Just had a quick look and the official results are now online. We came 21st out of 40 in the Mixed catogory, and 73rd out of 150 overall with an official time of 4:31.03. Turns out the team in 20th only beat us by two seconds!

Lessons learned for the next one:

1. Attach the bike repair kits & pump to the bike. Do not carry it around in your backpack.

2. Get a much smaller backpack and only carry the bare essentials.

3. Do LOTS more run training!

I did my first ever adventure race at the weekend and it was great fun. It was a team event, each team consisting of two people, so Becs got roped into being my teammate and we entered in the Mixed category. Given that neither of us had ever done an event before, we enrolled in the training day which was held the day before the race.

Saturday morning dawned to a light drizzle which put a bit of a dampener on things, but we drove down to the Royal National Park with only a vague idea of what lay in store for us. We knew it was a training day, but I wasn’t sure whether they’d have us running around all day or not. As it turned out it was quite relaxed. We spent the morning learning the basics of navigation; how to use a compass, plot your location on a map and then navigate to your destination. We wouldn’t actually need much navigation skills for the race, but they’ll come in handy at some stage in the future. We also got plenty of tips for route planning, and got advised to arrive early so we’d have plenty of time to annotate our map with our chosen route and some navigation clues.

After that it was a spot of lunch, followed by the rudiment of mountain biking (which I already knew) and the basics of kayaking. Having been on the kayaking course previously I thought I was well prepared, but as the kayak we’d be using in the race was only half the length of a sea kayak, and also inflatable, it spun on a dime, so most of the what we’d learnt on the kayaking course no longer applied. If we tried using the ‘torso rotation’ method of paddling, the kayak just spun underneath us! It had rained on and off all day, so I ended up soaking wet and freezing by the time I got home. I’d have to prepare better for race day!

The alarm went off on race day at 5:20 and I could hear the rain outside. “OK,” I thought to myself, “it’s going to be a mud fest!” After a quick bowl of cereal I packed up my gear, making sure I brought a complete change of clothes for after the race. Becs picked me up a little after 6:00 and we made it down to the Royal shortly after 7:00, dropped off our bikes at the bike transition, then got a great park near the start and registered nice and early. We picked the map and race instructions out of the bag and headed back to the car to plot our route around the course.

8:40 saw us standing in the rain listening to the race briefing, feeling surprisingly relaxed. Probably worrying more about the weather than the race itself! The gun went off at 8:56 and we sauntered off at the back of the pack. Our first checkpoint was about 1.5km up the Hacking River and we had to row to get there. I started off the rowing, though launching the boat amongst about 10-15 other teams meant that the first few minutes were spent trying not to crash into someone. Becs navigated out to the checkpoint which was a lot further than it had looked on the map and it took us about half an hour to reach it. We punched our card, then turned to head back to the boat shed. We considered swapping places and letting Becs row for a bit, but decided against trying to swap places for fear of ending up in the water. I’d remembered that the current flows fastest in the centre of the river, so we did our best to stay away from the banks and it only took about 20mins to get back to the boat shed.

The second section was all running, with a further three checkpoints to navigate to. Our preparation in the car paid off as we knew almost exactly where we were going, though as it involved gaining and then losing about 100m in altitude, my legs weren’t too happy with the whole operation. Carrying about 5kg of stuff in my backpack didn’t really help either. I was pretty pleased after nabbing the 4th checkpoint until I realised we had to run back up to the Visitor’s Centre to start the bike legs. Anyone who has driven into the Royal National Park knows that the hill down to the weir is bloody steep, so can imagine having to run back up it. The road was off-limits, so we had to use and adjacent walking trail which consisted mostly of steps. I decided from the start that I was going to walk it and Becs was happy to oblige, though I suspect I was holding her up as trailwalking is her strong point.

By this stage we’d been going for almost two hours and I was feeling a bit tired. I’d been drinking water regularly and had eaten a Mars & a breakfast bar, but it was now time to bring out the heavy artillery in the form of a Gu Energy Gel. It was quite tasty, but I didn’t get any sugar rush from it. However, I soon forgot about being tired and it was only an hour later that I realised that I’d been charging around the place without issue, so they obviously work very well!

We finally made it to the bike transition at the Visitor’s Centre, checked in with the course marshalls and jumped on the bikes for the MTB leg. There was mud everywhere so we had a great time charging through the puddles and just getting completely spattered with dirt. Becs took a turn at navigating, but I ruied it a bit by taking off down what I thought was the right track, but turned out to be the wrong one. Luckily we didn’t end up too far from our desired destination so we didn’t really lose any time.

