Fraser Darcy

After praising the simple values of Quorn life numerous times throughout the history of fraserdarcy.com this week presented a great experiment. Can Quorn life be transposed to Adelaide (or wherever)? Can the simple daily routine of eat, read newspaper, run, eat, gym, relax, run, eat, relax survive the distractions of big city life?

From the sample size of one week the answer is yes. Perhaps I’m biased from being on the ‘up’ with my fitness or perhaps I’m biased because I have nothing much to stress about and this week would’ve been good anywhere I was. To ensure you are well prepared to judge the answer for yourself, or to absorb the lessons of Quorn life (in Adelaide) here is where I was at the start of Quorn life (in Adelaide):

• Friday morning, dropped Mum and Dad off at the airport. Had been training ok in the preceding 7 days highlighted by a good 30km long run, into an ok Tuesday session into an ok Wednesday mid week long run.
• Fitness wise I was probably at 80% as a rough value.
• The outlook was 8 days (until this Saturday arvo) with the Eden Hills residence to myself and nothing really stopping my training. Base phase was well and truly locked in.
• I also had no other work besides general RAO, The Blue Line stuff. No appointments, no Quorn work, no nothing out of the ordinary. A clear schedule.

Take that as the starting point or set of ingredients then and add in the basics of what I call Quorn life but what you might call something else:

• Run twice a day if body allows. Occasionally hard and occasionally long depending on feel and what else is going on.
• Strength train every second or third day.
• No big spending on luxury items.
• Use spare time to relax. And I mean really relax. People go on holidays to overseas resorts to ‘relax’ and sit by the pool. There’s nothing stopping you from doing that in your backyard on a Tuesday afternoon/evening as well.

If you’re a regular reader you’ll already know that the first few days of this experiment, Friday-Sunday of last week went well. A good 45 minute tempo on Friday, plus plenty of biking with RunAsOne commitments, into an easy Saturday into a good hard 36km long run on Sunday.

Coming off that Sunday into this week’s Monday I went to Belair as I did the previous Monday and cranked out a good 16km loop. Having taken Sunday afternoon off I was well rested for this Monday morning run and enjoyed myself and my music. I went to the gym, did my exercises, did some socialising and work at The RunHouse and then went home for some relaxing. There wasn’t much time for relaxing as I also had a few house jobs to do but I still found time to stroll around the backyard doing nothing in particular. My arvo run that night was pretty good as well.

Tuesday. Last week I took this session relatively easy and the game plan this week was to step it up a notch but not by too much. The session was 1200m hard, 400 jog and we ended up doing it on a bitumen loop as the sprinklers were on the grass track. I ran with Patty for 5 sets and gave him a good rev up on his 5th rep. I was pleased at how comfortable I was finding that rep, being able to shout encouragement and average 2:58/km for the 1200m. I had planned to do 6 reps before the session started so comfortably did a 6th and then realised I could give another one a go as well. There was still time before I had to end the session and jog back to The RunHouse with people. Again, I squeezed out another fast rep and felt good about it. It was over the effort I had planned for the session, with probably a bit too much faster work in there but I seemed to pull up well enough after it. The faster paced more anaerobic work is the stuff that is dangerous to my leg/hip/any niggle. Being in a base phase is all about volume at lower aerobic speeds, not fast reps at VO2 max speeds.

Anyway, it actually didn’t seem to matter too much. I doubled that afternoon and perhaps because I had depleted myself of glycogen in the morning my body felt particularly light in the afternoon and I enjoyed a good 10km double. Something I hadn’t done since the heady days of July/August. The pleasure of doing a longer double than I expected is there’s no rush for me to be home to sit down to eat dinner with anyone, or avoid getting in anyone’s way and there’s no distractions either pre-run stopping me from getting out the door. Living by yourself involves having a lot of freedom and that freedom can easily filter into my running. You know what, I’m feeling good, I’m going to run 10km’s tonight, not just 7.5km.

Living by yourself can also get lonely at times which is especially hard to deal when running is not going well. Luckily that’s not me this week but without any social interactions at home I organised some for my Wednesday mid week long run of 2hrs. That length of time is a lot by yourself after having been by yourself all afternoon and evening the day before. I organised to run with Jacob for the first hour and a half and that made the run a lot more easier than this time a week ago. Perhaps I’m getting fitter as well or perhaps it’s just the beauty of having such a dichotomy between quiet, relaxed, alone time at home, and going running with someone in the hustle and bustle of the city. Either way, it was one of the easiest 30km’s I’ve done in a while and I added in a good gym session afterwards.

