Training Log Archive: blairtrewin

Victorian Sprint Championships, 6th. At Haileybury College in Keysborough, a reasonably conventional campus-style area with some complex buildings in three sections interspersed with flat open sections across ovals. Thought the area might be a bit small but it was just big enough to contain the course - you really need a school with both a junior and senior campus (as Haileybury has) to get enough area on school grounds.

Put in a decent effort suggesting that things are continuing to improve a bit - haven't been as close as 1.30 to the front of a sprint for a while (although I don't think Bryan had a brilliant run). Only one very slight wobble, on 6, and that was only worth a few seconds. Clearly I was running at the same speed as Eddie - at no point after #5 were we separated by more than 3 seconds (his eventual margin over me). Jim was also very close to us before a late time loss - indeed as of #13 there was a four-way dead-heat featuring the three of us and Matt Schepisi.

After the run (with a brief detour via a well-known Swedish business to get some lunch) it was on to a review session of the Victorian ALP environment policy committee (much of which consisted of replacing statements in policy documents which said that in its fourth term the Brumby Government will do X). I got there just in time to deal with the section on human interactions with stock and domestic animals (not the sort of interactions that certain ACT-based football teams have been known to get involved in).

Course 1 - Splits

My non-night owl tendencies meant that I missed a bit of excitement in Noumea; a few of my colleagues who stayed around longer than I did after dinner had the dubious pleasures of seeing someone apparently deliberately run down (they're still alive as far as we know). We'll have to wait for Monday's local paper for the full story but I'm led to believe that the full story may well give us a chance to find out what the French is for "the victim was well known to police".

Not a great one to finish off in Noumea. Felt as if there was still some hangover from Thursday, particularly early on when quads were still a bit sore. That eased up in the first 10 minutes but the rest of the run was pretty sluggish, too. Seemed to be more humid than on previous days (and the wind direction was northeast rather than east), but that may have been just my imagination.

At the airport now; back in Australia tonight (all being well, although we're going to be late leaving because Noumea doesn't have the world's most efficient airport: 90 minutes of queueing for check-in, immigration and security).

A morning swim in the hotel pool, although this pool is rather more expansive than the last time I tried this (about 20 metres long in the deep part) and it was therefore a much less dizzying experience, although the lack of a black line was still slightly disconcerting. (At the hotel nearby where our actual workshop is, the pool sprawls over a vast area and would be close to 100 metres long, although irregularly shaped). Quite a pleasant session.

Finished proceedings at lunchtime today, which gave some of us a chance to get into the countryside for a bit, finishing up at a local waterfall - rained a fair bit which took something off the experience, but still worth doing. The pothole density increases in proportion to the distance from Noumea.

C • Waterfall 2

The long run of the week, heading roughly along the shore to the central city and then out onto a peninsula extending west from the city towards Nouville. Settled down reasonably quickly. I was wondering whether my chosen route was a good one in the course of a stretch through the port and then along a road with some traffic and not much of a verge, but towards the far end got off the main road and into the back blocks, something different to what I've seen so far. This is shack country - New Caledonia's per-capita GDP is similar to New Zealand's but a lot of it is locked up in the mining industry and doesn't find its way to the broader population - and no white faces were to be seen (other than my own), but the people were friendly and the numerous dogs didn't give chase (or even, with one exception, bark).

Turning around meant going into the wind, which felt cooler if slightly more demanding. To this point the run had been going well, occasionally bordering on very well, but by 80 minutes I was feeling like I was starting to tire, and ten minutes later the tank was more or less empty - whether of water or food I'm not quite sure (I suspect the former, although it is the first time for a while I've tried to do a long run before breakfast on nothing more substantial than a few sweets). At least by then I was past the last hill, but the last quarter of the run, and especially the last couple of kilometres, was a case of barely hanging on. Didn't have a lot of energy through the rest of the day.

