Training Log Archive: blairtrewin

NSW Long Championships at Arthursleigh. Definitely a contrast with yesterday - open gully-spur and long legs even by the standards of NSW Long Distance Championships. I think I'd probably have to go back to 10s (or possibly 12s) for the last time I only had 6 controls on a course.

Didn't get quite as good a warm-up as I would have liked - arrived a bit late because it was further in than I'd thought (on a dodgy track which made me a bit nervous about the hire car's low front, but it seems to have managed OK). First leg was downhill which settled things a bit, and from there it was largely a day of running free through gentle gully-spur, with a couple of moderately wide route choices to stay away from steeper stuff near the river. (It wasn't an option on our course, but in M35 Steve took a route choice along the river flats - I wouldn't have dared, assuming them to be thick or rocky or both, but it worked OK for him). Didn't have the pace to go with Jock, who came through me about a quarter of the way through, but a solid run at my current level.

Ended up third in 45A. Jock did 61, Nathan Guinness 67. Nathan can obviously run; I think he got me in the first WMOC qualifier too (before blowing out in the second).

Will give this event points for an efficient presentation, too.

I feel like I'm continuing to make gradual progress - a few weeks of reasonably consistent training will do that. Hopefully a full winter of it will get me somewhere by the time we get to the back end of this season.

Hard 3 - Splits

NSW Middle Distance Championships at Appin. I wasn't quite sure what to expect of this but it ended up serving up some old-school Sydney sandstone (plus some small tracks) - often pretty thick and controls tricky to see. For those of us who grew up on places like Jerusalem Rocks and Toota Maroota it was a return to those days, but probably more of a surprise for the youngsters. (Also spotted the standard mix of urban-fringe bush features: the burnt-out car, the illegal rubbish dump, the trailbike track and the marijuana plant).

Took a while to get into this, both physically and technically. I flew up this morning and had the standard early-morning flight problem of waking up long before my alarm and not being able to get to sleep (a coffee at the not-exactly-my-usual-territory Campbelltown Mall solved the sleepiness problem), and felt rather strange running through the first half. Also a bit wobbly early, dropping perhaps 45 seconds at 2 where Steve caught me, and a bit wide on 4 (but Steve lost more there because I saw him again at 6). A more significant time loss on 10 - went in too far and dropped perhaps 1.30-2 minutes. Got much better after that both physically and technically. Jock and Rob Bennett caught me at the rugged 13, but I got away from Jock again when he overshot 15, and finished off fairly well from there.

Not sure what the determiner of the course lengths was thinking - not even Thierry Gueorgiou would have done 35 on that (probably high 30s). Itay Manor (from Israel) won with 51 and Rob and Steve were the only others to break the hour.

Hard 1 - Splits

Friday morning at Fitzroy, with a clear sky and the mist rising over the (relatively) warm water. Didn't feel especially smooth but was clearly moving through the water faster than usual. Quads a bit sore before I started but fine once the session was done, which was one of the objectives of this session.

A rare sub-20 on the bike from the pool to work (it's usually around 22-24) - got a particularly good run with the lights, which made up for running a little later than I would have liked at the beginning.

Off to the NSW Championships this weekend - flying up to Sydney first thing in the morning.

A solid morning's work and my longest one since the New Year. Slow in the first half-hour through a combination of darkness and climbing, but steady after that once dropping down onto the Yarra flats (experiencing the first proper fog of the season in the process). Still felt as if I had plenty left at the end (although was rather tired afterwards). A bit of hamstring discomfort at times in the second half but improved by the end.

Checked out en route how the railway construction next to my old place is going. Looks like most of the work is being done on the other side of the line so my original thoughts that the building would be a casualty may not come to pass, but I'm still glad not to be living next to a (mostly nocturnal) building site for the next couple of years.

20x30 seconds at All Nations. A bit of an effort early but got going reasonably well in the second half. Only minor hamstring discomfort - probably at about the point where I can start pushing longer with these.

On-leash compliance rate: 3 from 7. Thought we were going to make it to 50% today but a new offender appeared at the last moment.

Warm-up and down. As usual, slow on the way there, not so much on the way back. Nice morning for running, and for riding in afterwards - not sure what, if anything, I should read into the fact that I got most of the green lights on the way into work and almost none of them on the way home.

Didn't sleep that well after yesterday hearing something somewhat unsettling about something that happened in 2014 (albeit less unsettling than it would have been had I heard it in 2014). Didn't have huge expectations for this run but it turned into a pretty nice one after a slow first kilometre - felt like I was flowing along nicely, and dealing with the bumps comfortably, although never all that quick. A little bit of hamstring soreness in the last 10 minutes.

Nothing like some cold showers from the sky to deter people from going to an outdoor pool. It's not really a problem once you're in, and this ended up being a reasonable swim once some initial stiffness had worked its way out, although a bit slower than some recent sessions.

I had thoughts of trying to add the Monday lunchtime run back into my schedule, but my back has been living on the edge a bit for the last few days so it wasn't too surprising that it wasn't feeling up to the job after a morning at the desk.