I was able to find time for some good relaxing in the afternoon as well on this Wednesday which meant by the time my arvo run came around I was refreshed. I whacked on an old playlist I used to listen to religiously on this loop and just ran to feel. The cool thing about using the same playlist for the same loop is that I used to judge how fast I was going by where one song ended and another started. Without really meaning to I was in a good flow on this run and ended up running quite fast at some points. As long as I’m staying in an aerobic zone and not jeopardising the next day’s running it doesn’t really matter to me how fast or slow I run. To paraphrase from last week’s blog, I didn’t care anymore about the speed, I just cared about feeling good and enjoying my running.

That theme really got wound up on Thursday. I had been tossing up between fitting a harder run in on Friday either with the 6:30am group at RAO or in between the 6:30 and 9:30 group like I had the last two weeks or just getting a harder run done on Thursday. But with that last option means I will do a hard run on Tuesday, a long run on Wednesday and then another hard run on Thursday. BUT, when you have the time to relax and let all your worries disappear into space you can wake up feeling pretty good on a Thursday.

So I ran hard on Thursday. I took what I used to do with my training, a hard 16km loop at Belair where I started moderately hard from the car and picked it up, and added in a warm-up and cool down to bump out the km’s. I also put the headphones in for a bit of a music fartlek. As long as I hit somewhere around 60 minutes of effort for the loop, didn’t go too anaerobic and didn’t jeopardise the ability to run 60-70minutes the following day then all the boxes would be ticked.

It was very liberating to just run comfortably hard around Belair for an hour. It’s something I had been keen to do for a while but with the commitment to training on Tuesday’s and Friday’s it was always going to be hard to schedule in. Having fit it in this week I enjoyed every minute of it, even when I had to detour a few times around a prescribed burn by the CFS which closed off a part of my loop. Not to matter though, I had just to keep my foot on the pedal for 60 ish minutes. Towards the end I knew I was getting close to averaging 4:00/km for the 60 minutes and thought about trying to kick home to get it under that pace but that would’ve meant I cared about the speed so instead, I let go and just kept the effort where it had been for the hour. In the end, to average 4:03/km is not that far off race effort on the trails. Previous Adelaide Trail Runner races through Belair I have done where I am racing have averaged out to just below 4:00/km for 80 minutes so to be relatively near that speed without being at race effort shows I’m pretty fit. The ability to do this type of effort also after a 30km long run is another sign my fitness is in a good place at the moment.

That’s all well and good to be like that on a Thursday but how does one manage to back it up for the rest of the week?

Well through another good afternoon of relaxing and an easy double in the afternoon and plenty of eating. Life’s pretty simple like that and that’s the way I like it some times. Perhaps I watched this scene below from The Jungle Book at the right age and have learned to appreciate The Bare Necessities.

Friday. The second day of the week involving RunAsOne training but unlike on Tuesday where I trained with the group this time I was on the bike helping support the session. Hence, I got an hour of cycling in to start my day and then only had a small window of opportunity for my own run before I jumped on the bike again and helped support Izzi and Riley in their last big marathon session. Regular blog readers will know I’ve made this a routine over the last few Friday’s and this Friday run has been getting a bit out of hand at times. Perhaps this week, with a hard Thursday run I might just ‘jog’ an hour on Friday…

Oh no I didn’t, he writes with extra attitude. Instead, I skipped the warm-up and cool down part of a run and just went for a 60min progression run on the North Adelaide Loop. By the end I managed 17km’s at 3:37/km pace which, if you compare it to the 13km’s I did last week at 3:33/km’s it felt a lot easier! Clear evidence I’m getting fit again, even in just the space of one week!

After that run though I didn’t have that much time to soak it up as I was jumping on the bike for the aforementioned pacing/support job. Off it was then for what turned out to be 3hrs of bike riding from the city, down to West Beach, around a loop there a few times, over to Glenelg, drink a Ginger Beer Izzi bought for me and then back to the city all to finish at The RunHouse just as the jets flew over the Vailo500! Talk about timing! Chris (fellow bike pacer and content producer for RunAsOne) and I got a free airshow for ten minutes and it felt like we were in a movie! People were stopping in the street, out of their offices all watching the planes and I was yahoo-ing all about the place! A great end to a great morning.

