Training Log Archive: jennycas

And now it's the apple tree's turn to shed its fruit. I'm eating so many apples a day that soon I'm going to be as slim as Pavarotti - who famously believed in a diet where you could eat vast amounts of anything as long as you didn't mix it with any other food at the same time...actually, according to that theory, the weight loss benefits of consuming a whole roast chicken or a pound of butter all at once could be negated by a single apple!

C • Roast chicken and apple? 2

Decided it might be worth the effort of driving across town for an hour in peak traffic, to go to Evalin's sprint training; was a bit disappointed when I got there to find out that we were using the old map rather than the version with all the updates Sarah & I had made about 3 summers ago, but this was still worth taping my ankles for, even though it meant that I was then behind the groups and running the six sprintervals by myself.

Jogs between the finish of one sprinterval and start of the next each time.

Attempt to loosen up knees a bit before the orienteering course. I actually got to notice the houses and gardens, without a map in my hand. Unfortunately, by the time I had finished the warmup, it was raining...

When Meredith and I set the twilight series here in 2014 we held a bonus sprint around the school, which hasn't changed much although some of the garden landscaping is not the same now. My greater problem was that it 's already getting too dark to read the map!

Decided that I had enough time to do the 3-Falls loop since I was certain that tonight's penultimate episode of The Amazing Race would be a non-elimination leg (since it wouldn't make for good TV to have only 2 teams racing to the top of Mt Kosciuszko in Sunday's finale) and therefore it was ok to miss a bit of the broadcast in order to commemorate the last Morialta run of the summer we didn't really have. Embarrassingly, I got overtaken by a walker heading up to Deep View, and in fact this was 2 min slower than 2 months ago but surely I can't be less fit than in Jan - so hopefully it was just that legs are still tired from Wattle Ridge.

C • Amazing (Non-elimination) Race 16

Normally when staying in Penrith I would go for a run around the river, but that wasn't possible because although the Nepean River had receded somewhat and was no longer only about 5m below the freeway bridge, the bike path would have been still well under water (I think most of the suburban flooding in the streets last night was because Peach Tree Creek overflowed into the rich people's houses on its way from Cables Wake Park - a series of waterskiing ponds - to the river itself).

I thought about not going for a run so I wouldn't have to pack wet gear for the flight home, but then reasoned that my shoes were still soaked from Sat anyway, and explored the streets around where we were staying on the north side of the station. The land used to belong to Defence (originally as a WW2 munitions factory) until about 2011 and is now a modern landscaped development of townhouses and apartment blocks with laneways between them and centred around a perfectly round white-picket-fenced 'oval' and a series of ornamental lakes - this area would make a really cool street-O map and could even be used for a sprint, as traffic is residential only.

I definitely owe G a favour for being willing to drive out to Wattle Ridge today and then stay in the car reading a book for a couple of hours while I went orienteering, which took me even longer than I had thought it would because the ground was so soft underfoot, both from last summer's bushfires and from 3 days of heavy rain. I started off ok,being fairly conservative navigationally and taking wide route choices around the sandstone valleys - sometimes unnecessarily wide but anywhere that a gully crossed a rockface it was now a creek with a waterfall, and I'm really glad that I didn't do the W21 course because the wide-around choices weren't really an option at all for them.

After crossing the road I had thought I was heading south across a valley and up a line of bare rock but somehow I made a 90-degree error and ended up at a track junction about 500m east of where I'd intended to be (which would have been ok if I'd decided to take the road around in the first place...). Started to realise that I was really hungry and still had half the course to go. Got a bit distracted by people headless chickening around me at the end of that leg and also partway along another leg (I knew I hadn't gone far enough and needed to be beyond the next knoll, but got suckered in to doing laps of some unmapped cliffs, AKA mapped rocky ground, with other people anyway.

Was running out of my own legs by now too so it was fairly slow going and I did come out to the road on a couple of legs, but possibly not on the ones where I should have done so, so frittered away a bit of time towards the end of the course also but was still horrified to be as much as 18 min behind Tracy - clearly I should have eaten twice as much for breakfast so that I could focus better. And maybe being here for the recent women's coaching weekend could have been somewhat beneficial too?

Back at the hotel, it took me even more rinses (6) to wash the mud out of my O socks than it had done in Scotland...anyway, on the bright side, for once we are not staying at the riverfront caravan park In Penrith. If we were, we would have been evacuated by now!

Hard 4 - Splits

UWS Macarthur, Campbelltown. We flew into Sydney this morning and it was raining heavily (although thankfully, not actually stormy) when we landed. It was raining heavily when we caught the shuttle bus to the hire car place, when we breakfasted in Rockdale, and driving down the M5, so why would it not be raining at the event? I enjoyed the unfamiliar uni campus although took a while to work out how things were mapped (even at 1: 3 000) and made poor route choices on the first 3 controls in the buildings, then went a bit too wide on the legs around the lakes (although they were of course wider than mapped) and after that got a bit better at reading ahead and smoother at running through the little walkways although still fairly tentative with my footing. Glad I read my control descriptions diligently - not sure why they kept deciding to put controls at the top of stairs.

Managed to end up faster than anyone else who was entered in W40 or W45 but that's not saying much, as for some reason everyone from W20-W45 and M40-M65 was on this course. After this, it rained when driving to Penrith, when visiting in-laws in the nursing home and when having dinner with sister-in-law's family at the pub. Now G & I are sitting in bed at the hotel, both Googling footage of Warragamba dam overflowing and wishing we could go and see it but of course the dam wall is closed to stickybeaks. Photos of the ferry wharf at Parramatta being flowed over are impressive too.

Hard 2 - Splits