Someone at morning tea (in a discussion about songs that get stuck in one's head) mentioned the Scatman, something which I will permanently associate with the WOC 1995 opening ceremony (it was the backing music to the performance of the local police gymnastic team, which featured a couple of German cops using a police car as a vaulting horse). The ceremony itself was a bit of a debacle - it was on the evening after the long distance qualification and the day before the final in a town 40 kilometres away from where everyone was staying, and was therefore attended almost exclusively by people who'd missed out on the final (in those days the maximum team size was five and four could run the long, so there weren't the extras doing other events that there would be now). The timing also meant my WOC career was, as it turned out, over before the opening ceremony.

A fairly standard interval session while I'm travelling, 10x1 minute (approx) on a 2-minute cycle. Often I let myself drift in these but today I was putting a pretty solid effort in, picking up pace nicely after the first couple of reps, continuing the encouraging signs from yesterday. Along the Baie des Citrons foreshore but the showers meant not many people were out.

Warm up/down from the intervals session. Slept poorly last night - clearly my system doesn't cope with evening Coca-Cola any better than evening coffee. It didn't affect the run but I hit the wall this afternoon - certainly wouldn't have wanted to be trying to run after work today.

For the first half this was the same old, same old, a steady but not especially inspired exploration of some residential suburbs of Noumea (via a fairly convoluted route because not many of the back streets link together). That part of the route was designed in the name of being reasonably warmed up before hitting the day's (and week so far's) major climb, a couple of solid kilometres up the Ouro Toro hill at the back of where we're staying. Much to my surprise, I suddenly learned how to run up hills again about a quarter of the way up this climb, and held that strength together to the top before embarking on a fun descent down some sometimes rough and ready bush tracks through dry but thick vegetation (no potential maps here). Ended up as my best run for several weeks, at least.

One semi-derelict house I passed had a banner on it 'Not For Sale' and the name of a clan - not sure if this was to do with indigenous land rights or not. Things have settled down a fair bit in this part of the world since the conflict of the mid- and late 1980s (although four people were killed - I'm not sure how - during a protest last year on one of the outer islands against, of all things, increases in airfares to Noumea; not sure whether or not this is an advance on the incident a few years back in which Afghanistan's transport minister was beaten to death by a mob at Kabul airport after a flight was delayed). There's a referendum due in 2014 in which the options will be the status quo, greater autonomy or full independence; the talk is that the second option is the one most likely to get up.

And part of dinner discussion last night was that one of those present had recently performed duties well above and beyond an aunt's call of duty - taking her nieces to a One Direction concert (or more precisely, to scream outside a One Direction concert they didn't have tickets for). I'm still trying to work out exactly what responsibilities I will have as an uncle but I think we can assume they won't involve whatever the 2025 equivalent of One Direction is (even if Cassie has a daughter at some point in the future). Really, if the stories my mother (who was 13 in 1963) are anything to go by, the reaction of the relevant demographic now doesn't differ significantly from what their grandmothers were doing when the Beatles and Rolling Stones turned up.

C • 1963 4

C • Ouen Toro 2

Managed to hold myself back in the conference-food-consumption department during the day and was rewarded with a run which, after the first few minutes, picked up where this morning left off - it's always a bit slower in the dark, but felt smooth and the hill towards the end passed almost effortlessly. This morning was clearly worth a lot for confidence; hopefully it's an indication that a corner has been turned.

Pretty windy tonight, especially on the exposed eastern side of the peninsula. One positive aspect of this is that the drip which was landing on the pipe outside my window last night will become someone else's problem tonight.

A bit like Coogee, from this end of Noumea there are three runs: down to the beach and turn left, down to the beach and turn right, or up the hill. I did (a) yesterday, (b) today and plan to do (c) tomorrow (hopefully not suffering as much from conference overeating syndrome as I am at the moment I write this).

This was a reasonably similar run to yesterday - tight early but warmed up OK after the first 10 minutes or so, whereupon it turned into a steady but not especially inspired run. I'll hopefully be more used to the humidty by the time I try to go long in it in the second half of the week. (Still, that's good practice for Darwin - unless we get a decent southeast surge, and those start to become fewer and further between by the second week of August, the conditions this week are pretty similar to what I'm expecting there at a similar time of day).

Quieter than I expected for a Monday and then I realised that today is the New Caledonian equivalent of Melbourne Cup Monday (tomorrow is a public holiday).

And the hotel room shower seems to have almost as many knobs and dials on it as the plane we flew here in.