Training Log Archive: jennycas

A bit sorry not to be orienteering anywhere today. I really enjoyed the Christmas 5-Days; pity I only go to them about every 10 years. Anyhow, we spent the day driving to/from the Glow Worm tunnel at Newnes (about 2.5 hrs each way, so marginally better ratio of time on foot to time in car than the Gloucester Tops) which was interesting, being in an old shale-oil railway tunnel in the Gardens of Stone NP, but I was a little disappointed in the quantity of glow worms, being seriously spoiled by a couple of previous rides in boats on underground rivers through amazing glow worm caves in NZ!

Was a bit ashamed of lunch having been courtesy of McDonald's at Lithgow (nephew's choice, and it was raining at the time) so went for a hot-and-steamy jog after getting home to sister-in-law's. The roads go every which way through Glenmore Park, which would make a good street-O map. I think there's one out this way?

Probably should not have fronted up for this, given how painfully my blistered heel was keeping me awake in the night, but layered with 3 Band-Aids and in running shoes at a flat jog along the road it seemed manageable. So I stubbornly went out on course - and promptly made a lot of mistakes because I was concentrating too much on where I was putting my feet in a vain attempt to avoid further heel chafing, and not enough on my bearings, so had some real shockers, missing track junctions and going up/down wrong creeks. Final straw was on 9 where I still don't understand how I ended up too far east, but the 1: 7500 scale may have had something to do with it.

I started to realise that if I took any longer on course I might run out of time to go back to the motel for a shower before checking out, and I might jeopardise any chance of being capable of doing a longer run when it cools down in a couple of days' time. And also I couldn't face the thought of the long leg across the long-grassed area just to come back across the long-grassed area , so I called it quits and walked slowly and painfully back to the finish. I don't like to be a quitter :(

We lunched in and walked around the waterfront at Brooklyn by the Mooney Mooney crossing. I couldn't convince G to catch the little ferry out to Dangar Island from there but we did cross on the vehicle ferry at Berowra Waters before making our way to Penrith via Arcadia & Cattai. 9pm fireworks display at Panthers wasn't too bad viewed from a hilltop a couple km away; however, everyone local seemed to have their own personal fireworks stash and to be setting them off in the creek at the end of the street. I expect this activity to be repeated in about 20 minutes' time when the clock strikes 12 and all the dogs to go slightly troppo as a result.

C • That explains it. 2

Day 5 Hard 2 - Splits

Rather tired this morning; had intended to get up earlier, but slept through my alarm (as did many people, it seems) and had intended to do a proper warmup but ended up just walking to the start with Tracy - it was pretty warm already, but at least still clouded over. Actually, this was a new map for me today - I'd thought we'd be running immediately south of yesterday's area but in fact it was across the road and thankfully rather less green. Equally flat, except for one big hill at the southern end of the course up which I had to walk, but I could see Tracy walking up in front of me (she'd started 2 min ahead). She kindly offered me a drink when I caught her at the drink control but I foolishly wanted to see if I could manage ok until the end. Hindsight says that with a cooler brain I may not have veered too far right when approaching a little gully on the creek at 17, and then compounded the error by thinking I still needed to go further right (but then I veered to the right on a number of other bearings also, so that's something I need to watch out for tomorrow).

Right near the end, heel blister became raw, which lacked pleasantness, and it's still painful this evening even though we did no strenuous exercise this afternoon but instead sampled the wares of places purveying cheese, chocolate, wine and beer, then drove via Broke to the historic village of Wollombi and back through Cessnock. Many of the towns around here have crepe myrtle as street trees and they are blooming gorgeously in pinks and purples (despite not having been pruned to within an inch of their life as I'd always thought is recommended in order to encourage flowering).

C • #17 1

Day4 Hard 2 - Splits

New O shoes time. And although they are half a size bigger than my old ones, it was just as much effort to wrestle my feet into them as usual. Decided the laces were improbably tight, so loosened them. Felt my heel chafing on the way to the start, so tightened them. Got halfway to control 3 and the excruciating pain under my right arch was unmanageable, so spent a couple of minutes loosening that shoe. By halfway round the course though, a blister was forming on the other heel even though I'd left that shoe tightened, and the rest of the course became a limp-jog. Clearly my feet are not the same size as each other...

As for the navigating, I actually quite like flat low-vis stuff, and the shade provided by the dense ti-trees (Leptospermum) meant it wasn't too hot. Did a couple of dumb overshootings at times though - some of them deliberate because I couldn't find an earlier singletrack through the green even though it was on the map, but overrunning the first control was not in my plan. I must have been about 30m away from it yet climbed up the embankment to avoid a patch of green, then came wrongly down a track too far south because I thought there was a track before the control when actually the mapped black line was a pipeline. Getting worse at reading the detail, I am :(

Favourite control was in an area of swampy paperbark tea tree (Melaleuca) which didn't currently have any water underfoot but instead a carpet of maidenhair ferns. This made up for all the gruesomely burned car wrecks out there, which give me the heebie-jeebies.

