Bit aggressive but you’ll hopefully appreciate the attitude. This week involved some big changes happening in the life of fraserdarcy.com to enable more focus on my running and life in Adelaide. No longer will I need to be hot-footing it between Quorn and Adelaide. All things going well, Adelaideans will have to get used to me being here full time.
Before we get into that, let’s start on Monday like any normal weekly calendar does. Coming off 2hrs 40 min from the previous day you could be forgiven for expecting me to be tired on Monday. I was not. Instead I had an enjoyable run in Belair, listening to some 70’s music until Bat out of Hell came on. With no real reason or need to do it other than just feeling good, I just started matching the song’s energy and took off on the downhill section of trail I was on. It was great to get rolling without over reaching for it.
I visited the gym later on in the day to lift some heavy things and put them down again. My strength has been slowly improving but it hasn’t been a major focus for a few weeks as I’ve built my running volume up. I should add in a few more plyometric exercises though so perhaps that will come next. The rest of the day was a bit more relaxed, organised myself for a trip to Quorn, ran in the afternoon, had dinner, didn’t sleep that great but oh well, there’s always another chance to get that right.
The poor sleep meant I was a bit tired for the 6:30am session with RunAsOne but I managed to get through it. I rolled out for my session straight afterwards at 8am and only had until 9:30am to fit it in as I was heading back to Quorn on this day. I had planned to do 10 sets of 1km ‘threshold’, 250m jog recoveries. When the first one clicked up at 3:14/km I thought oh boy, this isn’t great, this is the poor sleep effect. I put a bit more effort into the next one and still received 3:13/km for the 1km effort which is a teeny tiny bit slower than my true threshold. That’s it, I’m not hitting 10 of these, I’ll only do 8 and be done with it. The next couple were faster again but still only at 3:10/km. It was only until I made it to number 7 and 8 that I felt like I was actually running fast so was glad to call it there in the end.
Once I was back at the shop I chatted with Jacob who seemed to think the GPS data around that loop isn’t great so my paces were actually probably spot on or too fast for what I wanted. Great. That made me a bit more positive about my session but it did nothing to stop me from feeling dead tired. I quickly changed, hot-footed home, organised myself and then said hello to Chad as he arrived at my parents house. Yes, this was a two person visit to Quorn this week as I needed an extra pair of hands to help me move my belongings out of my house.
I have finally bit the bullet and decided to rent my house out in Quorn. I had been thinking about it for several months and eventually knew the decision had to be made. The options I had on the table to decide from were:
- Keep the status quo of living between Quorn and Adelaide, visiting every fortnight or so.
- Move more permanently back to Quorn and stop attending training in Adelaide as much.
- Move more permanently back to Adelaide and put all my focus into living there.
The pro’s and con’s of each are a combination of financial implications (eg. cheaper to live at home and rent my house in the short term, but long term renting/buying in Adelaide will be more expensive) and effects on my running (more time spent in Adelaide is better for my training overall and improves my ability to travel to interstate races). That’s the logical part of the decision making process though. The emotional part of it is that I really enjoy the simple Quorn life as I’ve expressed before on these webpages. Losing that freedom and independence just to hopefully run a bit faster, is that the trade-off I’m making?
No it’s not I don’t think. That’s a closed minded view of what it means to focus on living in Adelaide. There’s a whole range of opportunities and ambitions I’ve not explored because I’ve really never lived in Adelaide without having outdoor ed work drag me away at random stages. The other way I look at it is I’ve ‘used‘ the Quorn life part of my life to develop as a person and now I need to move somewhere else to continue that development. That’s not to say I still wouldn’t have kept developing and improving had I stayed more permanently in Quorn, it’s just that it would’ve made it more difficult to become a better runner and coach whilst staying in Adelaide. The successes I’ve had in the past six months all reflect the increased time I’ve spent in Adelaide since mid-July. However, what’s probably important to recognise as well is that it’s not necessarily the moving to Adelaide that is important, it could also easily be Melbourne or Sydney, the key fact is it’s just not in Quorn anymore and compared to everywhere else, Adelaide has the best opportunties for social, sport and employment aspects at the moment.
So with that decision made about deciding to rent my house out in Quorn, I actually had to go there with someone to empty and clean the house. In comes friend of the blog Chad who is a wizard at doing tasks like this because of his positive easy going attitude and way of making a possible complex and emotional task seem simple.
Once we finally arrived up in Quorn it hit me a bit that I was packing up shop. If I didn’t have Chad there I may have doubted my decision but seeing as Chad was already packing things away it made sense to get on with the job! We did a pretty good job at tidying the shed up first, making room for the house things to go in the shed and then packing up the house. By 6pm I had to pull up stumps and head for my final afternoon run in Quorn for a while.
