Fraser Darcy

If a blog comes out on a Monday afternoon then that means I’ve been too busy on the weekend to finish it on Sunday. Which is a good thing. If by publishing on a Monday afternoon I’ve missed my window of opportunity for you to read it well then I’m sorry for you will have missed a great recap this week that has everything from Melbourne runs to unexpected wins & unexpected losses and then expected wins.

Starting off on Monday though in Melbourne still. Waking up at the Dohnt’s house after probably my biggest night of drinking in a while I was pleasantly surprised to not be too tired. My body was a bit cooked post race and as I limped around the kitchen area Linda offered to give me some treatment to help loosen me up. It worked a treat, she released some of my tight fascia, and I was able to confidently organise a run with Riley, Izzi and their Melbourne connection Shane.

It was pretty cool running around Melbourne, enjoying some of the same trails that some of the big Melbourne groups use (which we saw out training too). Definitely a highlight of the quick trip I made over. After that run, and a shower at Shane’s place, I hopped in the car for the 8hr drive back. Punctuated by a couple of phone calls, some podcasts and plenty of music I arrived home in time to mostly put together last week’s blog.

Arriving home on Monday meant I could make it out to training on Tuesday and jumped back on the bike for a pretty cruisey session. I opted to jog during the 9:30 session as I still wasn’t quite right and went from noticeably limping around on my run, to stopping and stretching, back to limping, back to stretching, running through the botanic gardens for something different, back to stretching, then the body free’d up and suddenly I had made it 90 minutes of running. Excellent!

I had a bit of computer work and RAO work to catch up on over the rest of the day after that.

Having run 90 minutes on Tuesday it meant on Wednesday I opted for just an hour. It was ok, I still had to stop and do some stretching mid-run to get through the full hour but I was moving a little better. My hope was that I could do a session on maybe Thursday or Friday. The only twist in the tale this week was that I was intending on working at Quorn on Thursday doing some orienteering which meant on Wednesday I needed to drive up to Quorn. The only issue with that plan was Quorn was forecast to have a massive storm and 38 degrees roll through making it very inclement weather for orienteering. I waited at The RunHouse on Wednesday until 1pm hoping to hear it had been cancelled but hadn’t received any word. I didn’t want to leave to go back to Blackwood in the wrong direction of Quorn only to be told that I was still needed to head up there.

To kill the time I went on a bike ride to the SARRC office to catch up with the big wigs there about a few things. On my way over I rode past St.Andrew’s Hospital and realised Mum volunteers there on a Wednesday… I might be able to get some free food!! Having bought lunch at The RunHouse on Tuesday I didn’t want to make a habit of it two days in a row and had expected to buy lunch on the road to Quorn so by 2pm I still hadn’t had lunch… until this sudden opportunity to steal some leftover food from the St.Andrews Hospital cafe fell neatly into my lap. Mum gave me the last chicken and lettuce sandwich and I felt like an absolute king. Onto the SARRC office, I had a productive chat with a few people there and my mood of being in a waiting period all day had changed for the better. It was capped off with the news that no, I didn’t have to drive to Quorn for a day of work and could rest my tired body instead.

So on Thursday, with the bonus of still being in Adelaide I opted to do a lot of proper strength work before my run and it turned out to be one of the better runs I had been on in a while. It didn’t start out great but by the time I hit North Terrace near the SAHMRI building I was starting to hit my groove and really enjoying running in the hustle and bustle. I continued that feeling to run through Adelaide Uni and then back out onto North Terrace. I almost contemplated hitting 90 minutes again but pulled it back to 75 minutes instead with the intention of doing a light session on Friday. This was now almost a week of running I’d strung together where I had felt pretty good by the end of the run. The signs of life were well and truly there.

Which means, after a week of progression you can now expect that I hit a great session on Friday and was amped to be back into running! WRONG! Instead, I slept in on Friday morning, rushed out the door to make it in time to be on the bike for the 6:30 RAO session, had the oats I had planned to eat for lunch for breakfast instead and a coffee from The RunHouse (for the first time). I thought I had saved my bad start to the day when I did some rolling out on the spikey ball to get ready for my 9:30 run but when we eventually rolled out the door I was no good. My limp, favouring my right side, was the most noticeable it had been in over a week and I was barely able to get going. My hopes of even jogging an hour were dashed as well and I quickly retreated to The RunHouse.

