Endomondo Running Workout: 27.49 km in 3h:24m:26s
Phew, this was tough. One thing about trail running is that when you get tired, the whole business becomes exponentially difficult; I lost count of the number of times I fell over in the last 7 km. It's incredibly difficult to just keep lifting the feet high enough to stay out of trouble, and this was a rocky trail. So rocky, in fact, that there were plenty of sections where walking was the only option. Tremendous concentration is required; there is nothing automatic, no sections where you can rest in the rhythm of regular movement. I dredged up a mental trick from my Wilke days on a production line; lower your expectations of time (Wilke's) or distance (trail) past and the finish line (lunch break) arrives unexpectedly sooner. It's a simple trick but it still seems to work. Not that it makes much logical sense.
Anyway, all I got from the falls was a couple of grazes on the legs and arms. I haven't quite overcome the nervousness associated with breaking a shoulder on a fall, but it is receding. In point of fact, I'm a lot stronger now than 18 months ago so I think that I have more resources to minimise the impact of a trip. These falls are more heavy stumbles than full on falls.
The upside of trail running is of course the fact that the bush is a nicer place to be than the side of a highway. I haven't been in the Royal National Park many times (maybe once?); it's another reminder, in the South rather than the North, of the way that Sydney wraps itself in bush. Another, more subtle difference from Melbourne. The ocean vs the bay smacks one in the face, but the bush vs the agricultural hinterland is not so immediately obvious if you are living in Marrickville. I think I've said it before - I've thought it before - and I'll say it again: I might have taken geography a lot more seriously if I'd grown up in Sydney. Sydney's geographical complexity is more visible than Melbourne's.
The out-and-back loop we ran has as its spine Lady Carrington Dve - it's a fire trail, despite the name - which runs alongside the Hacking River. We actually ran in three completely different environments; eucalyptus forest (by which I mean tall trees), rain forest (much wetter, darker and cooler) and then, on the way back along the top of some unnamed ridge, the kind of stunted, scrubby, wind-beaten brush that I associate with exposed landscapes. (If you click on the link above, you can select the satellite option, rather than the map option, and the colours will paint the picture for you). Likewise the rocks seemed to be in three distinctive categories, broad horizontal strata, tightly packed wavy folded strata, and amorphous boulders ranging from the bloody enormous to the not-small-enough-to-avoid-tripping-over. I'm afraid I can't offer any more technically precise description of the landscape. Apart from Lady Carrington Drive, though, it was substantially empty and judging from the extent to which the trails were overgrown, empty is its normal state.
Saturday, October 29, 2011
Sunday, October 23, 2011
Hawkesbury Canoe Classic
Canoe Race: paddling 102.55 km in 18h:00m:44s
This is the final of the marathon canoeing trifecta; interestingly enough, we were sharing trailers with a team who are doing the 2011 Hawkesbury Classic as the start of theirs. They will do the Murray in December & finish with the Yukon next year. For obscure reasons, we're doing the shortest race last. In fact, there are only four of the Yukon team left, Liz, Angie, Tracey & Sue. The rest have retired from marathon paddling. Dilettantes :-)
This time the boat was an outrigger, the training boat for the Yukon. It's not so easy to transport; it has to be broken down into pieces, transported and then re-assembled. The aku (the 2 arms holding the actual outrigger) and the anu (the outrigger itself) are tied on with nylon rope, re-purposed inner tubes and/or gaffer tape. It seems weird, in a way, to be so low tech on a modern (fibreglass) boat, but the tying provides the right balance of strength and flexibility. A mechanical solution that worked as well would be hugely more expensive. (And these boats are already ridiculously expensive).
We stripped the boat down on Friday night & loaded it on to the trailer fro transport Saturday AM. Liz and I drove up to Windsor Friday night to spread the stress a little thinner, so at least on Saturday we woke up near the race start. One thing noticeably different about this event is that, because it's squeezed in over a weekend, there's no real chance to dedicate preparation time for it. Packing, sorting, checking, everything is squeezed in around work & whatever else. With, say, the Yukon, we had 4 days doing nothing except getting organised for the boat. Here, we had to be at the marshalling yards at 11:00 to re-rig the boat for the scrutineers. They didn't end up turning up until after 15:00; as is normal for these events, the big boats get - well, overlooked, so we spent 4 hours just hanging around a very hot (29 degrees) not particularly shady park.
Liz got bitten on her thigh by a bull-ant, not at all the right preparation for 18 hours of paddling. Sigh; nature, not entirely wonderful.
To the non-paddler, we might look like we're pretty serious, but in the marathon paddling community we are rank novices. People who do this regularly know where to park for maximum shade and minimum walking; they have fans, chairs, canopies. If we'd been scrutineered early, we'd probably have headed off to sit in an air-conditioned pub until the race start; regulars know that that is all an idle dream, so they bring their own waiting spaces. If you want to understand serious; one guy was paddling in his 35th instance of this race, at 70. Probably the oldest competitor was the 78 year old woman paddling with her 74 year old brother. It didn't look like it was their first race, either. Anyway, finally, paperwork and hanging around finished, the boat took off at 1630, in the "social" Brooklyn-or-bust version of the event. Cue final land crew meeting. Andrew off to buy water - I remember the Murray -, Brooke off to pick up Scott and swap cars, Antonia (Tony) to pick up some groceries, and Martin to head off to Cattai, the 1st checkpoint. It doesn't matter how much planning you do, there's a few last minute things that have to be done. My last last minute thing was to pick up driving instructions for the checkpoints, lucky since Tony was using the supplied GPS coordinates, and at Cattai they ended her up on the wrong side of the river.