Yes, only a morning because that afternoon I had to tick off some jobs around the house before Mum and Dad returned and then fit in another arvo run. At first I thought I was potentially biting off more than I could chew with this run. I had been sunburnt from the 3hrs on the bike, a bit tired from the morning’s run and probably hadn’t rested enough. But, I was keen and Quorn life stipulates two runs a day so I just started and what do you know, I got rolling again! Not rolling fast, but rolling comfortably, like the type of running you do when you’re just happy you’re running and you can’t feel a thing. Back in the house after my run I felt so good that I almost, almost toyed with going out the door for another run. When you have the magic of feeling this good with running and nice weather to enjoy it in, it’s hard to resist running but I managed. A homemade pizza and a beer was a good replacement.

Saturday. Easy trails in Belair to start the easiest day of my week and once again I conveniently organised to run with some people to stop myself from getting rolling. It was still a good hour’s worth of running and with a gym session to follow I felt like I was ticking off the day well. A bit of relaxing in the afternoon under the aircon and then Mum and Dad returned home. Quorn life had ended. Not really, but having the house to myself certainly had. I went for an arvo jog and with the heat still hanging around and the wind this wasn’t the greatest run of the week. Not every run can be the greatest run of the week though. If it was then the ranking system would be broken.

Sunday. Long run day and, if you’re an eagle eyed reader you may also remember I alluded to entering the Glenelg Classic on this day. I did enter in the end. For a bit of RAO presence really to ensure there was representation from the coaching group and that the tent was down there. I did my duty and got the tent up by once again starting the process by myself and having strangers jump in to help. Bit of a cool social experiment to see how that always happens. I was planning on still trying to fit in 35km’s worth of a long run amongst the 10km race but was also in a bit of a ‘wait and see’ mood to see who else was around to run with. A mate turned up on the day for a late entry so I ended up doing a few warm up km’s with him after a few of my own so by the time I stood on the start line I had 11km’s in my legs.

Out of the gates, the pace felt fast. Maybe it was the strong wind, maybe it was the 100m of grass to begin with, maybe it was the extended warm-up or maybe it was the cold I sort of had. Sounds like it was really a lot of those things. Whatever though, it did mean that my mate Patty was on the front foot running around 3:15/km which was a bit faster than the 3:20/km’s I had secretly hoped for. After a couple of km’s the pace was still hot and I was starting to doubt whether my extended warm up, 170km’s of running for the week already and the fact I didn’t care too much about this race had all started to catch up with me. I felt a bit better by 4km’s in, and by the turn around at 5km’s I started to edge in front of Patty. Ok, maybe thoughts of a potential loss was premature. I dropped Patty somewhere after that as I couldn’t see his shadow on the ground anymore, nor hear his footsteps. I ended up picking it up a bit towards the final few km’s to around 3:10/km or just under and was happy to finish in 32:26. A slowish time for me but given the windy conditions it’s not actually too bad.

That was the race part of the morning done. I still had another 14km’s to go in a perfect world to hit 35km’s of a ‘long run’ for the morning. Although, having the long run broken up by waiting for presentations that were organised for 9am blow out to 9:25am was not ideal. In the end I warmed down with Patty for a few km’s, he turned back and I kept going, starting to feel good at the 28/29km mark which meant, yes, I would hit my 35km’s for Sunday that I hoped for. My aim is to build as much consistency as possible with hitting this amount of running on a Sunday throughout November and December. If I manage that well, then that’s great and I’ll be closer to the marathon training of some elites that I have been studying over the last few days.

Over the next few days, or this next week to be precise, I will be hoping to run another 200km’s for the week with a fairly similar structure to this week just gone. If I can manage another big week without getting injured and then do another biggish week it will mark the best month of running I’ve ever done. So that’s one goal at the moment and fortunately there’s not too much other work stopping me from achieving that. I may visit Quorn, I may not. I’m still in a bit of a ‘wait and see’ mood. For now though, thanks for reading and enjoy these final pics from the race and my training stats.