Training Log Archive: blairtrewin

Local Swiss event just north of Zurich, on an area unlike most I've seen before in Switzerland - the (slightly underestimated) advertised climb for the whole course was less than that in the first couple of controls last time I was in this part of the world. It was a flattish area, lots of tracks and lots of green, not yet in full winter mode so the green still meant something (often in European deciduous forests, the green can essentially be ignored in winter) - in particular, lots of brambles at ground level, not always reliably mapped.

My compass running in flat terrain wasn't very good today, but it didn't cost me as much as it might have on another day - indeed on 5, going out at 45 degrees in the wrong direction put me onto an alternative route choice which gave me my best split of the day. A bit wide on 8 and dropped 30 seconds or so, took what turned out to be a suboptimal route choice on 15, and then lost another 30 seconds or so on 16 - this didn't seem to be in the right place, but as it was on a "thicket" in an area of the map where there was no discernable relationship between the vegetation on the map and what was on the ground, it may well have been a mapping issue.

Ended up third in M40, although I think it was a fairly thin field (no names I recognised). Placing it in some perspective was that Markus Hotz, whom I've crossed paths with a bit in WMOCs, ran M21 and took six minutes longer to run 2.6km further.

Left the event a bit earlier than planned and got a train 30 minutes earlier than planned, which proved to be a bad move because it broke down and we had to wait for the next one an hour behind - yes, it does happen in Switzerland too. Now in Geneva.

From Nesslau in northeast Switzerland. Took a while to find a good way to do this but good once I did. Started out up the river valley, which for the first bit had a nice track along a flat bottom next to the water, but I know enough about pre-alpine Switzerland to know that that was unlikely to last for long, and indeed around the next corner was a (nice) waterfall with a bit of stair work. Ended up back up at the main road, and as the alternative for continuing was an unrunnable gorge crossing I decided to stick with the main road up to the next village - a bit too much traffic for comfort. Was settling nicely in a physical sense by then, though, and once in that village, found a good side track for an out-and-back, then came back on a similarly quiet path/road on the other side of the valley. Not a bad run in the end.

The main target of the day was the Santis, the highest peak in this part of Switzerland and also location of a weather station with 150 years or so of history. If you're really keen you can walk or run up this (as Lachy did last weekend), although you'd want to be better with heights than I am in the upper sections of the tracks. We were well and truly above the low cloud/fog line here, and the views were as spectacular as you would expect ('gute Fernsicht', as per the forecast, turned out to mean everything as far as the Black Forest and French Jura), though it was sobering to see that summer 2015 looks to have just about finished off the two summit glaciers. (Vanessa tells me there's still a fragment in a sheltered spot not visible from the summit).

It may be low season but there were still lots of people out, many of them walking in the foothills. The road up to the pass at the cable car base was also much used by motorcyclists (as I suspect many Swiss mountain passes are in good weather).

A couple of my long-term Australian sites (Snowtown and Palmerville) are in places better known for murder than they are for meteorology, but the Santis can go one better than this, thanks to the 1922 murder of the weather observer and his wife on the summit. The case was never solved although a prime suspect committed suicide a few weeks later.

Finished the day by joining up with Vanessa, Tobias and a few friends, and after one false start, finding a pub to watch the rugby in (I'd almost got the date of this wrong by a day).

Felt pretty flat this morning, and slow even on the downhill bits - perhaps a reaction to some of the long downhills yesterday even though there was no obvious muscle soreness. Led into a good final day of the workshop, though.

We finished up at lunchtime. From there, it was into Zurich to catch up with a former Bureau colleague (now working in the reinsurance industry here) for coffee, then onwards to the base of some mountains (with a couple of split-second rail connections part of the mix). I haven't actually seen said mountains yet because I arrived in the dark, but tomorrow will be my chance.