This is just a glimpse of the entries lined up waiting for the start; most of the boats aren't very big ... More than 530 paddlers were entered, so that must be around 300+ boats, because there were certainly plenty of singles to offset the larger boats. More than 40 withdrew - even though it's significantly the shortest of the events we've paddled in in the last year, the night aspect, combined with the tides, makes it a long way from easy.
I don't have photos from the checkpoints. Cattai was not particularly significant; no-one stops there unless there is some mini-crisis, something overlooked, an
equipment failure. It was still light when the team passed through, looking good, and ahead of schedule. We had a lot of problems working out a timetable, primarily because of the tides which are significantly less predictable in their details, especially up a river, than I expected. Plus, there's the problem of the relationship between the tide and the current; plus the question of how many & how longs the breaks are going to be. We did have a pretty good idea of pace from the training runs, and I knocked up a spreadsheet to model a few possibilities. It was sort of OK - the tide was stronger than I modelled, the team took all their breaks at the checkpoints, we actually missed them arriving at Wiseman's Ferry (somewhat embarrassing) by 10 minutes, although at least we had the food hot once we tracked them down - but I was right to about 10 minutes with their arrival at Mooney-Mooney.
We proceeded in a leisurely fashion, pausing for a picnic dinner at Cattai, before heading to Sackville. At Sackville we had to park on a football oval that was, oddly to my mind, at the top of a hill. From there it was onto a minibus shutttle to the edge of the river in the middle of a caravan park. The beach for pulling up boats was about 20 meters long. 300+ boats; 20 meters. Something of a challenge. There's a standing instruction for the HCC land crews to not use lights so as to not to disturb the night vision of the paddlers. Did I mention the nearly vertical sand bank leading down to the aforementioned beach? Sackville was a pretty fair impersonation of total chaos, and we hadn't managed to bring all the right bags for all the paddlers, so it was a bit tense. No-one could find the toilet, a couple of people nearly broke their ankles getting up the bank in the hopes of finding a toilet and we had a lot of trouble getting the boat off the mud - a big cheer here for Brooke who had to hurl herself into the water both to get the boat in and out. Then we had to grab everything out of the mud and queue for a minibus back, re-pack the cars in the dark and head off to Wiseman's Ferry. It sounds pretty bad, and it was pretty hectic, but the fact is that the Hawkesbury is NOT a very accessible river, and all the access is on private land. Really - and especially at Wiseman's - it's pretty damn generous of the caravan park inhabitants to put up with a nighttime invasion of 300-odd boats, 500+ paddlers, and probably 400-ish landcrew.
We did a much better job of setting up at Wisemans Ferry, although we had to park a long way from the beach an lug a lot of stuff a long way. Most of us managed to get an hour's sleep; somehow though, while cooking, we managed to miss the boat number being called as it passed through the checkpoint. (Due to the tide they arrived 15 minutes before the earliest point I thought was possible, so we didn't have anyone down at the landing) Fortunately the magic of mobile technology reunited us with the team, and apart from Liz missing some gloves, it was a very successful turnaround. Probably took a bit long, but everyone left in a very optimistic mood. They decided not to stop at the final pre-finish checkpoint (Spencer), which was a BIG relief to me, because the Spence checkpoint looked worse on paper than Sackville. Also, some rather smart navigation by Scott & Brooke meant that we could drive to Mooney Mooney without crossing Wiseman's Ferry, which, you can imagine, was somewhat busy. Mind you, it was a scary, scary road. Some of the hairpins had a recommended speed of 5 kph, and they were not joking. Any faster and you were on the wrong side of the road. OK, not a big problem at 4AM, but I'd hate to go along there at peak hour. It's not that easy to do 5 kph in a diesel in 2nd, and it's not that easy to change down into 1st.
We got into Mooney Mooney just in time to miss the last 2 spaces in the car park ( I can say that because Martin & Tony got them). I probably should have slept at this stage, but I find it hard to sleep at the end of a race. We had a great setup, we commandeered a picnic table next to the coffee tent, so I wandered around keeping an eye on things.
There was a dramatic moment when their number went up on the "30 minutes a way" board, but it turned out to be a transcription error. I didn't think they could be in before 9:00 AM, and 9:30 was my official estimate, but I wan't quite sure about the tide. They figured to catch some of the late low tide; it was a question of how much of it, and how strong it would be. They'd got in to Wiseman's very early, absolutely at their best possible time, so I didn't want to miss them twice in one race.
Fianlly at 9:00 we got the word they were 30 minutes out, and they really were quick in that last stretch. Sunrise, and the sight of the finish must have woken them up. In the end, their time was 17 hours, 4 minutes; 2 hours better than our pre-race estimates. A big success.