We spent the afternoon driving to/from the Barrington Tops, which turned out to be 3 hours each way, because I had the thought that at 1300m it would be a bit cooler than the 40 degrees down in Cessnock. And indeed, up at the Gloucester Tops it was maybe even not quite 30. Plus there was still enough water in the river to make the Gloucester Falls worth the drive - and we saw a lyrebird. On a cooler day I'd have done the 8km loop walk around the sub-alpine plateau but in any case my blister said no. On the way down, at one of the many river fords, we had to let a herd of beautiful shaggy Highland cattle wade in/drink from the river.

Broke up the return journey with dinner at a defiantly unrenovated pub in Dungog, where my steak was overcooked (if that was medium rare, I'd hate to see well done) and G's schnitzel cost a whole $10 and it was even spelled correctly on the menu unlike the economically-lettered SNIZL I saw on a menu during our roadtrip.

C • Lyrebird 2

Day 3 Hard 2 - Splits

Um...looks like there is/was a fire this afternoon in the forest immediately to the west of tomorrow's map. Thought I saw smoke in that direction when we were up in the mountains :(

Since we're staying in Kurri Kurri, I could jog to this morning's event at Pelaw Main, and was already pretty sweaty by the time I got there. Wasn't too warm in the forest though, and I quite enjoyed the event, taking tracks where possible to minimise the prickle-bush. A couple of times I missed/misread a minor MTB track or a junction, but my cross-country bearings weren't too bad and so I feel like I only lost a couple of minutes all up.

After a shower, a nap, and removal of numerous prickles from my knees, plus $12 lunch at the pub, G & I headed up into the Watagan mountains for a drive which turned out quite pleasant (also cooler than the plains) once we'd established that I did not intend for him to go 4WDing on any unofficial tracks.

On the way back we decided to look at the HEZ, the Hunter region's greatest white elephant. According to our street directory, The Hunter Economic Zone business park should in fact encompass much of the area where we were running today, but in reality there is one 5km road through the middle of the bush, with only two businesses on it but a hell of a lot of burnt out cars and tyres (the bushland area is pretty junky too; I had a control today on a burnt out wheelie bin) - and yet the visionaries went to the trouble of putting kerbs, streetlights, a bike path and bus stopping bays along this (now dead-end) road. Makes a mockery of the saying "if you build it, they will come"!

C • HEZ 5

Day2 Hard 2 - Splits

Event: Xmas 5 Days 2016
 

Heavy-legged jog around Bushman, which is what this town was known as until somebody local got the bright idea of federating all the states...some lovely turn-of-the-century architecture around, in federation style (no less) and also, since this town actually has hills - unlike any town which we passed through yesterday - I ran up to the war memorial monument on the hilltop next to the caravan park.

We then went to visit The Dish (AKA Parkes Radio Telescope) and took back roads through Wellington to Gulgong where we lunched (and were thankfully able to obtain fuel) and then although I'd been keen on the Bylong Valley Way, realised it would take too long and also I wasn't doing too well on winding roads in the ute. So we headed through towards Cassilis instead, and were intrigued immediately after crossing the headwaters of the Goulburn River to see a sign to The Drip. This turned out to be a cliff overhang along the river (flowing, but only wading depth with some deeper pools) about 1.5km from the car park and to which many people had walked in their swimsuits! I have a feeling that there may have been a NSW champs rogaine near here a few years ago?

By the time we left The Drip it was after 2:30pm and we still had 300km to drive to get to Newcastle - oops. So our only stop was in Merriwa, where I found Pluto! This has solved a 10-year old mystery for me; along the road from Coonabarabran to the Warrumbungles are signs representing various planets, based on a scale model of the solar system which has Siding Springs Observatory as the sun. And I had always wondered how far away Pluto is...the other thing I found in this town is that you can still get HavaHeart ice creams; the heart-shaped choc-dipped vanilla ice creams which I'd thought had vanished some years ago.

C • The Drip 1

We got to the event site at Islington Tafe at least 14 min before starts closed - thank goodness the Hunter Expressway has been completed since my NSW road atlas was printed and although I didn't get much of a warmup it was still fairly warm so I was happy not to have run any earlier. Fun course at 1: 3000 so things came up very quickly, including controls which were on other people's courses but I took care to read the numbers. And descriptions too, but that didn't stop me from not realising that control 5 was on top of the little grandstand. A couple of minor misreadings of the control circle, plus I went too wide where a fence was actually mapped as crossable, but these were small things compared to going in the wrong entrance of the Christmas tree shaped maze on the oval at the finish because I somehow had my map turned around 90 degrees after the creek crossing. Public humiliation is the way to go - but seriously, we should have a maze more often.

Found excellent fish and chips afterwards :)

Day1 Hard 2 - Splits

We left home not long after 7am and stopped for the night in Parkes about 7pm. G kindly did all the driving and my job was to be a well-behaved passenger, which seemed to involve consumption of a lot of "sometimes foods" (although I'm sure the vanilla slice from Ouyen bakery was highly nutritious) in an attempt to avoid feeling sick from car travel or from overheating. At Goolgowi the car thermometer said it was 40 although that's probably an overestimate. Surprised to learn that Goolgowi was only settled in 1923, after the railway line to Hillston was completed. East of there the vegetation's still nice and green - lush even - since the September rains and between West Wyalong & Forbes still quite a bit of water is lying around in paddocks and billabongs.