Fraser Darcy

Theme of this week was holidays. Holiday from teaching. Holiday from Quorn and of course the holiday from normal daily routine that comes with actually being on ‘holiday’. Each day of this week I ran either somewhere slightly different or with other runners for company. Makes the km’s tick by a lot quicker when there’s company but I feel less ‘trained’ somewhat by being distracted from the pain and monotony that I come to expect of training.

There’s a few gaps in my week from what a perfect week of training of racing in Adelaide would’ve looked like but coming off my efforts in Brisbane over the weekend I’m pretty happy with the following run-down.

Day	Location	Other
Monday	1: Easy hour in Belair 2: Easy along Shepherds Hill Rd	Solo
Tuesday	1: Trails, 5*1.2km reps in Shepherds Hill Reserve (first run there since March) 2: Easy half an hour by the beach (first run there since March)	Intensity
Wednesday	1: 90 hilly minutes with Chad around Willunga, (first ever run there) 2: Easy half an hour along Shepherds Hill	Company on a run!
Thursday	1: Tempo around Victoria Park (first run since February there and second ever run there) 2: Easy half an hour in Belair	Intensity
Friday	1: Easy loop with Georgia in Belair	Company!
Saturday	1: Easy jog around home loop 2: State XC 10km Champs, 5th	Great company for the event!
Sunday	1: 2 hours in Belair with Jess, visiting friend from Australian Mountain and Trail Running team 2: Easy arvo along Shepherds Hill Rd	Company for my long run!
Total	160kms, 3000m elevation, 3 faster sessions, 2 longer runs. Longer runs could’ve been more marathon specific but not the end of the world.	Another week in the bag and the weather was great.

Besides an overall highlight being the consistency in my week and structure, the second highlight was running in the State XC Champs. (XC= Cross Country).

XC was something I was ok at at school. Did enough to go and represent my school at the next level but that’s about it. It was also very fun in a good ‘hard’ kind of way but I always wished I actually ran and trained properly for it whenever it rolled around. Since school, actually racing in the State XC Champs was something I thought was beyond me, hence I never bothered to seek it out and race in it. Until this year, where, having sharpened up my 5k speed earlier in the year and resolved to test myself more against quality competition I threw an entry in. I was never going to be able to race at 100% coming off the Brisbane effort but I knew the experience I was going to get from it and the training effect would hold me in stead for future years and for the upcoming Adelaide marathon. Plus, racing back-to-back weekends is also good practice for if I ever visit Europe again and wish to do something similar.

Being only a 10km race it’s not worth a full 1000 word race recap. However, it is worth quickly highlighting that my intentions were to race solid, enjoy it and hopefully come in the top 10. Off the start I went out at a good pace. Settled into fourth with another runner right behind me and then a pack another twenty metres back. The course was 5 laps of a 2km, flattish, grassy track with two pinches (small hills) in it. Enough hills for me to be way more excited about this course as opposed to the State 10km Champs. The first lap was good. The second lap I moved closer to 3rd place and was right on his shoulder without feeling like I adjusted my pace. At the start of the 3rd lap 3rd place surged off a bit (1st and 2nd were miles in front in relative standards by the way) and I was comfortable enough to let him go. Fifth was a bit far back and I was content on just holding my position.

By the end of the third lap the efforts up the hills were starting to take it out of me for my flat running speed and I felt like I was slowing a bit. Fifth place caught up to me on the 4th lap and we played a bit of cat and mouse on the hills with me edging in front and him getting me back on the flats. A great set-up for the fifth and final lap.

He surged off in front of me in the first flatter part of the lap and I just didn’t have the ability to increase my leg turnover. You know the feeling of trying to run away in a dream and you just can’t? Yep, that’s what it felt like. 6th place and beyond were a fair way back though so I continued with having my feet down to the floor somewhat trying to hold on to 3:20/3:25/km pace knowing I had 5th place sewn up. I tried my best to make some ground on the steep pinches but in the end missed out catching fourth place by maybe ten seconds to eventually place 5th in a time of 33 minutes for 10km. Pretty good considering seven days ago I ran the equivalent of a marathon in 22 degree heat.

So yeah, another nice result in the box and nice to feel somewhat in the main part of the race even though there weren’t as many quality runners entered as there are currently living in SA. If I was to improve on my result from yesterday I think the two main things I would’ve changed are:

• Not racing the weekend prior.
• Spending more time doing 1km repeats at 3:00/km pace (like my 5km training sessions) and less threshold efforts up Dutchman’s stern.

But you can’t have it all in this running game of trying to maximise your performance over 45km of trail running and 10km XC races so I’ll take what I can get from this years experience and know that I can build on it next year if I choose to go down the XC path again. It was pretty fun overall and I enjoyed the camaraderie that comes from competing in Athletics SA events for my Flinders Athletic Club. I’ve known a few of the guys involved for a while and it’s nice to have been welcomed into the club as another runner. The other positive thing about Athletics SA events is that they are run by an organisation whose purpose is to put on running events for runners trying to be at their best. Athletics SA is not a commercialised money seeking race entity. I could get around more of this ‘official’ race stuff in future years not only because it makes me a better runner, but the events also treat running as a pure and exciting sport in itself and don’t need to add DJ’s, lights, gift bags etc to entice athletes to enter….

To cap off the week and tick off my recovery from Brisbane and XC somewhat (ensuring I am now re-confident in my body and ‘all systems are go’ for the Adelaide Marathon build) I enjoyed a 2hr long run on Sunday around Belair with some company! The female Australian Mountain Running Champion (AKA the female winner of the race in Orange, AKA Jess) was in town for work for the weekend and so I showed her around Belair for 2hrs whilst also getting to chat and relive some World Champs stories. Jess also represented Australia in the Skyrunning Champs in Italy in September 2022 so hearing about her experience in that event was also a valuable extra to the fact that it’s just nice to have someone to break up the normal training regime with!

School holidays are a two week game though so what does the second week have in store for me? Well, hopefully a similar week with some consistent intensity and a couple of longer long runs that are more marathon specific. By my count, this is now the fourth reference to the marathon so it’s clearly what I am gearing my next month of training/racing towards. However I have learnt that focusing on one race as the be-all-and-end-all is not the greatest strategy so hopefully I get the balance right between focusing on doing well and enjoying my running. Keep reading along the for the next month to see how I go with it I guess, race day is August 27th… thanks for reading this week!