This is the final of the marathon canoeing trifecta; interestingly enough, we were sharing trailers with a team who are doing the 2011 Hawkesbury Classic as the start of theirs. They will do the Murray in December & finish with the Yukon next year. For obscure reasons, we're doing the shortest race last. In fact, there are only four of the Yukon team left, Liz, Angie, Tracey & Sue. The rest have retired from marathon paddling. Dilettantes :-)
This time the boat was an outrigger, the training boat for the Yukon. It's not so easy to transport; it has to be broken down into pieces, transported and then re-assembled. The aku (the 2 arms holding the actual outrigger) and the anu (the outrigger itself) are tied on with nylon rope, re-purposed inner tubes and/or gaffer tape. It seems weird, in a way, to be so low tech on a modern (fibreglass) boat, but the tying provides the right balance of strength and flexibility. A mechanical solution that worked as well would be hugely more expensive. (And these boats are already ridiculously expensive).We stripped the boat down on Friday night & loaded it on to the trailer fro transport Saturday AM. Liz and I drove up to Windsor Friday night to spread the stress a little thinner, so at least on Saturday we woke up near the race start. One thing noticeably different about this event is that, because it's squeezed in over a weekend, there's no real chance to dedicate preparation time for it. Packing, sorting, checking, everything is squeezed in around work & whatever else. With, say, the Yukon, we had 4 days doing nothing except getting organised for the boat. Here, we had to be at the marshalling yards at 11:00 to re-rig the boat for the scrutineers. They didn't end up turning up until after 15:00; as is normal for these events, the big boats get - well, overlooked, so we spent 4 hours just hanging around a very hot (29 degrees) not particularly shady park.
Liz got bitten on her thigh by a bull-ant, not at all the right preparation for 18 hours of paddling. Sigh; nature, not entirely wonderful.
To the non-paddler, we might look like we're pretty serious, but in the marathon paddling community we are rank novices. People who do this regularly know where to park for maximum shade and minimum walking; they have fans, chairs, canopies. If we'd been scrutineered early, we'd probably have headed off to sit in an air-conditioned pub until the race start; regulars know that that is all an idle dream, so they bring their own waiting spaces. If you want to understand serious; one guy was paddling in his 35th instance of this race, at 70. Probably the oldest competitor was the 78 year old woman paddling with her 74 year old brother. It didn't look like it was their first race, either. Anyway, finally, paperwork and hanging around finished, the boat took off at 1630, in the "social" Brooklyn-or-bust version of the event. Cue final land crew meeting. Andrew off to buy water - I remember the Murray -, Brooke off to pick up Scott and swap cars, Antonia (Tony) to pick up some groceries, and Martin to head off to Cattai, the 1st checkpoint. It doesn't matter how much planning you do, there's a few last minute things that have to be done. My last last minute thing was to pick up driving instructions for the checkpoints, lucky since Tony was using the supplied GPS coordinates, and at Cattai they ended her up on the wrong side of the river.
This is just a glimpse of the entries lined up waiting for the start; most of the boats aren't very big ... More than 530 paddlers were entered, so that must be around 300+ boats, because there were certainly plenty of singles to offset the larger boats. More than 40 withdrew - even though it's significantly the shortest of the events we've paddled in in the last year, the night aspect, combined with the tides, makes it a long way from easy.I don't have photos from the checkpoints. Cattai was not particularly significant; no-one stops there unless there is some mini-crisis, something overlooked, an
We proceeded in a leisurely fashion, pausing for a picnic dinner at Cattai, before heading to Sackville. At Sackville we had to park on a football oval that was, oddly to my mind, at the top of a hill. From there it was onto a minibus shutttle to the edge of the river in the middle of a caravan park. The beach for pulling up boats was about 20 meters long. 300+ boats; 20 meters. Something of a challenge. There's a standing instruction for the HCC land crews to not use lights so as to not to disturb the night vision of the paddlers. Did I mention the nearly vertical sand bank leading down to the aforementioned beach? Sackville was a pretty fair impersonation of total chaos, and we hadn't managed to bring all the right bags for all the paddlers, so it was a bit tense. No-one could find the toilet, a couple of people nearly broke their ankles getting up the bank in the hopes of finding a toilet and we had a lot of trouble getting the boat off the mud - a big cheer here for Brooke who had to hurl herself into the water both to get the boat in and out. Then we had to grab everything out of the mud and queue for a minibus back, re-pack the cars in the dark and head off to Wiseman's Ferry. It sounds pretty bad, and it was pretty hectic, but the fact is that the Hawkesbury is NOT a very accessible river, and all the access is on private land. Really - and especially at Wiseman's - it's pretty damn generous of the caravan park inhabitants to put up with a nighttime invasion of 300-odd boats, 500+ paddlers, and probably 400-ish landcrew.
