Training Log Archive: blairtrewin

Event: O-Ringen 2015
 

The trip itself had a mixture of the good and the bad. The good was scoring an upgrade on the Dubai-Oslo leg, and also getting a smooth run into Dubai (it often gets congested and I've had a few anxious occasions circling nearby watching a rapidly shrinking connection time). The bad was being next to a two-year-old on the first leg (more room and not as much noise as I might have anticipated, but intermittent kicking was unhelpful to sleep), and also the slow immigration line at Oslo - 45 minutes for me, and it would have been much worse for those at the back of the plane. (We came in just behind an Aeroflot flight from Moscow whose occupants were clearly being given the nth degree).

I missed out on the ugly - the equivalent flight scheduled on Friday night (which two of the people from our conference were on, en route to another meeting in France) was cancelled on the night and didn't end up getting out until 30 minutes before ours. There was also a bit of a reminder of a bit of extreme ugliness as we tracked for some time parallel to the Russia-Ukraine border and perhaps 100 kilometres east of it, probably close enough that those on the other side of the plane might have been able to see where MH17 was shot down from. (Coincidentally, the last 24 hours have seen the heaviest fighting in that area for months).

I'm staying at Cassie's tonight (although without Cassie, who's already at O-ringen). Went for the standard shake-the-legs-out run once the Tour stage was over, but felt awful - my back clearly didn't like the flight and also felt pretty weak generally. Hopefully this is just a jet-lag thing. I was just looking for not-too-steep options to stretch it out to 30 minutes when I saw Zsuzsa and Henning (who live a couple of hundred metres away) coming home, which was all the excuse I needed to decide that this was enough for this run and that catching up with them was a more attractive option. Nice to get my first taste for this trip of Nordic forest at the far end, though...

Early morning session from Lance and Wendy's. There are few flat options from there and I wasn't really looking for flat options (it was quite a challenge on a previous visit when I was looking for flat options because of an Achilles injury) - hilly for much of the way. After some initial ups and downs, climbed Mount Coot-tha via the Slaughter Falls track (thinking once at the top, looking at the view of the distant ranges, that this time yesterday there might just have been the novel sight of snow on the top of them) - this was a gentler climb than I expected, although fairly long, and while my hill-climbing wasn't brilliant nothing went horribly wrong. Across the top, which is up and down in itself, and then came off the northwest side where it felt like I lost all the height gained in about three minutes, before a less hilly return, apart from the final climb through the saddle back to the finish (which was stronger than any other climb today). Not a brilliant run, but probably a step up on what I've been doing in the last couple of weeks, especially later.

About to set forth to Europe (Oslo, via Dubai). I had been thinking of getting last night's flight and trying to get there in time to do the full five days of O-ringen, but it's just as well I didn't - last night's flight hasn't left yet (it's due out only 30 minutes before ours).

And there was a certain amount of schadenfreude today on hearing that one of our occasional nemeses, an NT government ministerial staffer, has been arrested on corruption charges....

Would normally take to the pool on Fridays. The place where we're staying has a pool, but it wasn't heated and this was not exactly the day for it - as the Queenslanders will know, today saw the most significant snowfalls in Queensland since 1984 (5-10cm at Stanthorpe, which was worth the first 10 minutes of the TV news), and while Brisbane was well short of any snow, it was chilly and very windy.

The conference finished off well. In Brisbane for one more night before heading off to Europe.

A run which had a soon-to-get-sick feel to it for most of the time, despite having some good places to explore - south to the "green" bridge initially, across to UQ, sort of along the river to Indooroopilly and then back along the bike path. Nice morning to be out. Was reminded periodically (until the flat last 5km) that Brisbane is hilly, and didn't always handle it especially well.

Today's run took me past the Go-Between Bridge, named for a much-loved Brisbane band. The thought crossed my mind that the Brisbane City Council could continue a similar theme with other local bands, and perhaps name a park after Savage Garden, or the building occupied by the council's environmental health inspectors after Regurgitator.

The conference continues to go well, although today was a long day. (Unexpected encounter of the day - Olly, whose girlfriend is here). Two of the last three papers of the day both looked at conditions in Melbourne on the morning of 29 January 2009, which have had some discussion here previously.

C • Powderfinger, surely? 3

10x1 minute along the West End riverside. Felt rather sleepy early on and was never really sharp, but the principal objective of this session was achieved - getting through something faster with no injury issues, before a predictably long day conferencing. (For the second day in a row, getting to an evening venue - at QUT this time - would have been facilitated considerably by possession of an ISSOM sprint map).

Warm-up and down - returning via Vulture Street, which would be a familiar name to cricket fans (although the Gabba is a couple of kilometres further east).

Heading up to Brisbane today for a conference (I'm then flying out from there on Saturday to Europe). The flight wasn't until noon so that enabled me to run a bit later, notwithstanding the packing that needed to be done - headed out to my old place to drop in the spare garage-door opener I found in a cleanout of the car the other week. Not the greatest of runs but reasonable in the injury department.

Proceedings get properly under way tomorrow, but there was a forum this evening at UQ. I feel somewhat naked without a decent map, and finding my way from the ferry wharf to the relevant building in the dark was something of a challenge (should have brought the sprint map with me). It didn't help that the theatre has just got a new name which doesn't appear on the UQ website yet.

Lunchtime Tan run on a somewhat bleak day (I chickened out on riding, partly because I didn't want to create any more sets of wet gear on the last full day before leaving, and found myself sitting next to someone in bike gear who had obviously done similarly). No rain for the run, though, and felt like a reasonably standard lunchtime run - not exactly sparkling up the Anderson Street hill, but not the back issues of yesterday. Stopped briefly en route on spotting a colleague on Southbank to enquire how our cyclones paper (of which we're two of about eight authors) was going.

It would be fair to say the media coverage of the weekend's weather events was the subject of a certain amount of derision in the office this morning. (It was locally the most significant event since 2000 in parts of northern NSW, such as Armidale, but in Victoria it was pretty much a non-event except for the rain in Melbourne). Queenslanders headed for New England in droves, to the extent that the KFC in Glen Innes reportedly had to close because it had run out of chicken.

Switched this to the evening because of the aforementioned media storm (to wit, an early interview with Radio National, at the more sensible end of the spectrum). As I've noted before, it feels a bit strange doing this in the dark. Water seemed unusually cool tonight at the start, but seemed reasonable once I'd done a couple of laps.

Readers are invited to guess the context in which I read today the following words: "a small, localized region of southern Sweden experiencing notably later FU than normal".