A nice 10k loop I felt pretty fresh despite being pretty tired from a lack of sleep and from the busy day. We had dinner at the pub, a couple of beers and then returned home to chew the fat on the back porch one last time. Another reason it was nice hving Chad up there with me is because he’s probably the person that has happened to spend the most amount of time with me at Quorn of all my family and friends.
The packing up continued into Wednesday as well of course, only getting started after I’d done a good 70 minute run (half with Chad) in the morning. Then it was just more organising, moving everything into the shed and cleaning the house. In one of our little breaks I made the phone call to the real estate agent I had spoken to a month or so ago and gave her the heads up I was in town and going to drop the keys in this afternoon. That meant Chad and I had a bit of a deadline to meet and as things started to approach 3pm we were only down to the final jobs of poisoning the weeds, wiping down cupboards and mopping the floors. Chad worked very hard for someone who wasn’t getting paid and for that I owe him a few good favours (which is nothing unusual in the Fraser/Chad friendship).
By 4pm we’d tidied up the Triton and were driving back to Port Augusta. That was it. No more Quorn visits for the immediate future unless I was to visit for work with Quorn Area School or to take some mates up there for a holiday. Less than twenty four hours after locking up my shed and house, the ad was up on realestate.com.au to rent out my house. As Ferris Bueller says, ‘Life moves pretty quick, if you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you just might miss it’.
It’s worth more than a paragraph or two on my weekly blog (and at some stage I may be inclined to write a book about it) but overall my time in Quorn was excellent. There were plenty of things I dreamed of doing that I never got around to and this made me sad at first when I thought I had been too lazy to do them, but, more importantly I learnt the simple beauty of a having a simple Quorn life day. Consisting of; wake up, coffee, toast, read or research or plan something, run, more food, more reading/researching or house jobs, cruise around somewhere like Devil’s Peak, arvo nap, arvo run, dinner, movie, bed. That routine kept me away from doing the things I had dreamt of doing and probably was better than doing those things anyway. And, the best part is, that routine is transferable anyway. It doesn’t have to just be in Quorn of course. Long term blog readers will remember a discussion about ‘how you want to be’ vs ‘what you want to be’ and I feel like, to keep things simple, my time in Quorn consolidated the how I want to be part of my life. Whether those lessons stay with me for a while in Adelaide who knows!
Chad and I arrived back in Adelaide just before 9pm and by then it was too late for an afternoon run meaning I was now behind on my weekly schedule even more than when I just ran 70 minutes in the morning as opposed to the normal 2 hrs. That would bother me if I had a big race coming up but the idea guiding my training at the moment is to just do what I can, experiment with it a bit and get some of these other life jobs ticked off before I don’t have time to prioritise them.
Having a lighter Wednesday though did mean I could bank some extra km’s on Thursday which was great. I chose to run from home in the morning and came up with a good new 16-18km loop that’s relatively flat. Between my morning run and my afternoon run I spent all day either unpacking my ute and sorting out the things I had brought back with me, catching up on my coaching admin and also putting together some previews for the Zatopek event this weekend for FTK. Doing this last task was really fun as it meant I was pretty much the closest thing to being a sports reporter, writing little blurbs for each event to be published on Instagram in much the same way that AFL and Cricket matches get promoted in the paper. Come Thursday afternoon then when I had finally unpacked and sorted everything out, and now had all my most important things in the one place for the first time in three and a bit years, and had ticked off a productive day on the laptop I could start to relax and enjoy being based in Adelaide. That was reflected in my strong afternoon run through Belair of 14km’s.
That feeling was also reflected the following morning in my session. Having been given permission to train with the 6:30am group for the first time in a while I chose to do my first big ‘marathon session’ to see what all the fuss is about. Elite marathoners around the world these days do 20-30km’s worth of volume at marathon effort/pace in their training weeks which is slightly different to how the old school runners trained in the 70’s-90’s. I’ve never really been one to train at marathon pace, always just relying on using half marathon or 30k races as those ‘sessions’. This block however, the game is try and experiment with training and see where that takes me, so, given the opportunity to join in a tempo run with the 6:30am group I decided to run 10km’s with them and then run to Botanic Park for another 10km of tempo. It would give me the equivalent of 20-21km’s worth of marathon work which is what most elite marathoners do in the early-middle stages of marathon training. Hence, it was a perfect fit for this part of my block.
I ran the first tempo with Fin and at stages felt like he was dropping me. Jeez, how poor am I going if I’m getting dropped at 3:20/km pace. Only a few minutes later though Fin was on his last lap of the 1.25km loop and I was beginning to drop him. Funny how things work sometimes both physically (I was obviously all warmed up and in my groove by then) and mentally (I was a lot more confident when I was dropping Fin). I did a couple more laps and then bailed out towards Botanic. I did think I would have to jog this section but ended up feeling good through it and just kept going straight into Botanic.
