Training Log Archive: Anvil

Tempo-y terrain run in the 5 Mile Pines. Grabbed an old park course and roughly did that, was surprisingly accurate considering I barely looked at the map.
Felt OK, still a little cautious of the wound whenever running through scrub/bracken - it's still a bit fragile.

Parked at 7 Mile, ran up through the pines to 5 Mile and back. Some very soft sand tracks in places, quicksandesque.

Two cruisy laps of Fiddlers, just tried to keep the legs ticking over and a constant pace. Worked too, the split for the 2 laps was only 15 seconds apart.
Feeling pretty weary though, had that little voice in my head telling me to cut off the major hill on the second lap (I call that voice Smythie), but then went on autopilot for a while and was half way up the hill before I realised it.
Bloody weird day, sunny and warm when I started, then cloudy, then overcast, then in pissed down at the end.

Loop on the mountain, fitted in the new part of the North South track which is pretty nice - will be awesome when they extend it all the way to the Mountain Bike park in Tolosa. Felt pretty good, slowly the fitness is coming back.
Another great night, summer is awesome.

Ridgeway to Fern Tree via Pipeline track, O' Gradys Falls down to Strickland Ave and back up to over Huon Rd.
Felt heavy on the hills, but pretty good on the flats and downhills. Was nice and weary by the end, perfect for...

First summer series event on Knocklofty.
Was looking through last years logs and noticed I was doubling up before or after these, cause well, 3km isn't much of a course.
Aim of the day was planning ahead, had to have the entire next leg planned before - not really hard to do on Knocklofty, but it's good habit to get into.
Lost a minute overunning #9 and was pretty slow through the rough stuff from there to the finish, had only put a bit of tape over the foot wound and it had come off.
Nice night though and a pretty good turn up by the looks of it.

Interval session on the domain. 6min, 4min, 2min, 4min, 6min with increasing pace in the 4s.
Felt good on the first one, but died in the arse on each successive one after that. The last 2 were agony. Have been feeling flat since getting back from St. Helens.
Ilka was runnning well tonight - smashed me on the 2nd 4 minuter!

Had been given the monumental task of organising the Camp Champs. All I knew was that I wanted to have head to head racing and not have a peg relay, so decided to to a pairs relay to give the juniors going to the upcoming NOL weekend a taste of things to come.
Have never set a relay style course with forking so was a good chance to try my hand at it. Whipped up a 2km loop on Chiron (Jasons Task was first choice as it's still fast from being burnt out, but couldn't open the map on my computer) with 3 forks. As it's a tough area put most controls near big catching features or with a big linear feature lead in so the less experienced kids wouldn't struggle.
With each pair doing two legs each the total course length of 8.4km, I predicted the winning team would take about 90 minutes with the slowest taking about 2 hours.
Started off as I thought, Oscar came back first in a touch over 16 minutes with most others coming back within the next 5 minutes. Reports of most of the pack ran to the same first control (F) and people all over the place around R, C and E pleased me, it's what I hoped would happen.
Time ticks on and no second leg runners appear. Finally, an hour later Anna Dowling pops out of the forest - she was about 7 minutes down on the pack. Most concerning, Jessie West, who was walking due to injury is one of the first back on the second leg.
Fortunately quite a decent amount of the 3rd leg runners go out within 5 minutes of each other so they get some more racing practice and they all come back fairly close together.
Final placing,
1. Jessie & Karl (yup, the team with the walker) in a touch over 2 hours
2. Sarah & Anna about 2 minutes back
3. Callum & Jarrah just pipping #4 at the final control another couple of minutes back
4. Oscar & Hannah
Also significant that Jarrah and Hannah were 'new' juniors who hadn't ran on anything but park maps until this week.

In a way it turned out like I expected, I wouldn't really want to shorten the courses any more or make them any less difficult as I wanted the top juniors to do at least half an hour of racing, I just never expected there to be such a big drop off of times.
If I do that format again for a junior camp, I'll start off everyone at once on the 1st and 2nd leg, then have the second runner back tag the first off on the 3rd leg and run it like a regular relay from there.