The rest of the day was a bit of a write-off as I sulked around frustrated at the turn of events. This fucking leg felt good yesterday, what is it’s problem today. Fortunately, I had an appointment booked to see Emma at 4pm. At the end of her already long enough work day I think she sensed that I was a bit flat about my run that day and how things were going so she put in an A grade effort to release some of my adductors, hamstrings and glutes, then did some testing on me, read through my MRI report with me and provided me with some clear exercises to focus on to improve my leg/hip stability. I felt like I had turned the corner when I left the appointment as I now had a bit of a clearer picture about what I needed to do to ensure I could run pain free and unrestricted. It simply is about rebuilding the strength in my leg to compensate for a compromised hip joint. The sooner I get stronger, the sooner I can be back running the 140-160km weeks I hold as a personal minimum gold standard of training.

With a bit more positivity than I had on Friday, I completed my exercises on Saturday morning before my run and went out planning on just doing an easy 60 minutes. I felt amazing compared to Friday and had chosen to listen to The Doors for the first time in a while as well. Lately I’ve been listening to a mix of playlists which are good (I create them so of course I think they’re good) but listening to one band for an hour, especially a band that I have listened to a lot of the years, is pretty special and hard to beat if you’re in the right mood. I was this morning and at various points in this almost ‘music fartlek’ I got rolling. And I felt good. I ended up running 17km’s with a few fast km’s in there.

That really gave me a pep in my step. I spent the majority of the rest of the day playing a bit of frisbee golf with Jacob and a couple of his other running friends which was great to do something different but maybe not so great for my leg. But oh well, it was a nice day and I wanted to have some fun. It’s not like I had a race to prepare for the next day…

Oh wait, I did. Up until this part of the blog you may or may not be aware that I threw in a last minute entry to the McLaren Vale Half Marathon on Sunday. That only came about from my impromptu visit to the SARRC office on Wednesday. One of those people unaware of this plan is Emma so all you other readers out there take a second to think about how she has probably shaken her head at me a little bit. My intention with this race was to use it as a test to see if I could run the first half relatively easy (3:30/km) and then if that felt good, kick down a bit, if not, stop there and re-assess my life. Considering how I felt on Thursday I knew this race could be a go’er. Considering how I felt on Friday I thought I was the dumbest person out there for wasting $80 on a last minute race I didn’t really need to enter. But then on Saturday after my music fartlek I was back on. Especially so if I pulled up well from that. The ace up my sleeve was that I knew from the list of names who were entered all I had to do was run 3:30/km across the whole event (slower than my marathon pace) and I would win. And winning is always nice.

In preparation for this race I had some pasta the night before and went to bed early. I wasn’t too worried about not eating heaps of carbs the day before and having a 17km run in my legs as well as I wasn’t too worried about even winning or finishing this event. Worst case scenario I’d just jog around for fun with some RAO people maybe.

On race morning though I went through an abbreviated set of exercises and actually felt very good. Pretty much as good as I felt last Sunday at the Melbourne 10km. It was going to be hard to stop me now knowing how good I felt.

Off the start line I went out a little quick and really had to pump the brakes to get back to 3:30/km pace. Pretty quickly the second place runner Ben was on my shoulder and I was very happy to run with some company for a bit. I thought about offering to pace the whole way but given the warmish and blustery conditions I decided it wasn’t likely to be a PB day for most people and would just run 3:30/km for the first 10 or so km’s and then see how I felt.

Given the course’s out and back nature it was pretty cool turning around at the first 3.5km marker to run against the whole field cheering us front runners on. Same again when we passed through the start line area at 7km’s. It was about here where I lost contact with Ben and ran pretty much the next 7 km’s all by myself out the 14km and final turn around point. I was now going to run back into the field for the final 7km which was going to be nice but I was also going to bump into the 10km field as well. If I ran it right I would even bump into my mates Luke and Patty who were likely to be winning the 10km.

Sure enough, as I got to the 5km turnaround for them I could see their singlets coming straight at me. I put in a burst of speed to catch up to Luke and was pretty bloody happy with myself for doing so and having a little bit of fun within the race. I tried to run with him and make a race of it for the last 5km’s but I was a little bit too tired for that and not that interested so opted to ease off and ended up running between Luke and Patty a few seconds back. I ended up coming in just in front of Patty and almost three minutes ahead of second place in the half marathon in a time of 1:12:45. It didn’t feel too bad but of course the real test is how I was going to recover from such an event.

The first kilometre of the warm down felt crap but then by the end the hardest part about warming down was the lack of energy I had, not my leg/hip discomfort. Maybe there were signs of life in me after all.

I spent the rest of the day doing some admin work, went for an easy bike ride and then jumped into the sauna where I am now almost becoming a regular on a Sunday afternoon. It was a good end to a busy week in the end and one in which all up I ran 127km’s which is an improvement by about 30km’s from the week before. If this following week hits 140km at least and my leg continues improving then I will be on track. There is the possibility I race the State 10,000m Champs on Sunday but I would like to run with some intensity on Tuesday or Wednesday before that happens. We’ll see of course and you can read along next week to find out what ends up happening. Thanks for reading this week!