Fraser Darcy

It’s a Thursday afternoon and I’m sitting down early to put together the blog. Not because I’ve got a busy weekend coming up. No, it’s because I feel like I’ve had a week of experiences already and it’s only Thursday. Things need to be purged from my consciousness so I can absorb some more ups and downs of life. Plus, I also thought I’d change up the routine for blog writing this week and see how that goes. I’ve changed a few other routines this week so what’s one more?

The first routine I changed this week was waking up in North Brighton on Monday morning, not Eden Hills. I usually run in Belair on Monday’s and to travel from North Brighton up the hill to Belair was going to be a pain at 9am so I got out there early. Lo and behold the universe appreciated that move and in the carpark at Belair I bumped into Rob Stillwell. It’s been a while since I’ve seen Rob but he was… still… well. After chatting with Rob I went for a run feeling much better than I did this time one week ago. I had a bit more pep in my step and ran my old 15km loop in Belair finishing pretty strong but not getting too carried away. Usually on Monday’s I follow this run up with some mobility but given I had a busy day on the cards that mobility session got pushed back. I headed back down the hill towards North Brighton with the ambition of plugging in the nbn box for the first time in Alice’s house. You see, the old owner mistakenly took the nbn box with them so even though we had a modem we had no internet across the weekend, *puts pirate voice on*, in the dark ages we were…

Back into North Brighton I rolled around 11am to a pleasant sight of the nbn box on the front door step. You beauty, plug her in and away we go. Plug her in I could not though. Old mate had not given us the actual cord to plug into the antenna. Motherf*****. Off to Bunnings I went to get an appropriate cord.

Back with the cord I then plugged it in again. Alrighty then, let’s get me some internet. No. No internet for you. I’d done everything right and was still getting no internet. In the dark ages I was. And getting angry. So I had some lunch instead.

And then I got even angrier. The dishwasher hadn’t drained properly and had water sitting in it. Now I had to solve that issue. Thirty minutes and a youtube video later I had it drained. Did I have internet yet though? No. I had to leave those issues behind though and crack on with some work, an arvo run and some strides. When Alice got back from work I hoped I could abdicate from my throne of internet issues and hopefully get her to lead our empire out of the dark ages. She called the help line, the lady on the end logged a request and said we’d have it sorted in 24-48hrs. For f*** sake what are they doing back there. Just give us the internet now. Unsurprisingly seeing as I made it to the end of the week, we lived on in the dark ages and survived another night.

On Tuesday morning, the day started much better. The internet gods had delivered. We had internet. Hallelujah. There was no time to use it though because we also had a RAO session to get to. On the cards were 2km reps off an 8 minute cycle. I felt particularly good last time we did these and was hoping to feel just as good. Instead, I did not and put it to two things. 1) Others were feeling just as good so I couldn’t get the big alpha energy that makes you feel like a king when you’re out on your own in a session. 2) I wore a pair of Alphafly 3’s I’ve never felt particularly fast in but always hope it’ll be a different story when I put them on. It never is though. There’s probably a mental part of it but there’s also some engineering parts to it that I discovered when comparing them to my Alphafly 2’s (the way they bend is different and where my foot strikes the ground relative to the airpods is different). So it’s not me, it’s the shoes. I think that’s what most good runners do, blame their shoes, not themselves…

After the session I had a much better bulk of the day than Monday. What with the internet now back in my life at ‘home’ I was able to get some work done late in the afternoon without draining my data. I wasn’t the only one doing work at ‘home’ though with a collection of tradesmen ripping up the shared driveway to the unit. This was planned work we were notified of late Monday night expecting it to only be carried out during the day. It wasn’t going to affect my car parking situation and Alice did not think it would affect her situation but… ominous music… it did. Long story short, Alice couldn’t get her car out of the driveway unless we shifted some pavers, so I shifted some pavers, Alice shifted her car, lady came out from next door, yelled at us for shifting pavers, we apologised and said we didn’t think the work would impact us after hours, she yelled again, we apologised and shifted the pavers and Alice’s car back.

Now if somehow the lady across the driveway has found her way onto fraserdarcy.com well hello and sorry for making it sound like you’re a nasty person. Please keep reading as there’s a good ending.

