Training Log Archive: blairtrewinIn the 1 days ending Aug 6, 2016:
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Saturday Aug 6, 2016 #
8 AM
Run 1:35:00 [3] 18.5 km (5:08 / km)
Often in country settlements my running strategy is to pick the quietest road I can find out of town (preferably a dirt one). However, in a place like Longreach, all the roads out of town are at least moderately major (with even farms close to town measuring in the thousands of hectares, there aren't the minor rural roads you'd find in more densely settled areas), with the one which looked like it had most potential being on the other side of what I assumed would be the pedestrian-unfriendly highway bridge across the Thomson.
I took the Muttaburra road and immediately discovered I'd landed on my feet - it was closed to through traffic because of flooding further out of town. As a result (outside the town area) I only saw two vehicles in over an hour. Settled into a good rhythm early on and kept it going through the run, with hamstring only at minor nuisance levels. In the first half there was a slight headwind; on the turnaround this became a tailwind at almost exactly the speed I was running, so its noise disappeared and instead the birds formed the backdrop, which was nice. Even 9km from town in such flat country, town doesn't seem far away (the Qantas 747 at the airport museum, visited later in the day, is a major landmark). The second half seemed to go pretty quickly, crunching out a succession of 5-minute kilometres; starting to get a bit warm by the end. As a rural out-and-back, this won't quite match my classics of the genre this decade - Warwick (2013) and El Calafate (2014) - but it was pretty good.
I think this is also the first run I've done which has involved crossing the Tropic of Capricorn.
Did a trip through the middle of the day to Isisford, a small town which I knew chiefly because one of my teachers moved there to run a pub after retiring from teaching (he's moved on now). It's a town which has clearly seen much better days but they've done an excellent job of showing what used to be there, with a lot of informative signs (some of the stories not so happy, such as the mother and baby who perished when one of the pubs was torched in a 1956 insurance job) and a few original shops reconstructed. The aforementioned pub's hamburger probably ranks third out of three on my list of outback pub hamburgers this trip, but is still head and shoulders above anything you'll get out of a chain in the city.
Hapless criminal story: the Isisford bank was held up in 1921, and the robber made off with a bag of money. Unfortunately for him, the money was a bag of pennies - and in any case he didn't get far out of town before feeling the long arm of the law.
Made my first contribution to the vast quantity of roadkill on outback Queensland roads by running over a snake. (I haven't seen much larger wildlife on or close to roads, but that's probably because I've usually been off the road by 5).
I took the Muttaburra road and immediately discovered I'd landed on my feet - it was closed to through traffic because of flooding further out of town. As a result (outside the town area) I only saw two vehicles in over an hour. Settled into a good rhythm early on and kept it going through the run, with hamstring only at minor nuisance levels. In the first half there was a slight headwind; on the turnaround this became a tailwind at almost exactly the speed I was running, so its noise disappeared and instead the birds formed the backdrop, which was nice. Even 9km from town in such flat country, town doesn't seem far away (the Qantas 747 at the airport museum, visited later in the day, is a major landmark). The second half seemed to go pretty quickly, crunching out a succession of 5-minute kilometres; starting to get a bit warm by the end. As a rural out-and-back, this won't quite match my classics of the genre this decade - Warwick (2013) and El Calafate (2014) - but it was pretty good.
I think this is also the first run I've done which has involved crossing the Tropic of Capricorn.
Did a trip through the middle of the day to Isisford, a small town which I knew chiefly because one of my teachers moved there to run a pub after retiring from teaching (he's moved on now). It's a town which has clearly seen much better days but they've done an excellent job of showing what used to be there, with a lot of informative signs (some of the stories not so happy, such as the mother and baby who perished when one of the pubs was torched in a 1956 insurance job) and a few original shops reconstructed. The aforementioned pub's hamburger probably ranks third out of three on my list of outback pub hamburgers this trip, but is still head and shoulders above anything you'll get out of a chain in the city.
Hapless criminal story: the Isisford bank was held up in 1921, and the robber made off with a bag of money. Unfortunately for him, the money was a bag of pennies - and in any case he didn't get far out of town before feeling the long arm of the law.
Made my first contribution to the vast quantity of roadkill on outback Queensland roads by running over a snake. (I haven't seen much larger wildlife on or close to roads, but that's probably because I've usually been off the road by 5).