Decided to be the most ambitious I've been for a while - Switzerland encourages you to be ambitious. The map had a nice-looking ridge to the south of town and that was my target. To get there involved a fairly serious climb - the first 30 minutes of this run was almost continuously uphill, climbing about 350 metres in the process, before a long stretch along the ridgeline (which was quite attractive enough as it was, but would have been better still had there not been low clouds and rain to get in the way of the views of the mountains beyond). A steep initial drop off the ridge then back into town, before a final 25-minute loop in town - during which at times I hit "float mode" for the first time in months.

This would definitely rate up there amongst my best runs of 2015 (especially its latter months) - feels good to stress my body and have it respond positively.

C • St Gallen 9

C • Talking point 2

First fast session since the nationals, a 10x1 minute set in a St. Gallen park near the museum. Not too bad, gradually picking up pace as it went on, though the (uphill) finishes of the odd-numbered reps were a little challenging.

I expected this to be a good workshop and so far it is - almost every talk was engaging, although, as is often the way, I'll probably emerge with about 10 times the number of ideas that I'll actually have time to implement.

Warm-up and down, taking in St. Gallen's small corner of sleaze (one "Sex-Kino" and a couple of nightclubs) en route.

I suspect your average European hasn't paid a great deal of attention to the political demise of Tony Abbott, but the crowd you get at climate science conferences certainly knew about it...

The flight went reasonably smoothly - as I expected, I'd got myself into such a state of exhaustion that I had no difficulty falling asleep for an extended period on the Melbourne-Dubai leg. On boarding in Dubai, the boarding pass machine made strange noises and I was sort of hoping that the new pass I was handed would have a somewhat smaller number on it; that didn't happen, but I got the "poor man's upgrade" (a row to myself) instead - Dubai to Zurich is a route much travelled by money of dubious provenance, but on today's evidence not so well travelled by people.

I arrived in St. Gallen in early afternoon - the forecast was for persistent fog and low cloud but in fact it was sunny and felt a fair bit warmer than the 8.7 the Meteoswiss website said it was. Took off from where I'm staying in the old town and headed northeast, up one of those deceptive hills which keeps going, and going, and going - almost unbroken for 3km. Coped with this better than I would have expected to, albeit slowly. Towards the top of this I got out of town into patches of forest and farmland, the latter reintroducing me to Swiss cowbells. Returned via the university, then spent the last 15 minutes exploring the old town in depth (I presume this has been used for a sprint at some point in time) and feeling increasingly good about things. There look to be some good runs to be had from here, although most will involve some solid early climbing (and I'm not sure what the light will be like for the early ones).

Perhaps appropriately in the light of what I was doing today, one of my items of in-flight reading was an article in R4YL, which quoted a scientific study which found that sleep-deprived athletes thought their performance was being more adversely affected than it actually was.

Dropped Jenny off to the airport for an early flight and then went to Northcote for a swim on the way home (noticing how much harder it is to get a park at 6.30 than 7.30). Knee tightness still an issue this morning. Main purpose of this session was to loosen myself up (the warm water, normally one of the less desirable features of Northcote, was helpful in this regard).

Essentially a fitness-test run, to see what my knee would cope with. The tightness still didn't feel quite right but it improved a bit on the run and didn't cause me any pain, so I think I can assume it to be a minor issue which should be a non-issue in the next few days. (It's at its worst after sitting for long periods, so it might be a bit ugly when I get off the plane). The run itself was a bit of a nothing run, although felt better than I thought I might after not much sleep (and the post-rogaine part seems to be behind me). Rather windy at times, and quite a few building sites to find a way around.

Today was definitely a day when a lot was fitted in: after the 5.10 start and the aforementioned trip to the pool, among today's items at work were giving a talk, doing an interview with Swedish TV, setting up the first draft of a statement on all the records that October is going to break, and publishing a (long-overdue) issue of the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Journal (and this run came in the middle). Then came a Labor policy committee meeting. All that done, I finally stepped on the bus to the airport; I'm on my way out of the country again, mostly to Switzerland (first a workshop in St. Gallen, then another stint at WMO in Zurich), though with a week in Oslo at the end where I will hopefully have the chance to introduce myself to an impending new relative.