We did a much better job of setting up at Wisemans Ferry, although we had to park a long way from the beach an lug a lot of stuff a long way. Most of us managed to get an hour's sleep; somehow though, while cooking, we managed to miss the boat number being called as it passed through the checkpoint. (Due to the tide they arrived 15 minutes before the earliest point I thought was possible, so we didn't have anyone down at the landing) Fortunately the magic of mobile technology reunited us with the team, and apart from Liz missing some gloves, it was a very successful turnaround. Probably took a bit long, but everyone left in a very optimistic mood. They decided not to stop at the final pre-finish checkpoint (Spencer), which was a BIG relief to me, because the Spence checkpoint looked worse on paper than Sackville. Also, some rather smart navigation by Scott & Brooke meant that we could drive to Mooney Mooney without crossing Wiseman's Ferry, which, you can imagine, was somewhat busy. Mind you, it was a scary, scary road. Some of the hairpins had a recommended speed of 5 kph, and they were not joking. Any faster and you were on the wrong side of the road. OK, not a big problem at 4AM, but I'd hate to go along there at peak hour. It's not that easy to do 5 kph in a diesel in 2nd, and it's not that easy to change down into 1st.We got into Mooney Mooney just in time to miss the last 2 spaces in the car park ( I can say that because Martin & Tony got them). I probably should have slept at this stage, but I find it hard to sleep at the end of a race. We had a great setup, we commandeered a picnic table next to the coffee tent, so I wandered around keeping an eye on things.
Fianlly at 9:00 we got the word they were 30 minutes out, and they really were quick in that last stretch. Sunrise, and the sight of the finish must have woken them up. In the end, their time was 17 hours, 4 minutes; 2 hours better than our pre-race estimates. A big success.
 |
| Good to finish. Smart move to sleep before driving. |
Published with Blogger-droid v1.7.4
Thursday, October 13, 2011
End to end TVT
Endomondo Running Workout: 18.57 km in 2h:05m:00s
Sharon and I went on a good run at a steady pace (both still post-marathon) up past the waterfall and along cup-and-saucer creek and eventually by a bit of black magic that I didn't quite understand and couldn't really guarantee to replicate onto Bexley Rd and down to the M7 (or maybe the M5) where the TVT (two valley track for new viewers) actually begins. Or ends. Anyway, this was good because I've only been able to find half of the TVT whenever I've gone out on my own, and running both valleys is obviously better. I'm looking to increase the amount of trail running, and even though it's not the most difficult, sorry, technical, trail in Sydney, it's not a road. It has rocks, hills, trees and water crossings. And some rather poor signposting, meaning it's almost impossible not to get lost. Not so badly lost that you can't get un-lost fairly easily though. Of course, in addition to being off road, in summer it being under-tree is a huge bonus as well, typically 5 or so degrees cooler along the track compared to the road.
We met a few people on the track; there's a definite moral hierarchy involved with being a track user; clearly, judging by the disapproving looks and lack of cheer, bird-watchers believe themselves to be higher up the hierarchy than runners. Walkers don't appear to be particularly morally sensitive, but dog walkers all clearly have guilty consciences. Cyclists, thankfully, aren't seen.
Tracks are interesting things. Since I was eleven, I've been thinking about them; how they form, how they evolve, how they disappear. People follow each other, but in the beginning there aren't many clues about where to go. So "follow" isn't quite the right word. A track comes into being as an average of new attempts to go somewhere. Changes happen through a mixture of accident and enhancement. I'm thinking about this because at the point where we got lost, the one track has developed two offshoots. One of those I've seen before, but it is much deeper now. More people have pushed along it, each one perhaps a little further before deciding that it is the wrong track and turning around. One day perhaps it will no longer be the wrong track, because its end point will be somewhere useful. The other false path we followed is new to me (I've been lost at this point before). As you'd expect from a new path, it's quite short. But it will also probably continue to grow.
Both of these false tracks came into being, presumably, because the bush mimicked the first metre of the continuation of the real track, leading people astray. Impressive mimicry, when you consider that the real track is there, it's by no means invisible or overgrown; when you find it after trying the two dead ends you wonder why you didn't immediately see it.
Further along, though, someone;s decided to take a hand and run a bulldozer through the bushland. Yes, well, that's a track too.
This reminds me, suddenly, of a conversation I overheard, and some thoughts I had thunk after Jabulani. One guy was complaining, moderately heatedly, that he would have been competitive in the 46 km event if it hadn't been for the incredibly bad signage. He'd had to wait, on several occasions apparently, for someone to catch up with him and show him the way. Like me, it was his first run in the National Park. The organiser was a bit surprised; the track was well signposted, he said. I was ambivalent; my own view was that the directions the organisers had provided were pretty sub-par; they were directions written by someone who knew the route too well and didn't have the imagination to look at it with a stranger's anxious eyes. But having said that, even though I had a lot of doubts, I was able to follow these sub-par directions to the finish. Perhaps this complaining runner just wasn't accustomed to reading the signs of the bush; perhaps he read them in a different language, coming from a country or a region where the bush is not the same. Perhaps, short of providing every runner with one end of Ariadne's thread, it is impossible to map an unequivocal path through the bush.
