Fraser Darcy

Some climbing, some sauna, some tired-ness, a minor injury niggle and a race. A smorgasbord of elements to look forward to in this blog. If you’re new here, welcome. Written content like this is pretty rare these days so let’s see how well your attention spans lasts. Oi, is this bloke giving me a little drive-by insult? I’ve got a great attention span. Yes I am and sure you do mate. That’s how we roll here sometimes on fraserdarcy.com, this isn’t a safe space so unbuckle and hit the escape button if you’re a bit precious. If you’re a regular, hopefully you know that the above is true or I am just lying to scare off new readers.

Enough faff. Monday. I was a bit tired from the weekend before and a bit grumpy. At family dinner the night before my Mum and older sister were pushing pretty hard for me to get some cosmetic work done on my chipped tooth and neither side of the debate was willing to secede from their beliefs. Hence, Monday morning I started with a chip on my shoulder and ran with it for 14km’s. The easy run did not dissipate my grumpiness. I followed up my run with a day of climbing at Onkaparinga with my mate Liam from Hawker who was down in Adelaide. It was good to be climbing again, even just for the day, as I felt it worked wonders for some tight muscles I was managing. As a result, my arvo run later that day felt on and I got rolling.

I kept rolling pretty well into Tuesday’s morning session with RunAsOne where I was once again Chief Cone Putter-Outerer. The session went fine, I yelled some encouragement and then before I knew it was time for the 9:30 crew of Adam and Connor (new character) to arrive for our own session. We were doing 8*1km with 150m jog recovery, slightly different to the normal 60-90s standing recovery I’ve normally done. I tucked in behind Adam for the first rep hoping he’d run a 3:00 rep exactly for the 1km split and see how he approaches the jog recovery. We ran 2:53 instead and jogged the recovery in just over 30 seconds. Oh boy. The next three reps were fast and the jogs still fast. I’m pretty well on for a 10km PB at this rate I thought. At the 5th rep I started to take the lead on Adam a bit. Ok, do some work for him, maybe crank out two more good reps and then let him drop you, 6 is pretty good. At the same time he was thinking pretty much the same thing. We both made it to 6 reps and then he put some time into me. I hung on till the 8th rep and managed to just hit 3:00 for it which was nice but it was a slow regression of a session. It felt a lot harder than XC on Saturday (only two-three days ago). Connor was also having a pretty good session running low 3:00/km reps so it was a good morning out. I made it home for some lunch, tried to recover a bit, didn’t, went to the sauna instead (eavesdropped on some CFMEU commentary for 20 minutes) and then shuffled my way through an arvo run later on. Big day.

Which meant on Wednesday I felt a little cooked upon waking up. To add to that I drove into the city right in the middle of peak hour traffic like an absolute idiot. It hasn’t been too bad the last two Wednesday’s I’ve done this. The last two Wednesday’s were school holidays though weren’t they. Yes. Cooked + traffic = tired Fraser at the start of a 2hr run. I ran towards Athelstone on the Torrens path and made it 13.5km’s out which gave me 27km’s in total for 2hrs. Pretty good stuff considering I was tired. At 11am I really felt like a beer after this run, or a nap in some nice grass in the sun. I did neither though and went home and put some washing on. A little bit of mobility work in the afternoon, an easy afternoon run that felt 10x better than the morning and we had made it through another day of training.

Which means, we have another day of training to get too!!! Thursday I spiced things up a bit by visiting a new destination, the Happy Valley Reservoir. Still kind of grumpy and tired from Monday I was almost pushed over the limit when my headphones started playing up. When you’re at your limit though it is nice to recognise that and go, well, here is an opportunity to push my limits a little further out. Even if it was just my boredom limits really. I ran without music or podcasts for about 50 minutes of my 70 minute run and the sky did not fall down. I celebrated by buying new headphones about an hour later and then went to the sauna. Thursday’s sauna session was quite possibly my best work. I stayed in until 30 minutes pretty comfortably and then a RunAsOne friend, Lauren, walked in so I had a reason to chat my way through another 6 or so minutes. Yes, I contributed to sauna chat for once. It helped get me to a PB in the sauna room as I went in for another 8 minutes after my initial stint. The obligatory arvo run finished off my day.