There was one tricky section of the course which was a steep downhill. Given the conditions you’d fall over if you went too slow, but you couldn’t go too fast either as there were other teams walking uphill towards us. We made it down at a reasonable pace without issue, clicked off our 7th checkpoint and started the long walk up the hill on the other side. Cycling up wasn’t really an option as there was so much mud it was almost impossible to get traction. The 8th checkpoint was at the school near Grays Point, where we ditched the bikes and ran (well walked) through suburbia to the local boat ramp for the kayaing leg, stopping en route to explain to some kids what was going on. After all, there were plenty of mud-covered lunatics running back and forth through their streets.

The kayak leg was a pain in the arse as the kayaks were inflatable. The recommendation was to put the heavier person in the back, so that left Becs up front. Given the weight difference between us the boat actually bent in the middle! Ideally we should have been kneeling up and leaning slightly forward, but I wasn’t able to kneel due to my recurring foot issue. It hadn’t been bothering me during the race, but it seems to be triggered by stretching my foot, so sitting on it was almost certain to aggravate the problem. I ended up sitting on my arse, in probably the least efficient paddling position. Thankfully the leg was only about 30mins long, after which we ran back to the school, picked up the bikes and entered the great unknown.

In an effort to prevent any cheating, the last six checkpoints were not marked on competitor’s maps and had to be acquired on course. As we picked up the bikes, the course marshall showed us his map with the next checkpoint marked on it and we were off. It was now just one long MTB dirt fest to the finish. At each remaining checkpoint there was the hole punch to mark your control card, and a map with the next checkpoint marked on it. We flew around the rest of the course, apart from a hiccup at checkpoint 12, where some kind soul had stolen both the hole punch and the map showing the location of checkpoint 13. Thankfully some volunteers were on hand to explain the situation and point out CP13 on our map.

CP13, CP14 and CP15 followed in rapid succession, with us passing a couple of mixed teams en route. CP15 was the last checkpoint, and all that remained was to ride to the road and speed downhill back to the weir. There was another mixed team right in front of us, so we hammered downhill and managed to pass them. We dumped our bikes in the last bike transition, shouted our team number to the marshalls and asked “Is that it? Are we finished?”. The response was “What does your course card tell you to do.” Unfortunately it said we had to run back to where we’d started the race, a distance of about 1km. Off we went, but my knees were in bits at this stage and my run more closely resembled a hobble. The teams we’d passed on the downhill sauntered past us and there was nothing we could do. We crossed the line with big grins on our faces with my watch reading 4hrs 34mins. Happy Days ;-)

We’ll definitely do another one.

Just finished a big order to Amazon of a few books I’ve been wanting to read for a while. I’d better learn to speed read!

The Best American Science Writing 2004

Freakonomics : A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World

Blink : The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

History of the Arab Peoples

The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2004

The Devil’s Teeth : A True Story of Obsession and Survival Among America’s Great White Sharks

The Market for Aid

The Best Software Writing I

Should keep me going for a while.

Did a second 30min stint on the indoor trainer when I got home on Wednesday night. Same drill as last time: 10min warmup, some one legged drills and finish off with another 10mins cycling. Had another gym session first thing yesterday morning and felt surprisingly good. Normally I’m a bit sluggish in the morning.

Wk11: S: 2000m – B: 30km – W: 2 sessions

Got up this morning to do some training on my indoor trainer. I had spent last week playing around with it and making a few adjustments to my cleat positions, so I was ready for a straight training ride today. I was aiming for 30 minutes to start off with, so after a 10min warm-up I started doing a few one-legged cycling drills.

The basic idea is to cycle with one leg (obviously), which sounds a lot easier than it actually is. It’s amazing how tired your leg becomes when you have to lift it over the top of the pedal cycle, so my original intention of doing 5mins on each leg got rapidly downgraded to 2 * 1min each. I guess I’ll have to build that up slowly. In case you’re wondering, the reason you’d do these drills in the first place is to teach you to lift your leg at the bottom of the pedal stroke. This means that the opposite leg, which is on the down stroke, now has less work to do, leading to a more effficient pedal stroke and a faster cyclist. I completed the session with another 10mins steady cycling.

Lunchtime swim: did the whole session as pull, since my foot is still annoying me.

200 FS Warm Up
8 * 50 on 1:00 (40)
4 * 50 Catch on 1:00 (45)
5 * {
    100 Catch on 2:00 (1:35)
    100 FS on 2:00 (1:24) }
200 Cool Down
Total: 2000m

Wk11: S: 2000m – B: 15km – W: 1 session

Things slowed down a bit last week on account of my foot, but I’m trying to get back into it this week. Monday was a public holiday, so I took that at face value and did no exercise. Yesterday saw me back in the gym. I’m down to 2 sets of 13 reps (from 30 intially) and the weights have increased enough that today’s the first time I’ve still felt a bit stiff the day after a gym session.