Sharon and I went on a good run at a steady pace (both still post-marathon) up past the waterfall and along cup-and-saucer creek and eventually by a bit of black magic that I didn't quite understand and couldn't really guarantee to replicate onto Bexley Rd and down to the M7 (or maybe the M5) where the TVT (two valley track for new viewers) actually begins. Or ends. Anyway, this was good because I've only been able to find half of the TVT whenever I've gone out on my own, and running both valleys is obviously better. I'm looking to increase the amount of trail running, and even though it's not the most difficult, sorry, technical, trail in Sydney, it's not a road. It has rocks, hills, trees and water crossings. And some rather poor signposting, meaning it's almost impossible not to get lost. Not so badly lost that you can't get un-lost fairly easily though. Of course, in addition to being off road, in summer it being under-tree is a huge bonus as well, typically 5 or so degrees cooler along the track compared to the road.
We met a few people on the track; there's a definite moral hierarchy involved with being a track user; clearly, judging by the disapproving looks and lack of cheer, bird-watchers believe themselves to be higher up the hierarchy than runners. Walkers don't appear to be particularly morally sensitive, but dog walkers all clearly have guilty consciences. Cyclists, thankfully, aren't seen.
Tracks are interesting things. Since I was eleven, I've been thinking about them; how they form, how they evolve, how they disappear. People follow each other, but in the beginning there aren't many clues about where to go. So "follow" isn't quite the right word. A track comes into being as an average of new attempts to go somewhere. Changes happen through a mixture of accident and enhancement. I'm thinking about this because at the point where we got lost, the one track has developed two offshoots. One of those I've seen before, but it is much deeper now. More people have pushed along it, each one perhaps a little further before deciding that it is the wrong track and turning around. One day perhaps it will no longer be the wrong track, because its end point will be somewhere useful. The other false path we followed is new to me (I've been lost at this point before). As you'd expect from a new path, it's quite short. But it will also probably continue to grow.
Both of these false tracks came into being, presumably, because the bush mimicked the first metre of the continuation of the real track, leading people astray. Impressive mimicry, when you consider that the real track is there, it's by no means invisible or overgrown; when you find it after trying the two dead ends you wonder why you didn't immediately see it.
Further along, though, someone;s decided to take a hand and run a bulldozer through the bushland. Yes, well, that's a track too.
This reminds me, suddenly, of a conversation I overheard, and some thoughts I had thunk after Jabulani. One guy was complaining, moderately heatedly, that he would have been competitive in the 46 km event if it hadn't been for the incredibly bad signage. He'd had to wait, on several occasions apparently, for someone to catch up with him and show him the way. Like me, it was his first run in the National Park. The organiser was a bit surprised; the track was well signposted, he said. I was ambivalent; my own view was that the directions the organisers had provided were pretty sub-par; they were directions written by someone who knew the route too well and didn't have the imagination to look at it with a stranger's anxious eyes. But having said that, even though I had a lot of doubts, I was able to follow these sub-par directions to the finish. Perhaps this complaining runner just wasn't accustomed to reading the signs of the bush; perhaps he read them in a different language, coming from a country or a region where the bush is not the same. Perhaps, short of providing every runner with one end of Ariadne's thread, it is impossible to map an unequivocal path through the bush.
Sunday, October 2, 2011
Endomondo Running Workout
Endomondo Running Workout: 12.57 km
A gentle run, provoked by the act that it was raining somewhat more heavily than I was prepared for. Plus it was extraordinarily cold.
Nothing much to report, except perhaps another fine example of Sydney's civil (so-called) engineering. The bridge that carries Canterbury Rd. over the Cook's River has what seems a lot like an afterthought path under it, in that it's very low and narrow; there's also a head high storm water drain outlet, which in heavy rain does quite a good impression of a fire hose.
It reminds me of a joke - sadly not a repeatable one.
(This brief entry brought to you by the Dvorak keyboard)
A gentle run, provoked by the act that it was raining somewhat more heavily than I was prepared for. Plus it was extraordinarily cold.
Nothing much to report, except perhaps another fine example of Sydney's civil (so-called) engineering. The bridge that carries Canterbury Rd. over the Cook's River has what seems a lot like an afterthought path under it, in that it's very low and narrow; there's also a head high storm water drain outlet, which in heavy rain does quite a good impression of a fire hose.
It reminds me of a joke - sadly not a repeatable one.
(This brief entry brought to you by the Dvorak keyboard)
Monday, September 19, 2011
Sydney Marathon
Endomondo Running Workout
This might be the last Endomondo report because finally I am convinced that it has been overstating my distances significantly. This map of the race ends in Pyrmont, at about the 37km mark, where the battery ran out. Note that Endomondo shows the distance as 41+ km; that's really inexcusable, even though I know that the GPS signal around Sydney is not so reliable. RunKeeper, which I have been trialling, has it at 38km, which is much closer. Anyway, I'll see. One nice feature in the Endomondo package is the heart rate in the statistics graph; however, that is why the battery on the phone went flat. Possibly the final straw for the phone was lending it to a distressed co-runner so he could call his wife to give a revised ETA - but I think it would be a pity not to be able to do that.
Anyway, on to the race. I can't really decide how disappointed I am; after all, there are no sheep stations at stake and the finish time is respectable (<6 min/km pace). But I did really want to push down below 3:45, and I didn't really think there was much risk of not beating 4:00. Now I know better.