If your attention span has been keeping up we’ve had some climbing, some sauna and some tired-ness so far, but what are we missing? A minor injury niggle and the race! On Friday, I put out the cones and then picked them up forty minutes later at the RunAsOne session. I went on my own little tempo effort which included some minutes spent at the pace I hoped to race Hills 2 Henley at plus some solid efforts that were made up on the go inspired by picking out a tree or object and the distance and going bunta for it. The joy of training by yourself means I get to do things like this which is great. However, I had been aware of a little niggle in my right hip for a few days and these freewheeling hard efforts I think pushed it a little bit over the edge. I ran through my warm-down fine but at home I was a bit stiff the rest of the day. Did I learn from my injury earlier in the year and take the afternoon off? Not immediately. I hoped it would come good with a gentle afternoon run but it never really did. I wasn’t, and still am not too concerned about it, it just feels like the joint is a bit sore and needs a rest but I was hoping the 6-10hrs between runs I have would be enough. It wasn’t though.

I tried again on Saturday to go for a run with the hope it would clear up a bit but it didn’t. Here’s where I showed I have somewhat learnt about managing niggles. Instead of running the 13-14km’s I’d planned for to reach 180km’s for the week I stopped early at 6km’s. Aaannd I took the rest of the day off. I was helped in this matter by attending a 30th of a friend so I had a good distraction at least. It didn’t stop me from questioning whether it was still a good idea to race Hills 2 Henley on Sunday but I figured I would make the call on Sunday morning knowing full well I probably was never not going to race but I could at least pretend it was still an option.

Sunday morning when I woke up I still felt my hip niggle. Not as bad as Friday so the afternoon off the day previous had made a difference (which bodes well for next week if I can convince myself it needs some rest still). I watched some early morning Olympic action and then jumped in the car and then the bus to the start line. Being a point to point race I parked at the end and caught a bus to the start line. I sat down next to a random, we chatted about running for thirty-forty minutes and then we were suddenly in Athelstone.

I ran this race last year as a solid race from about 5k’s in. I didn’t want to do that this year and was hoping instead I could run with a group until about 20-25k’s at 3:30/km or a bit slower and then kick home. In the warm-up I still felt my hip and was trying to work out if I was noticeably favouring that side in my running but didn’t think I was and no-one in the warm-up commented on it. It didn’t feel like an injury where running at 3:30/km pace would make it worse so I just needed to be confident I could get through 1hr 45 min of 3:30/km pace to be confident to race. But I was in Athlestone at 8am on a Sunday morning without a car so what else was I really going to do but race. Because of my hip niggle and because I was treating it like a training race I took it pretty relaxed in the minutes before the start. I was expecting another RunAsOne runner to appear on the start line to run with but he never showed up so off I went half thinking I might get to run even slower than I had planned for.

Not to be the case. There was an unknown to me runner by my side through the first couple of km’s who looked pretty strong. After 3-4km’s it was clear he was going to be my new running buddy for 20km’s so I asked him what his plans were with the race. Alan’s response was somewhere around 5:30 mile pace, or 2:30 marathon pace. Oooh boy, a Brit who talks in minutes per mile! I knew sub 2:30 was somewhere around 3:30/km so Alan would be hanging around for a while and not just a one-hit/5km wonder. Turns out Alan is relatively new to Adelaide, has done some running with Robbie (past character in the blog) and is looking at running Adelaide marathon. It was an absolute pleasure chatting with Alan for the first 20km’s as it distracted me from my hip and the fact we were running along pretty quickly. In the first 2-3km’s of not talking to Alan I did wonder if I could hold 3:28/km for 30km’s off no taper but after 10-15km’s of chatting with Alan I felt unstoppable.

At the 20km mark I started to think about where I would pick up the pace and try some of my own marathon pace effort. 10km seemed too much, 5km seemed too short. I unknowingly created a little gap on Alan at the 21-22km mark and from there I chucked on some music and started dropping 3:10/km for some of the last 8km’s. It was a pretty fun way to race in the end. I knew I had a big lead heading into the final km so I didn’t need to push my way around the turns in the final kilometre and instead was able to soak it up a bit as I crossed the line. My average pace in the end was 3:22/km and my overall time was a tiny bit faster than last year when I had raced it a lot harder. (Alan was 2:20 back). I remember feeling absolutely cooked at the end last year whereas this time around, besides caution around my hip, I felt fine. Great success.

To add to that success, my sister Georgia finished 2nd out of the females in the 30k and plenty of other RunAsOne runners hit the podium.

That’s about that really. I didn’t bother with a warm-down because I wanted to chat with Georgia when she finished, make sure I didn’t miss the presentations and also to give my hip a rest. As I wrote earlier, I’m not too concerned by it but if you read next week’s blog and the issue has gotten worse please ring 0421 866 281 to tell me I’m an idiot. It will give you something to be on the edge of your seat for though! The next week of running and life I have coming up is pretty standard. Training, preparing The Blue Line, watching the Olympics and racing again in a teams event on Saturday (only 8km). Until next week though, thanks for reading and if you’re new and enjoyed it that’s great. If you’re new and didn’t enjoy it well that’s not great but it is your opinion. Thanks!