First up I finally got back on the
horse post Hobart, even though the physio said to take two weeks off. I decided
that the ankle was feeling ok and I’d test it out with a vigorous walk. Now I
know that’s the sure fired way to exacerbate an injury but after you’ve trained
for 6 months or so, and an upcoming 100km trail walk is niggling at your
cortex, sitting around waiting to come good really isn’t an option. After 5kms
of walking at a 9-10 min per kilometre pace, the usual “ants in my pants”
syndrome kicked in and I jogged the last km or so at 6.40 pace. This was total
insanity as I had a physio appointment early the next morning so could get
treatment if the body did blow up. Good news is I pulled up fine, had a light
treatment and am now getting on with things. That translated into another
6.85km vigorous walk/run on Wednesday evening as a warm up to the team trail
walk on Friday night.
Our first team excursion with
backpacks and runners took place on Friday evening (the get together to plan
our training, fund raising, support crew etc. over pizza and a few glasses of
wine doesn’t really count as an “excursion”). Three of us (one from another
team) took the monster train trip into the Dandenongs and were met by two of
our other team mates at the bottom of the Kokoda Memorial Walk, more commonly
known as the 1,000 steps. This is the start of Section 3 of the Oxfam
Trailwalker and is rated the hardest section of the course due to the 1,000
step and the steep hills. Backpacks stocked, trail shoes attached, drink
bottles full, we headed off stopping every so often to refer to the map
instructions and to take a few happy snaps. Personally I had a great time as I
have had months and months of training pretty much on my lonesome for most of
the time and it was great to have a few people to banter with and to share a
laugh or two. We took 2 hours 46 mins and 17 seconds to cover the 10.52km
course, so a tad slow but given about 30 mins was consumed by stops, the fact
that it was pretty dark at the end and the 733 metre elevation gain it wasn’t a
bad first outing for the team. Just watch out for single armed or legged
characters wandering the streets of Melbourne, it could well be one of our crew
missing the limb.
I followed up that late night with
a very early rise on Saturday morning to attend the usual parkrun at Albert Park
and ran my 2nd fastest official time of 30.09 for the 5kms so was
quite happy with that result too. No ankle problems yet so am certainly all
good post Hobart Marathon.
Earlier this week I also arranged
for an affiliation with wiggle.com – you will notice their banner on the right
hand side of this blog – and what that means is, if you go to their site using
my banner and purchase something I will receive up to 4% commission from the
sale. You pay no more than usual they just track your click from my site and
credit me with a portion of the sale. As per ALL of my links, any commission earned
is donated straight back to a featured charity. On my book blog
(messybooker.blogspot.com) I have affiliations with The Book Depository and
Amazon and have donated the US$47.52 earned to various charities (Indigenous
Literacy Foundation, CARE, Ultra Spirit and more), generally tipping in a few
extra personal $ to make the donation a nice round amount. Any earnings from my
affiliation with Wiggle will also go straight to charity with the amounts
earned between now and mid April being tipped into our Oxfam Trailwalker Team
at http://trailwalker.oxfam.org.au/melbourne/teams/team/?team_id=14113
We have also arranged a
fundraising night for 14/3/13, with trivia, games and memorabilia to feature.
This night is being held at the Duke of Kent Hotel in Latrobe Street in Melbourne,
a special meal deal of $15 for a burger, steak sanga, parma or fish and chips
and only $10 entry (if pre booked) and a full bar at bar prices the night is
sure to be a huge success. All proceeds
will to go to our Trailwalker team. Any Melbourne based readers who would like
to attend please leave a comment on the blog with contact details and I’ll get
back to you asap.
This week will be a little quieter
on the organisation front but will consist of some training but nothing back on
the trails until 22 February where we are kicking off a 27.7km walk at 9pm to
test out our night walking on trails skills.
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