A number of factors went into the result. Clearly I went out too hard; I can see looking at the statistics that for most of the first 10 km I was running well below 5 min pace. That is something I would never have predicted, and in fact, I was running with an event pacer in an attempt to control my early-event enthusiasm. What I wanted to do was run at exactly 5 minute pace for the whole event, accepting that I might slow down over the last 10 km. I suspect that those early 4:30 kilometers came back to haunt me. Lesson one: only trust your own pacing. (Actually, that was a bit of a technology failure as well, I had a wireless phone earpiece to tell me the pace - the phone contains the GPS unit- but I could never get it to stick in the ear, so I left it out on race day. Anyway, I guess it would have murdered the battery even sooner) I don't have much "feel" for how fast I'm running; 5 minute kilometers are my normal training pace & some days they feel slow & easy and other days they feel like hard work. I used to run with a wristwatch heart rate monitor, but its sensor has given out & while the phone has picked up the slack with the HRM, I don't like running with the phone in my hand. Apart from anything else, all that sweat wouldn't be good for it. The good thing about the HRM on the wrist was I could just set a heart rate target and hold that regardless of speed; heart rate correlates pretty closely with comfort, so it's quite effective. Whatever, I need to work on pace management and I guess ideally a reliable equipment free judgement is the best - although, when exhausted, I'm not sure that there is such a thing as reliable judgement.
What you can see from the chart is that up to about 32 km I was sort of going OK; slowing down through 5:30 towards 6:00, and struggling a bit with the hills. Then at about 34 km I had to stop running simply out of leg fatigue & start walking, so I did that for about 3km and managed - not easy - to start running again. I'm a bit annoyed with the failure of the GPS, because I would really like to know how fast I managed to cover the last 5 km.
The heat didn't help. I drank lots of water, so I wasn't dehydrated (I usually start babbling to myself in Chinese when I get dehydrated, so that's quite an easy empirical test) but I was certainly hot. I don't know how being hot slows you down from a metabolic point of view, but I might conduct some research into that. Particularly the Pyrmont section - the last third of the race - is pretty much pure cement & asphalt and collects a lot of heat from the surrounding buildings. My feeling is that 25 degrees in the shade would easily be over 30 running up the Western Distributor. It looks on the map as though there'd be a relieving view of water in Cockle Bay, but in fact you're running along inside the concrete walls that edge the freeway and the water doesn't really impinge on the consciousness. For a city which prides itself on the picturesque, this marathon route is distinctly ordinary from a visual perspective. A couple of 18th century style "views", but for the rest, street, and pretty drab street to boot. Curiously, in Canberra I had sore feet from, I suspect, the rain, a problem I had never encountered in training, while here I had hot feet, a problem I've never had in training before either. I've run in hotter conditions than Sunday, although not often and not as far. (That's how I know what I do when I'm dehydrated) Apart from the overheating though, the shoes (same model as Canberra) and the socks (new and wholly synthetic) were very satisfactory. No blisters, no chafing, no bruised toes. In fact, other than the kind of stiffness you'd expect after a solid run, the body is in pretty good shape. In particular the knees are completely free of pain; last Thursday I was worrying that I couldn't rest them enough before the race.
I think the nutrition plan was OK; the stopping wasn't, so far as I am any judge, related to energy available. I didn't actually stop, rather slowed to a walk until my legs felt up to running again. Not that I have anything other than apocryphal information about what a nutrition failure would feel like.
On the principle that you learn from your mistakes, there's a fair bit to take out of this. One tricky thing about running is that you can't really modify one parameter at a time and see how much impact it has. Prior to the next big run - as yet undecided - I'll be making a number of changes. Hopefully one or more of the them will get be back down under 4 hours.
I've thought of a way to compare marathon results. I think it works quite well for the "average" runner - it wouldn't, perhaps, work so well for extremes. It works like this; Canberra, 55, 50, 57; Sydney, 54, 49, 54. They are the percentiles for field, men, age group respectively, and in fact the age group in Sydney was 50-54 compared with Canberra's 50-59, so it's not quite a four-square comparison. But it's not bad, I think, and it equalises out the course & the environment. Clearly Sydney was not as good, but equally the difference isn't enormous.
Pictures can be seen here: Link to pictures...
It's probably obvious - certainly in retrospect - but cumulative marathon training doesn't make much difference. I was expecting an additional 5 months training to automatically improve my performance, but now I think that maintaining training at the same level, which is pretty much what I did, wasn't/isn't likely to make much difference over a long run. I probably need to find a coach, and possibly need to find more training time - not likely - if I'm going to get down to 3:30. (The winner in my division in Sydney ran 3:04, for comparison. Just in case anyone thinks 3:30 is unrealistic)
This might be the last Endomondo report because finally I am convinced that it has been overstating my distances significantly. This map of the race ends in Pyrmont, at about the 37km mark, where the battery ran out. Note that Endomondo shows the distance as 41+ km; that's really inexcusable, even though I know that the GPS signal around Sydney is not so reliable. RunKeeper, which I have been trialling, has it at 38km, which is much closer. Anyway, I'll see. One nice feature in the Endomondo package is the heart rate in the statistics graph; however, that is why the battery on the phone went flat. Possibly the final straw for the phone was lending it to a distressed co-runner so he could call his wife to give a revised ETA - but I think it would be a pity not to be able to do that.