Although I’m definitely fitter than any stage in almost the last 10 years, I’m still finding it hard to get rid of the gut, so I’m going on a diet. Before you bust your arse laughing at the thought of me eating just lettuce & drinking water, it’s not one of those women’s-mag fad diets, it’s the CSIRO‘s Total Wellbeing Diet. Given that they’ve just won an award for discovering how pure carbon nanotubes can be spun into cloth-like yarns you can’t argue with the quality of their research!

Anyway, the basic outline is pretty sensible: lots of fruit, veg, and protein from lean meat, slightly less carbs than normal and everything chosen to provide a balanced amount of vitamins & minerals. Nothing revolutionary. So, there’s 7 weeks until the NZ ski trip starts, so let’s see if that’s enough time to make a difference.

Wk11: W: 1 session

Well, on Friday morning I twinged something in my foot again, for the third time in three weeks. By lunch time the top of my foot had swollen up so I made an appointment with a physio who told me that nothing was fractured but that I’d probably irritated the tendons leading to my metatarsals and there wasn’t really anything I could do except rest it as much as possible. So, no running for at least a week, though I can still cycle.

On a more positive note, myself and Becs have entered an adventure race in two weeks time. Kayakying, MTBing, navigation and trail running – should be fun. I just hope my foot heals in time!

Got out of bed to celebrate my birthday with a run – 3.2km around the local park in 19:45 which is a bit slower than normal as I was feeling a bit sluggish. Weighed in at 88.3kg @ 17.5% fat which means I’ve put on a bit of muscle over the last few weeks. The gym is paying off ;-)

Hit the pool for a swim at lunch, so I can now relax with a few beers this evening.

400 FS
100 IM
2 * 100 Form
2 * {
    50 K/ 100 Pull/ 200 FS on 6:15
    100 Form on 2:00 }
3 * {
    200 FS on 3:20
    100 8FS/8BC on 1:50
    25Easy/25Med/25Easy/25Sprint on 1:40 }
Total: 2800m
(skipped the first 200m of last set)

Wk10: S: 2800m – R: 3.2km

Got my final weights session of the week in on Friday without issue. No more running this week as my calves got really sore after doing the two runs earlier in the week, presumably because there’s a couple of slight uphill bits, rather than the flats of my regular route.

Bought an Elite Fluid Trainer from Cheeky Monkey this afternoon so I can do indoor bike rides during the winter. Tried it out when I got home and it’s much quieter than I had expected, so there’s no chance of waking Jacqui up in the morning. I should be able to set it up in front of the TV and watch the morning news or something while I cycle away.

Wk9: S: 2700m – R: 7.2km – W: 3 sessions

Went to the gym yesterday morning and had no issues with my foot. However, after going for a run last night I noticed a bruise just above my heel. No idea what it’s from as I didn’t bang it off anything. Since it’s not sore to the touch I decided to ignore it and crawled out of bed at 6am for another run this morning. It was bloody cold, but my Icebreaker vest kept me nice and toasty.

I ran 3.2km last night and 4km this morning at a pretty comfortable pace. I measured an intermediate 2.6km at about 13:15, so that’s a 10km in approx 52mins. When I got home, however, there was a bit more bruising, so I’ll have to lay of the running for a while and let whatever the problem is heal. Pissed off.

Wk9: S: 2700m – R: 7.2km – W: 2 sessions

Who shares your birthday? Check here

I’m in good company, with five Nobel Prize winners, two kings, 2 presidents, a dalai lama, the last Russian tsarina, Scott of the Antarctic and the guy who kicked off the Renaissance. Not badd, eh?

Bjorn Borg

K.F. Braun (shared 1909 Nobel Prize for Physics, radio)

E. Krebs (shared 1992 Nobel Prize for Medicine, reversible protein phosphor)

T. Mann (1925 Nobel Prize)

P. Sharp (1993 Nobel Prize for Medecine)

Heinrich Rohrer (shared 1986 Nobel Prize for Physics, electron microscope)

William T. Cosgrove (First Irish President)

Dalai Lama #14 (1935)

King Joseph of Portugal (1750)

King Joao III of Portugal (1521)

Donncha Redmond (Living Legend)

Regiomantus (reponsible for kicking off the Renaissance in Europe)

Robert F. Scott (of the Antarctic)

Sukarno (indonesia’s First President)

Diego Velazquez (Spanish Painter)

Alexandra Romanova (last Russian tsarina, murdered in Bolshevik Revolution)

Alexander Pushkin (Russian Poet)

The question on the DealMac forum: Have you ever caught a Mac virus?

