve this.

Began reeling in girls who had started in front of me (having all the Aust champs races as WREs means limited randomness in the starting order and predisposes to the possibility of trains forming - at least there have been impressively big fields at these races, but in WA next year if the numbers are significantly less I'll be suggesting a random draw even for the WREs) and went through Amy and Sallyanne between 7 & 8, then to my surprise Belinda popped out from behind a rock at 11, and we were around each other for the next few controls. I got ahead but inhaled a wattle blossom and had a coughing fit so she gained again. We went different ways on the longer leg to 15 then converged on it along with Briohny and Katelyn, meaning that a slow train formed on the 2km leg to 16, the very end of which we all stuffed up. I can see now that I came around the hill ever so slightly high, but when I did drop 30m I was still expecting to find the control on a small spur, not the side of a gully as it turned out to be. So that's how I lost time on Bun again; probably only a minute but she & Briohny & Laurina got away.

Hanny came through me & Katelyn as we got to the farmland, which was about the point that I died. Katelyn was powering up the hills but it was as though someone had switched off the power supply to my legs. Even Kathryn coming through wasn't enough for me to be able to make them move! I was otherwise pretty happy with my run; although others complained about the junk on the ground I was just glad that it wasn't as rocky and tussocky underfoot as Badja. So on reflection, this weekend I did better than I'd expected in the long and worse than expected in the sprint, but the net effect was still a sense of satisfaction, maybe because I do like to run on new areas and there are none of these in SA.

Pancakes at Bredbo afterwards, with Geoff of course, reminiscing about how we stopped there after Aust Champs 2001. He had come down from Sydney to catch up with me and spent the weekend ferrying around Susanne, Kate, Zoe, Hania and got a speeding fine on the Monaro Highway for his pains...

C • WRE start draws 1

LONG Course 2 - Splits