Anyway, on to the race. I can't really decide how disappointed I am; after all, there are no sheep stations at stake and the finish time is respectable (<6 min/km pace). But I did really want to push down below 3:45, and I didn't really think there was much risk of not beating 4:00. Now I know better.
A number of factors went into the result. Clearly I went out too hard; I can see looking at the statistics that for most of the first 10 km I was running well below 5 min pace. That is something I would never have predicted, and in fact, I was running with an event pacer in an attempt to control my early-event enthusiasm. What I wanted to do was run at exactly 5 minute pace for the whole event, accepting that I might slow down over the last 10 km. I suspect that those early 4:30 kilometers came back to haunt me. Lesson one: only trust your own pacing. (Actually, that was a bit of a technology failure as well, I had a wireless phone earpiece to tell me the pace - the phone contains the GPS unit- but I could never get it to stick in the ear, so I left it out on race day. Anyway, I guess it would have murdered the battery even sooner) I don't have much "feel" for how fast I'm running; 5 minute kilometers are my normal training pace & some days they feel slow & easy and other days they feel like hard work. I used to run with a wristwatch heart rate monitor, but its sensor has given out & while the phone has picked up the slack with the HRM, I don't like running with the phone in my hand. Apart from anything else, all that sweat wouldn't be good for it. The good thing about the HRM on the wrist was I could just set a heart rate target and hold that regardless of speed; heart rate correlates pretty closely with comfort, so it's quite effective. Whatever, I need to work on pace management and I guess ideally a reliable equipment free judgement is the best - although, when exhausted, I'm not sure that there is such a thing as reliable judgement.
What you can see from the chart is that up to about 32 km I was sort of going OK; slowing down through 5:30 towards 6:00, and struggling a bit with the hills. Then at about 34 km I had to stop running simply out of leg fatigue & start walking, so I did that for about 3km and managed - not easy - to start running again. I'm a bit annoyed with the failure of the GPS, because I would really like to know how fast I managed to cover the last 5 km.
The heat didn't help. I drank lots of water, so I wasn't dehydrated (I usually start babbling to myself in Chinese when I get dehydrated, so that's quite an easy empirical test) but I was certainly hot. I don't know how being hot slows you down from a metabolic point of view, but I might conduct some research into that. Particularly the Pyrmont section - the last third of the race - is pretty much pure cement & asphalt and collects a lot of heat from the surrounding buildings. My feeling is that 25 degrees in the shade would easily be over 30 running up the Western Distributor. It looks on the map as though there'd be a relieving view of water in Cockle Bay, but in fact you're running along inside the concrete walls that edge the freeway and the water doesn't really impinge on the consciousness. For a city which prides itself on the picturesque, this marathon route is distinctly ordinary from a visual perspective. A couple of 18th century style "views", but for the rest, street, and pretty drab street to boot. Curiously, in Canberra I had sore feet from, I suspect, the rain, a problem I had never encountered in training, while here I had hot feet, a problem I've never had in training before either. I've run in hotter conditions than Sunday, although not often and not as far. (That's how I know what I do when I'm dehydrated) Apart from the overheating though, the shoes (same model as Canberra) and the socks (new and wholly synthetic) were very satisfactory. No blisters, no chafing, no bruised toes. In fact, other than the kind of stiffness you'd expect after a solid run, the body is in pretty good shape. In particular the knees are completely free of pain; last Thursday I was worrying that I couldn't rest them enough before the race.
I think the nutrition plan was OK; the stopping wasn't, so far as I am any judge, related to energy available. I didn't actually stop, rather slowed to a walk until my legs felt up to running again. Not that I have anything other than apocryphal information about what a nutrition failure would feel like.
On the principle that you learn from your mistakes, there's a fair bit to take out of this. One tricky thing about running is that you can't really modify one parameter at a time and see how much impact it has. Prior to the next big run - as yet undecided - I'll be making a number of changes. Hopefully one or more of the them will get be back down under 4 hours.
I've thought of a way to compare marathon results. I think it works quite well for the "average" runner - it wouldn't, perhaps, work so well for extremes. It works like this; Canberra, 55, 50, 57; Sydney, 54, 49, 54. They are the percentiles for field, men, age group respectively, and in fact the age group in Sydney was 50-54 compared with Canberra's 50-59, so it's not quite a four-square comparison. But it's not bad, I think, and it equalises out the course & the environment. Clearly Sydney was not as good, but equally the difference isn't enormous.
Pictures can be seen here: Link to pictures...
It's probably obvious - certainly in retrospect - but cumulative marathon training doesn't make much difference. I was expecting an additional 5 months training to automatically improve my performance, but now I think that maintaining training at the same level, which is pretty much what I did, wasn't/isn't likely to make much difference over a long run. I probably need to find a coach, and possibly need to find more training time - not likely - if I'm going to get down to 3:30. (The winner in my division in Sydney ran 3:04, for comparison. Just in case anyone thinks 3:30 is unrealistic)
Saturday, September 10, 2011
Endomondo Running Workout
Endomondo Running Workout
This is the beginning of the taper down to next week's marathon, so a nice gentle run, very comfortable. Hoping the knees will be 99% unbruised by the time the starting gun goes off at 7:30 on the 18th. They were pretty good today, so it looks promising.
