Fraser Darcy

Every time I sit down to write one of these blogs I quickly read the last blog. What did I finish with last time? How would it read sequentially? Last time I finished with an outlook to two weeks of training and school work and an anecdote from Western States.

Why not begin with another anecdote fresh in mind and somewhat fresh in yours if you’ve been reading along with The Austrian Diaries.

One of the things I enjoyed in the build-up to the World Champs race was scoping out the course and bumping into other athletes. Diary Entry #6 detailed the day I bumped into the Spanish team. Subsequently, during the race I bumped into some of these same athletes and remembered passing one, Jan Margarit, up the climb to the Kreuzjoch aid station. Jan was also in the hurt locker (along with pretty much everyone else). Jan had been introduced to my Aussie team-mate Matt and I as a La Sportiva athlete before the race had started so it was the third interaction with him hence I remembered to check his result post-race. Jan had a similar day to me. Started out hard, drifted through and came 102nd. Kudos to Jan for finishing it off when other athletes of his calibre pulled out. His calibre? What do you mean? Jan is a regular top-10 performer on the European circuit of high profile trail races and this result did not reflect his usual level. On the same weekend as I was winning the Pichi Richi 10.5km he was coming third in the Lavaredo 50km in Italy. Same same but different. Interesting anecdote I thought and one this blog picks up on in a slightly different way…

But the Pichi Richi and Lavaredo were last weekend and in the past, now we look forward, full steam ahead! Another week of school ticked off and momentum is building once again in the classroom. Good. Momentum is also building back up in my training. Great.

Momentum is also building in being smarter about measuring my performances across different races. Hmmm, elaborate please.

Driving to school each day affords me some good old thinking time. One brainwave that occurred to me on the 35 minutes through the Pichi Richi Pass was that given the races I have already done and am planning to do this year I will only have repeated three races from last year by the end of the year. This makes assessing my performance improvement from 2022 to 2023 difficult. The races I have re-raced so far are the Adelaide Trail Runner Belair and Onkaparinga races while I plan to run in the Adelaide Marathon in a month and a bit’s time (which I did last year).

Month	2022	2023	Improved?
January	ATR Belair	ATR Belair	Yes
February	ATR Onka’s	ATR Onka’s	Yes
March	Five Peaks	Donna Double Aus Mountain Champs	Effort wise yes
April	Alpine Challenge	Clare Half Marathon McLaren Vale Half Marathon	Similar efforts. Improvement within 2023 results.
May	Belair Trail Marathon	State 10km Champs	Similar performances.
June	Pichi Richi Marathon	World Champs Pichi Richi 10.5km	Pichi Richi’s similar. World Champs incomparable.
July	Ultra Adelaide 19km Melrose 50km	Not those
August	Adelaide Marathon	Adelaide Marathon
September	Trail Running SA Mt.Crawford Bonython Personal Challenge	Not those
October	Heysen 115km	Not those
November	–	Something
December	–	Something

Throughout 2022 I planned to just enjoy racing locally in SA for a few years and was keen to gauge my performance each time I rocked up to the same Adelaide Trail Runner or Trail Running SA race. As my opportunities opened up from February onwards this year though I had to re-calibrate that plan and up until last week on my drive to school, I had temporarily lost sight of the long-term focus that can be gained from comparing race efforts from year to year.

I can compare to some degree half marathon efforts within this year (Clare and then an improvement in McLaren Vale) and can use those halves and my full marathon time at any marathon I enter but the beauty and devil in trail running is that you can only compare races from year to year with yourself. Taking a step back and reminding myself of this means I free up my expectation a bit more with some trail running races I have planned for the rest of the year. They’ll all be new to me and maybe I’ll get the opportunity to re-race them in 2024 and see how I go then. If I improve next year great. If I don’t, well, maybe I’ll have been experimenting with a different training method and can return back to what worked for me in 2023.

Essentially I’m reminding myself this week that one result at a race doesn’t make or break you. It’s the consistency of results from year to year that can be used to gauge your improvement in a sport. Easy to think that now on a weekend where I don’t have a race but that’s why I’m fucking writing about it to have a written copy of it like minutes of a meeting!

The other take-away from this brainwave is that stacking years of results together is something to look forward to but can be difficult to aim for in the present as it feel so far away. The daily news cycle has shortened my attention span to a degree that imagining where I’ll be in 2025 is difficult to conceptualise. By then I’ll hopefully have three-four years of results to reflect on and see if I’m still improving. It’d be great to be at the level where the races I’m repeating are those on the top level but that depends on how I go in the immediate short term. Having 20/20 vision on both short term goals and long-term goals is difficult but it’s all part of the game of trying to be a better outdoor athlete!

Fortunately for me, while I might find it difficult to view progression with my race results across different incomparable races, I can take comfort in how I was able to progress in climbing when this is what climbing is all about. Once you complete a challenging project in climbing it is often not repeated. Yeah, there are training routes, or warm-up routes at the local crag but the big A grade climbing goals (equivalent to races) are often a one and done thing, especially when they are in hard to get to places. In the climbing scene therefore, progression is hard to gauge across different styles of routes and different crags. Typically though, if you regularly tick projects and keep on changing the stimulus, your climbing will improve. That’s in a sense what I’m unknowingly doing with my selection of races across the past 18 months, keeping me on my toes.

And that’s enough about that for now. Time to finish off the school term, keep the training ticking over and get stuck into some new race stimuli through July. Watch this space…

Thanks!