Training Log Archive: blairtrewin

Oceania Relays. Running 2nd leg in the Australian M40 team with Bruce and Craig. Bruce led off pretty well - put us well clear of the others in our class, which was expected, but it turned out that we were also on the same course as the junior men and open women. This meant I set out in some pretty good company - my partner in crime for the first few controls was a certain Ms. Alexandersson. Somewhat to my surprise, she didn't blow me away immediately, rather edging away (mostly in the rougher bits of ground) over the first 10 minutes or so. As I wasn't running that well, and struggled even at my peak to match it with the best women in the world (at the 2000 World Cup at Badja, where the women ran two of the three loops of the men's course, I was a bit behind Hanne Staff and Simone Niggli on the common sections), I take this as an indication that she wasn't going flat out. I was, however, gratified that Tove doesn't appear to be any better than me at getting over rickety barbed-wire fences.

Once off the back of that contest, and out of the open country, I made a couple of mistakes on my first two controls in the green, with one-minuters at 6 and 7 - not getting to grips quickly enough with which rocks were/weren't mapped at 6, and going in too early and getting caught in some green from 7. Fairly clean from there (in the navigation sense, definitely not the mud sense), but struggled for strength and terrain fluency in the uneven and soft ground. 6 down on Bruce which was about where I deserved to be, but at least we did the necessary (which in the absence of NZ opposition, was to get around three legs without a mispunch).

We couldn't have chosen a much more NZ-like piece of terrain for the relays and still been on this side of the Tasman, so it was perhaps not surprising that NZ managed to draw 10-10 - their best result ever in an away Challenge (and matching the 2013 result in NZ).