The Horrie and Belinda Show

1/1/05

Ventured out with Belinda for a twilight Bronte to Bondi run which is around 6.5km. As it was New Years Day and a nice day as well, had to battle plenty of tourists, beachgoers and all the people who have made New Year's Resolutions to lose weight and do some exercise in 2005.

This made for a frustrating run as it is a narrow path with quite a few stairs along the way. Note to self and Belinda, do not attempt this run at this time of day again, especially on a Public Holiday.

Apart from that, it still felt great to get out and start the New Year in such a great way.

2/1/05

Today was the Cherrybrook Circuit STaR Striders run which had a long version of 31km with plenty of hills and a couple of kms of trail thrown in to make it interesting.

Started at 6.10 with O Runner and Superflake tearing off like there was no tomorrow. Got left behind while I was waiting for my GPS to find its bearings. Note to self - do this a couple of minutes earlier as you don't want to keep keen runners in the barrier. 2 other runners named John and Dave who were joining us got left behind even further. Although, within 500m, we were all together again.

We were supposed to be running at 5:30/km pace, but as mentioned earlier, O Runner was running like a man on a mission. Went through the first 5km in around 25 minutes and Dave who has previously run Glasshouse 50 miler was struggling to maintain pace with us. We reasoned with him as there were plenty of hills and a bit of trail to come, that that would slow us down and he would be in his element. Unfortunately this wasn't to be. After we went through the trail section which had a few nasty hills in it, Dave had dropped off. Also whilst running up one of those nasty hills, Uncle Dave Criniti and his running partner went past us as if we were nailed to the ground. This is becoming a bit of a habit as exactly the same thing happened last Monday at the Cool Running 5km challenge.

There were then 4 of us and we continued to move along at a fairly decent clip until John who was leading us up the several hills we had to negotiate started to discuss shorter options as he didn't feel as though he could go with us for the full 31km. I joked with him that as he was leaving us, we could drop the pace, especially on the uphills to which he just laughed. We then bid him farewell as he turned off at the second short cut option which took off 4.5km.

Then there were 3. O Runner who had been making a big effort to stay within reach of us had been struggling with the hills as he has had heel problems of late, told Superflake and I to push on ahead as he couldn't stay with us on the uphills. This caused Superflake, another David who was a 6.20 runner who had previously passed us, and I to run an extra 500 metres as we did not cross a very busy road at the right set of lights which included another 250 metres of uphill. Not happy Jan.

In covering this extra distance, O Runner had actually ended up 100-200 metres ahead. I think this was a tactic on his part as he knew I was relying on his navigational ability. David had left us behind again as he upped the pace again. Superflake and I eventually caught up with O Runner and we joked about his tactic. We again left him behind with about 2-3km to go.

Superflake and I finally finished in just under 2:45 with an average pace of 5:15/km which made for a very solid run on this course. I worked out that we were 19 minutes slower than last week but as we covered an extra 1-2 km as well as all the hills and the trails, we could be very satisfied with having that run in the bank as the more runs we do like this will certainly help building endurance for Canberra.