Training Log Archive: blairtrewin

Training at Mount Tarrengower - mostly a pairs relocation exercise, followed by a downhill control picking course at the end. For the relocation exercise I was teamed up with Adrian (Lian's partner) - a pretty inexperienced orienteer, who was good at getting himself between controls but still struggling a bit with the fine navigation part of the exercise, which meant we spent a bit more time standing around than might otherwise have been the case. It was therefore difficult to gauge this in physical terms but good to get a bit more time on a map, and in the terrain, into me before Easter.

One thing I noticed was a lack of confidence running across sloping bare rock, even though it was dry - perhaps there are still a few mental scars from the big crash I had at Radford.

The Achilles soreness may not have totally gone away but there were other positives to take out of this run, like the fact that I was going 15 seconds/km faster than every other run this week (on the flat; there were more hills today) without any discernable change in effort. Took on some reasonably hilly areas in the middle through North Balwyn and Bulleen - not entirely convincing but not horrible either.

While looking at the north Queensland rainfall bulletins to see what moisture the not-as-bad-as-it-could-have-been Cyclone Ita had produced (it would have been a very different story had the track been 100km further east), I noticed that one of the sites on the list is called Daintree Ice Cream. Sounds like somewhere good to tag along the next time a site inspection is due.

It's stopped raining, more or less (apart from the odd stray shower, one of which dumped on me in the last five minutes of the ride to work), and there were even a few patches of blue sky to be seen during this session, though they quickly disappeared. A reasonably steady session and not feeling too tired after yesterday.

The new masseur works me a bit harder than the last one (perhaps not quite on the level of Jenny's Killer Physio (tm)); will have to see how it works out. Tomorrow morning will be the first test.

The first half of this was no better than the last couple of days, and was shaping up as a pretty tough slog - no quicker to loosen up (something which has been a very slow process lately, except perhaps for last Sunday). Picked up a bit from halfway, though, and much more so from about 70 minutes onwards - the last third of this run was much more in the mode that I'd hope to be in (always a good sign when a run's last kilometre was its fastest). But for a bit of Achilles soreness - the massage I have booked in tomorrow, after several weeks without one, can't come a moment too soon - I would have quite happily kept going for another 30 minutes.

Once again it was raining - only lightly, but enough to turn anything clay into a skating rink (as I discovered on taking to a track at one point), and calling for a couple of detours when going along the Merri Creek.

That opened things for a busy day, including a remote presentation to NSW Agriculture in Orange (pity it wasn't this time next week), a meeting in which we were trying to convince one of the more prominent climate sceptic MPs that we aren't cooking the books (as of 10pm he hasn't tweeted about it, which I take as a good sign), and two different functions in the evening. Shuttling between all of these on the bike also means I've generated about half a basket worth of wet clothes in the course of the day.

Definitely feeling better this morning and not quite as dire a run as yesterday, but still pretty bad - probably a bit better in the second half. Managed to find one of the few dry slots in what's now been 30 hours (and counting) of near-continuous light rain - Darebin Creek isn't up too much (yet). Watching developments in north Queensland with some interest.

In case climate-change denialists weren't implausible enough, I heard today of an upcoming "documentary" from a earth-goes-around-the-sun denialist (and you thought they became extinct in the 17th century?). He has a "Dr" in front of his name but apparently this is in religious studies from a distance-learning institution in Vanuatu.

C • Why are they doing it? 4

Thought yesterday afternoon that I was getting a bit croaky and might be in for a relapse of the trouble of a couple of weeks ago, and so it proved (a somewhat sleepless night thinking about how things will or won't sort themselves out in Queensland didn't help). Went out with thoughts of fartlek but realised at the second attempt at going fast (the first is downhill and doesn't really count) that it wasn't happening today. Struggled home even at a slow pace. Feeling somewhat improved in the later part of the day so hopefully it's a short-term thing.

Presumably one of the things which hasn't happened with the end of daylight saving is an increase in the density of the water in the Fitzroy pool, but that's what it felt like this morning - definitely not one of my better sessions.

The debacle in Sheffield on the weekend (for those who missed it, the Sheffield half-marathon was cancelled because it was deemed that the failure of the water for the drinks stations to be delivered was an unacceptable risk to health and safety) was a reminder that they did things differently in times gone by. A while back I came across a history of the Olympic marathon which included a copy of the race instructions to competitors for Melbourne in 1956. The course was an out-and-back along Dandenong Road to a turnaround somewhere around Clayton - clearly in 1956 using the marathon to showcase the most attractive bits of the host city to the international TV audience wasn't a high priority (*) - and the instructions featured advice along the lines that there were readily accessible taps in the front yards at numbers 163, 339 and 547, and a toilet round the back of number 477.

(* - although, I guess, in 1956 the far end of the course was probably semi-rural. These days you could probably run a marathon in the Chadstone car park; in the early 1980s, a Formula 1 Grand Prix was actually run in the car park of Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas).

C • Chadstone 1

Around the Tan at lunchtime. Feeling as flat as I'd expect to have done after a hard race yesterday.

It's school holidays this week - not that this was noticeable from this morning's traffic - and there were plenty of street performers on Southbank targeted at the relevant demographic. Also present but not targeted (specifically) at that demographic were the Jehovah's Witnesses, who - as I recently learned - were banned in Australia in 1943 under wartime regulations as a potential threat to national security.