Some long-time users can remember one around 1989-1991 (yes, that is 14 years ago!) but very little since. As for me, I can remember running Disinfectant back in 1990 and it finding the occasional problem, but nothing that caused me to lose any data. Since using OS X full-time since 2001 I haven’t had a single virus, trojan or piece of spyware.

Weighed in at 87.8kg this morning, so I hope it’s because I’m bulking up due to weights and not due to eating, though after all the farewell meals for Ed last week in Canberra I wouldn’t be all that surprised if it was the latter.

Was wandering around the house this morning getting organised for work when something twinged in my foot. Not sure what caused it, but something (a tendon maybe) near the middle metatarsal suddenly hurt quite a bit and didn’t like me pointing my toes. There goes running for a day or two. Decided to go to my lunchtime swim after all, but just did pull for the whole session, not kicking at all. Wasn’t too bad, but I didn’t bother recording the details of the session – 2700m of pull, broken up in various ways.

Should hopefully be able to do weights in the morning.

wk9: S: 2700m

I was down in Canberra this week, so it was a bit of a rest week. Got two weights sessions in. Had hoped to get a third one in on Friday, but as Ed invited us around to his place to have a few beers and say bon voyage for his trip to Paris on Thursday night, and since I’d been up at 4.30am on Thursday morning to watch the excellent Liverpool victory in the Champions League, I wasn’t that keen on getting out of bed at 6.30am on Friday.

I went kayaking all day yesterday with Simon and Becs, so I was totally exhausted by last night. Went to bed early and got up for a bike ride this morning. Met up with a bunch of people from Transitions for quite a few laps of Centennial Park followed by a coffee and lots of triathlon discussion. I’m tired now, so it will probably be off to bed early tonight, ready for the gym in the morning.

Wk8: B: 61.4km – W: 2 sessions

A bit late this one, but last weekend I went for a 5km run on Saturday morning with Jacqui and a friend of hers, the myself and Jacqui went on a shorter 2.5km run on Sunday morning.

Wk7: R: 7.5km – W: 2 sessions

Looks like the US Senate isn’t too pleased about George Galloway’s testimony. His is the only transcript missing from the Senate Committee’s web page, and he has apparently been edited from the video transcript as well??? Freedom and Democracy my arse!

You can watch the full video clip of his testimony here, as a Quicktime movie.

The weather has played havoc with training this week. Pissing rain on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday resulted in a sever lack of cycling and running. However, I did manage to get two gym sessions in: one on Monday and another yesterday.

Wk7: W: 2 sessions

“Everything I said about Iraq turned out to be right, and you turned out to be wrong, and 100,000 people have paid with their lives…”,1),
(

“Have a look at the real oil for food scandal. Have a look at the 14 months you were in charge of Baghdad when $US8.8 billion [$11.6 billion] of Iraq’s wealth went missing on your watch…”,1),
(

“Have a look at the other American corporations that stole not only Iraq’s money, but the money of the American taxpayer.

”Have a look at the oil that you didn’t even meter, that you were shipping out of the country selling, the proceeds of which went who knows where.“,1),
(

”http://www.smh.com.au/news/World/US-guilty-of-oil-for-food-scandal-not-me-Galloway/2005/05/18/1116361569660.html">George Galloway’s testimony to the US Senate

It’s about time someone told it like it is. Good on ya George.

I got back on the bike yesterday after a bit of a layoff. I had prepared on Wednesday by buying a dayglo yellow sleveless vest so I’d stand out like a sore thumb in trafffic. It’s certainly bright! I had intended cycling in to work and doing a few laps in Centennial Park on the way, but by the time I had rounded up all my bike gear it was too late, so I just cycled down to the ferry.

Did a few laps around CP on the way home instead, with the intention of keeping my HR below 140, but I was going relatively quick at an average HR of 120 which I was quite suprised about, so I just stuck at that. Once home I got organised and went out for a run, but only got half-way through it before my leg started seizing up a bit. I should probably have stretched after getting off the bike. I’d also done a run the previous evening which was probably a factor as well.

Crawled out of bed this morning and went ot the gym. Wasn’t particularly keen, but by the time the bus got into town I’d woken up a bit more. Hopefully I can get a run in tonight, and one more tomorrow morning and then the week is over.

Wk6: S: 2900m – B: 33.6km – R: 8km – W: 3 sessions