Training Log Archive: Bruce

new shoes

What a fun night.
I hooked up my laptop to my plasma tv to watch the WOC coverage in 50" widescreen. One window had tractrac for live tracking of the race. I had another 5 windows up with live split times and results. I also had another with the text commentary. It was a pity that there was no audio commentary, but I think that I probably had just as much (if not more) information than the commentators could have given anyway.
I tried the Czech TV feed for a while, but my bandwidth couldn't keep up and it was a little annoying to watch with buffering every 5 or 10 seconds.

Of course I also had Le Tour on Picture in Picture in the corner of the screen. Mark Cavendish won the stage about 5 minutes after Georgio won WOC.

Some observations from the men's race from TracTrac.
Julian lost time on a couple of controls in the rocks before the first radio. Both times he seemed to be within the circle, but on the wrong rockface. Tero Fohr caught him by #9, but Fohr made a mistake at 14 and Julian seemed to get away again. Fohr then seemed to drag him back towards the end.
Many people lost time at 14. It was in the green after a long leg across a constantly sloping hillside with no good attack points. Georgio's run was not perfect early, but once he caught the guy ahead of him, he was simply moving much faster than anyone else, especially after the spectator control.

The terrain was quite different to anything we have in Australia. Our team did especially well to place high.
TracTrac didn't cope well in some parts of the forest. They didn't seem to be able to receive signals from some parts of the forest, particularly on the far side of steep hills.
Georgio seemed to be give the strongest TracTrac unit, as his track was visible for almost all of the course.

3 Airlie St hills, followed by a lap of the tan, and then 3 Killer Loops.
Pretty cold and a bit wet at times.

I ran with a copy of the WOC Middle Distance map from last night. It was almost impossible to read the rock detail on the run. I don't know how they did it in the forest and under pressure!

C • Offset print might have helped. 1

Progressive tempo, increasing the pace every 2kms.
splits 4.13 4.07 4.01 3.45 3.48 3.35 3.46 3.29
Uphill on every odd km and down on the even kms.

Still felt quite stiff on the warm up. I'm still a bit sore from Sunday's long hard run at Lake Eppalock.

Mike's Meander with the Melbourne Midday Milers.
I felt terrible when I started. I even had a very painful neck-ache for a few kms during the run. It all got better after 40 minutes, and I finished very strongly.

Thank god for the rest day last night. I am sure it is scheduled for the spectators (rather than the cyclists). I needed it after a 1:30am bed time on Monday night.

I'm looking forward to the Hollowmen on ABC1 at 9:30pm tonight. Last week's episode was a beauty! That will finish just in time to switch over to SBS and Gabriel Gate's French cooking.

I was still feeling pretty tired and sore from Sunday's race and not really looking forward to a speed session today.
Ended up finding the group and running 2 x 1500m.
5:10 up the hill, about 2 min recovery then 4:46 down again.

Warm up, then warm down including another full lap of the tan.

Very easy recovery run around Carlton Gardens with Zoe, Suse, Owen and Nicola. Hundreds of possums around. We wondered where they all go during the day.

A late night followed urging Cadel up the mountains. I finally got to be at about 1:30am. Torren (3yo) appeared in the living room at about 1:15am, and said that he wanted to watch the tour! I let him stay up for the final 10 minutes of the climb. At least when he is watching Le Tour in 2050 with his kids that he will be able to say he saw the moment when Cadel took the yellow jersey in 2008.

Lake Eppalock 3hr Score Event
I tried to get some Melbourne Midday Milers to enter this event with me as a team, but they all pulled out so I was left to run solo. Most were racing AV the day before, and others could not get a leave pass to spend all day away from home.

A nice long run around Kimbolton Forest and Lake Eppalock maps. I set out with the intention of getting all contols. It certainly looked do-able, although it was hard to tell the distance given the map was 1:20,000. As it turned out, the run was a bit longer than I expected, but I still had plenty of time in reserve.
The competition was very thin. I felt Chris Norwood behind me for the 3 or 4 controls, but then didn't see anyone at all for about 90 minutes until I approach the last few controls.
I ran with quite a high speed early, covering the first 10kms in about 51 minutes. I managed to maintain it fairly well, running sub 6m/km on 30 of the 31 legs.
From about the 17km mark I felt some stiffness in my legs and my stride shortening a bit. The terrain was quite stony here, and it made running at a high pace quite difficult.
Twice I trod on a stone with my right foot and pushed my foot upwards causing a fair bit of ankle pain. However it was ok within 20-30 seconds on both occasions and did not trouble me any further.
My right big toe/ball of foot was a bit sore, especially when turning left. Taping the big toe so that it does not extend fully helped a bit.

After the race I was able to purchase my new pair of VJ Sarva MS shoes. I had been waiting for Kevin to get a new pair in since April and they finally arrived.