Back inside after the commotion in the driveway I was pretty pissed off. This’d never happen in Quorn, people don’t just yell at you… first the internet, now the driveway…in Quorn if something bad happened I’d just go outside and stare at the landscape and feel better… here I’m staring into suburbia. Things were not looking so bright in Brighton. But, what I failed to remember at the time is that I have lived in many different locations and there were always challenging times in each place I lived in. When I lived across the road from Westminster a housemate left the stove on and the front door wide open one afternoon, who knows what could’ve happened that day. When I lived in Quorn, dogs used to bark all night for the first 12 months I was there so much so that I put in an official complaint to the council. My first night at Perisher in my second season my roomate was drunk and tried to get in my bed thinking it was his… This event in the driveway was just the North Brighton chapter of ‘Challenging events when moving into a new house’ book.

Moving onto Wednesday and with the passage of time my rage at the inconveniences of North Brighton Life had died down a bit. I went for a good mid week long run by myself as Jess was in Sydney and Jacob was sick. I continued to do some work from The RunHouse and didn’t do any gym. I’d already ticked that off instead on Tuesday for another change of routine. Did it feel ok? Yes, it’s not really a big deal to me when I do my gym. By not doing it on Wednesday it meant my Wednesday arvo run was pretty good and I topped it off with a second sauna for the week too (I already went with friend of the blog Fin on Tuesday).

Thursday. Session day for me and the third week in a row of doing so in the city on a Thursday. This meant that I could drive Alice into the city for the third time in a row this week as well, saving her catching the train/bus. After doing some work at The RunHouse I got out for a run with Adam and Riley just after 9am. We weren’t doing the same session but it was still nice to warm up together. I changed into my Alphafly 2’s and took off on what I hoped would be 10-12k at goal HMP (under 3:10/km). If I couldn’t hold goal HMP comfortably then I would break it up into 12min blocks (or just under 4k’s worth). I believe I’ve said this before on fraserdarcy.com but I’ll say it again; this is exactly the type of session that lots of runners do very frequently however for a number of reasons (marathon training, trail running, frequent racing) I tend to not make room in my schedule for a session like this. Hence, it was a real treat to lock into a 10k at the same effort and just tick off the kilometres.

Which is exactly how it felt too. The first 1.5km’s was on the dirt of the uni loop and then into Botanic Park so inevitably it was a bit slower than I’d like but I tried to not worry about pace and only focus on getting warmed up into the effort of a half marathon. Once I was in Botanic I started clicking off sub 3:10/km’s and felt good doing so. At the 12 minute mark I realised I was going well enough to just keep going and then played the game of ‘will I stop at 10k’s or 12k’s‘. By about 6km’s in I realised I only had to do just over two laps of the Botanic loop and I would be at 10k’s. I could feel myself getting a bit tired as I made my way around the turns so figured, given I was doing three quality sessions this week anyway, that 10k’s was probably a decent amount of volume and would stop there. I averaged 3:08/km for the whole 10km’s and while I was bent over at the end I felt good about a minute later and probably could’ve kept going. That feeling always surprises me in training, the way your internal monologue makes you feel like death is imminent if you keep going at a certain pace but if you stop for a minute or so you could easily pick that pace up again. Something in that I think.

With the session ticked it was onto the rest of the day, which for a change on Thursday, included gym and sauna at The RunHouse. It felt good to just cram it all in the morning before heading back ‘home’ to North Brighton. Where, if you remember, the driveway was being worked on still. Fortunately though, the tradesmen were on schedule to be finished so there would be no more issues with Alice’s car being trapped. As I procrastinated my way out of work on the couch at ‘home’ there was a knock on the door. This house is full of surprises, who’s knocking on the door in the afternoon, how dare they…It was my friend from across the driveway. Oh this is a surprise. It turns out she was informing me the work was done and had, without literally waving a big white flag, was cosying up for a bit a truce/apology for yelling at us. There was even an admission that the letter informing us of the works was too ambiguous and could’ve been clearer to say the carpark area was not accessible for three whole days. I had my opportunity to be grumpy with her but refrained. This was instead my opportunity to show what I learned from living in Quorn and working at the pool. The best way to make a new friend in a new neighbourhood is talk very friendly like you have nothing else to do but talk about things that don’t matter in a very positive ‘how you going’ approach. Saying lots of ‘yeah yeah yeah’ and nodding your head with a relaxed smile is key here. By the end of our conversation I was convinced that we were on good terms (and I would hopefully not get yelled at). If the nice lady is still reading then please let me know in the comments if I am correct.