Once in Botanic I knew I needed at most 6 laps of the 1.8km loop. After the first loop my km splits had drifted out to 3:23-4/km which was a slight regression. Oh well I thought, the point is I follow through with my plan to do 21km’s worth of work. I didn’t feel terrible, I just slowed down probably because I went from the high of running with the group to suddenly being on my own and realising how tired I felt. Just when I had a little over 2 laps to go, Joe, a young kid who works at The RunHouse and trains with another group, rode his bike past me, encouraging me as he flew by. I yelled out to him ‘Joe, you got 5 minutes?’ hoping he’d say yes and would be able to pace me. Which he did! The legend ended up riding next to me and filming me for the last few km’s and I picked it up here to run some of the fastest km’s of the morning. It was interesting to notice how much of a difference Joe’s presence made in my perceived effort.
By the end of Joe’s little stint I had finished 21.1km’s worth of tempo running averaging 3:19/km. A pretty handy 70 minute half marathon, in training, off the back of moving house and a 32km day the day before. There was definitely a bit of I’ve chosen to move to Adelaide now, it’s time to actually pull my finger out and do some good running as a result. I don’t have the luxury of hiding behind the fact that I spend some time in Quorn and Adelaide and therefore can’t commit to training properly. I wasn’t afraid either of training like an elite and falling up short. Yes, I had channeled my inner Macaulay Culkin and was no longer afraid of being a failure in trying to be better.
Of course, just because I ran a good session on Friday morning off the back of a busy week doesn’t mean I could sit around for the rest of the day. I did do a little bit of that in the morning before I fit in a relatively light gym sesh. After that, I did a little bit of tidying and for the first time in a few days, a little bit of relaxing. To finish off the day I went for a fast-ish 10km down the beach, had a swim and had some pizza. A good week and one of my better ones in 2024.
A busy and successful week meant come Saturday morning I was a bit tired. I still ran 16km’s in the morning through Belair, half solo and half with a group of friends which made it easier, but by mid-morning I was in nap mode. A coffee didn’t really do anything to perk me up and nor did visiting the track to watch some other friends race a 1500m.
I still made it out for a Saturday arvo run and actually felt like I was a bit depleted which is kind of nice. These types of run I feel like give the most benefit as you’re teaching your body to run efficiently without many resources. By the time I finished I was a little cooked. Some pasta, non alcoholic beer and a night watching the Zatopek meet refreshed me enough for a big Sunday.
To finish off the week was of course the Sunday long run. Last week I managed 2hrs 40 minutes for 38km’s. This week I hoped to do another 38km’s with a bit more intensity at the end and be done a little quicker. The extra heat was going to make things more difficult but not impossible. I ran the first 90 minutes with the group and without anyone else training for a marathon and with half the group coming off a 1500m or marathon recently, the pace wasn’t as hot as it has been in the past. We were still close to 4:00/km which was fast enough in the conditions though. A topic of discussion was the blog for thirty seconds as well so Fin if you’re reading this, this is your second mention of the week so I hope that makes you happy!!!
Once the first 90 minutes was ticked off I grabbed a bottle of powerade I’d stashed in the fridge at The RunHouse and headed to Vic Park for a loop there. I ticked that off, had some more powerade and went to Botanic again, much like I did on Friday morning. I had worked my way into the 3:40’s by now and was feeling pretty good still. Hot, but pretty good. Running through the occasional sprinkler made the perceived effort a lot less. On my entry into Botanic I ran past Team Tempo and Joe again. Knowing I had 4 laps to do, I hoped they were going to be there each time keeping me accountable. The next lap around though I had an even better scenario eventuate, Joe was on his bike again and helped pace me through the last 3 laps. Discussing his own race and the races from the night before made the time pass, as did getting him to play some music, and eventually got me onto my last lap. I hoped to push the last lap the whole way around but by 35km’s my stomach and body was cooked. I had found my limit for today and started to switch off a bit. I made it back around to the end of that final lap at a steady enough pace before I took a two minute rest in the shade. That marked 36km’s in roughly over 2hrs and 20 minutes. A couple of slow warm down km’s meant I managed to clock over 38km’s once again. Consistent long runs are the best measure of a good training block so stacking another one on was very pleasing.
Of course, that’s just one week in the whole scheme of things though. Everything resets next week and I don’t have to visit Quorn to organise my house. That might mean I run another 215km’s for the week or maybe even more with more time on my hands. I guess you’ll have to wait and see! Thanks for reading!
Fraser Darcy 
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