I've been reviewing the marathon course; it starts with a couple of "hills", like over the harbour bridge, then around Mrs Macquarie's Chair, then back up to Moore Park. Fortunately that's all pretty much over and done with in the first 10 km, so they won't be too stressful. The trick in Moore Park appears to be to avoid getting lost, as we switchback around in there for about 15 km building up the distance, then it's back down to the city and up across York St, down to Sussex & around the waterfront to the Opera House forecourt. It's a bit of a shame in some ways to have all the downhill at the end - contrary to expectation, perhaps - because it's not so easy to stretch out and run like a mad thing downhill when you're absolutely buggered. Staying upright seems so much more important. Overall though, I think the hills won't be too much of an issue, but I also doubt that it will be a particularly fast course.
Anyway, I've decided my tactics; no guts, no glory. I've had a couple of good training runs this week, so I'm pretty confident I can get to 25 km at 5 minute pace. From there it doesn't really matter how fast I come home, I should be in good shape for a PB.
Spring is here with a vengeance; last week was good but today was even better. A bit surprising, because yesterday was freezing, but today was clear and warm. Lots of grasses flowering in the Bexley wetlands and last week's spring rains greening up whatever isn't flowering. Lots of fisherfolk out this morning too, including a couple in kayaks. It was certainly the kind of morning that wouldn't seem wasted even if you caught nothing; not that you ever meet a fisherman who caught nothing.
The Rockdale market gardens were looking fantastic as well; it's really a stroke of good fortune that the council has had the moral fibre to keep the developers out. We buy some of our vegetables from a local-ish market gardener (a bit further south than Rockdale) and the in season vegies we get from her are fantastic. They look as good as supermarket produce *without* water sprays and trick lighting. Plus, they're cheaper. And we can walk to the shop. (Admittedly, by the time I've finished saucing them, it's not clear that they taste much better, but they certainly don't taste any worse).
Saturday, September 3, 2011
Sydney -2
Strathfield and back
Well, this was a nice run except maybe for the hills coming up Canterbury Road. But absolutely a first class a-grade spring morning, perfect weather. I'm starting to taper now, so this was run at a fairly gentle pace; plus, I think I'll go easy on the exercises for the next couple of weeks. I've almost made up my mind to start at the pace I want to finish. I watched the IAAF marathon this AM when I got home - just amazing really, 3 minutes/kilometer, 42 times. Sadly, I don't think I can run the second half of mine faster than the first half, no matter how tactically sound that might be. Slowing down gently is the right tactic for me.
Here's something trivial. 1% of 100 meters is 1 meter; of a marathon it's 422 meters. That takes near enough to .1 second for the sprinters, and about 76 seconds for the marathoners. The margin in Daegu today was more than 2 minutes, so that's about 2 meters in sprinting terms. A real thumping. When you see 2 marathoners come in only a few seconds apart, as, say, in the Commonwealth Games women's in Melbourne, that's a sprinter's .01 of a second.
If it's Spring it must be flowers and it was. The casuarinas are out, and there are masses of them along the Cooks; casuarina flowers are as subtle-coloured as their leaves and make a fine muted backdrop for the wattles. I saw at least three (species of) wattles, hardenbergia, and lots of short-plumed grasses, bright green leaves and soft white florets; my guess is wallaby or plume grass. Plenty of exotics, too, including orange trumpet vine - one massive display at the back of the racecourse - and a couple of azaleas.
Lots of birds; ducks and ibis mainly.The ibis are a menace out of the water but they look quite picturesque sitting in it.
Not much else to tell really.
Well, this was a nice run except maybe for the hills coming up Canterbury Road. But absolutely a first class a-grade spring morning, perfect weather. I'm starting to taper now, so this was run at a fairly gentle pace; plus, I think I'll go easy on the exercises for the next couple of weeks. I've almost made up my mind to start at the pace I want to finish. I watched the IAAF marathon this AM when I got home - just amazing really, 3 minutes/kilometer, 42 times. Sadly, I don't think I can run the second half of mine faster than the first half, no matter how tactically sound that might be. Slowing down gently is the right tactic for me.
Here's something trivial. 1% of 100 meters is 1 meter; of a marathon it's 422 meters. That takes near enough to .1 second for the sprinters, and about 76 seconds for the marathoners. The margin in Daegu today was more than 2 minutes, so that's about 2 meters in sprinting terms. A real thumping. When you see 2 marathoners come in only a few seconds apart, as, say, in the Commonwealth Games women's in Melbourne, that's a sprinter's .01 of a second.
If it's Spring it must be flowers and it was. The casuarinas are out, and there are masses of them along the Cooks; casuarina flowers are as subtle-coloured as their leaves and make a fine muted backdrop for the wattles. I saw at least three (species of) wattles, hardenbergia, and lots of short-plumed grasses, bright green leaves and soft white florets; my guess is wallaby or plume grass. Plenty of exotics, too, including orange trumpet vine - one massive display at the back of the racecourse - and a couple of azaleas.
Lots of birds; ducks and ibis mainly.The ibis are a menace out of the water but they look quite picturesque sitting in it.
Not much else to tell really.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)