And that was of course only Thursday afternoon! I still had to go out for my double which I did along the beach for the second night in a row. It’s a real change in scenery and routine having so many more options to double from home. Living in Eden Hills it felt like all my doubles were limited to a certain few routes to avoid hills and traffic. Back in Quorn I had ample routes to choose from which were all flat and so I’m starting to adapt back into that mindset. Which is funny, because I moved to Quorn with the mindset of getting better at outdoor things and then specifying that into running. Now I’m bringing that mindset back, and sharpening it up a bit having learned a few things from Quorn life, and applying it to North Brighton life. What steps forward can I make with my running and life whilst living in North Brighton? I didn’t expect to make an Australian team when I moved to Quorn but I did. What unexpected achievements lie in my future whilst living in North Brighton?

It’s a pretty exciting thing to think about and by viewing my move into North Brighton from that perspective I am finding it easier to get over the small hurdles of internet and driveway issues. But just dreaming about my future doesn’t actually make anything happen. I still need to get out and DO things that challenge me outside my comfort zone in North Brighton life just like I did in the early days of Quorn life. Hence, the subtle changes in routine so far this week have been welcome additions. I don’t need to reinvent the wheel but a fresh environment does make me question; of all the things I do in life, are all of them benefiting my running and wider aspect of life? If not, is there anything within my control that I can do about them? A discussion for a later day I think…

Friday. RAO session day and I was on the bike again. The session went off without a hitch, I ran an easy 50 minutes afterwards with Riley and then did some work at The RunHouse. By the time I got home I was pretty cooked and was starting to get annoyed at myself for not being as productive with writing programs as I had hoped. But then I realised, hey, this time a week ago, you were just moving furniture into this house, you’ve had a pretty busy 7 days. It was nice to reflect on the things Alice and I had done in the past 7 days so I gave myself a break and relaxed a little. I even went for a double and a sauna with some mates to top it off. And then, even better, the Bombers won on Friday night.

Life wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows from then on though. It was for a little bit longer, I had an RAO trail session to start my Saturday with and I enjoyed just keeping it pretty simple and running to feel for 30minutes. It started to feel like the hard runs I used to do ten years ago when I had no idea what I was doing with my running but just ran to feel all the time. It was a nice mindset to tap back into and made me miss the times when running was a lot simpler…Following the RAO trail session I nipped home to Mum and Dad’s, said hello to the visiting pair of Uncle Ian and Aunty Helen and then continued on down the hill towards Emma and Dylan. They were moving house this weekend and for the second weekend in a row I was helping someone move house.

It took a bit longer than I would’ve liked to move the heavy items but three hours and a tired Fraser later, I was back home at 2pm. It’s been the theme of my week so far, do something all morning, return home to North Brighton for lunch, rest on the couch in the afternoon and then perk up for a double later on in the day. It’s not a bad routine but one that could probably be a bit more productive. Later in the afternoon I did get out for a double and that was about it.

Sunday. The final day of the week and after the week I’ve had it was nice to just run a standard long run with the group. Or so I thought. It was all going pretty standard until about 45 mins in the effects of my Saturday double came back for Round 2. In Saturday’s double my stomach turned on me and I had to run hunched over because my stomach couldn’t cope with the jostling. This type of thing used to be pretty common every now and then, generally more common in times of extra stress, routine changes or poor food choices. Lately I’d had a pretty good handle of it but this Saturday was a reminder to not get too complacent… Anyway, Saturday was cooked and then Sunday in the back half of the run I almost had to drop off the group and use the bushes. I made it to a toilet and got through the rest of the run actually pretty ok after that. So not a disaster, but not as stress free as I was hoping. I guess that’s been the theme all week! It’s like I’ve learned nothing!!

Well actually, I did learn something this week. I learned that Bix Nutrition has some nice products. They/Vlad Ixel sent me their gels and I tried them in my long run. Worked well and having them for free was great.

And that’s about it really. Alice’s grandma and brother came over for Sunday lunch which was entertaining and then I finally got some good peace and quiet like a Sunday afternoon is for. Ready for another week now I’m looking forward to ticking off a lot of things on my to do list next week. If I get all the things I want done before Sunday’s Launceston Half well then I’ll only have one thing to focus on. Running as fast as I can over a half marathon. If I do that well enough, cook my brain, leg and hearts then next week’s blog might be delayed until the Monday/Tuesday of the following week when I’ve recovered. Until then, thanks for reading!