Fraser Darcy

Another week goes down and off the back of a 10.5km race and lovely weekend in Quorn I was straight into a morning easy run around Marion. Fourth week in a row I’ve started my week with 16km’s and this one probably felt the easiest. Not because I’m getting fitter, but just because it didn’t come after a long run and instead came after a race. The rest of my day was fairly busy catching up with emails and adjusting a few programs I had sent out the week prior, PLUS, I had the tidy up from being away over the weekend to attend to. I still managed to fit in an easy arvo run and surprised myself with how good it felt. My strides out on Bowker Oval were interrupted for the second week in a row though, these U/10 or whatever soccer carnivals that keep taking up the whole space are one week away from being annoying. Can’t one man have half the oval to himself and 400 kids and their families use the other half? That’s fair right? 

Tuesday. RAO session day and one in which it didn’t start off on a positive note. About ten minutes before we were leaving home Alice noticed the fridge was no longer cold. It was on. But it wasn’t cold. The freezer was cold. But not the fridge. Bugger. I had a quick look at what the issue was, couldn’t resolve it and admitted defeat until later in the day. 

I sort of admitted defeat with the session as well. Coming off the race I wasn’t keen on mentally thrashing myself for some low 3 minute km’s and given I was running a marathon in five days time it also would’ve been a little unnecessary. I still warmed up the same though and this gives me a great segue to a returning segment from last week. Another reader of the blog asked me/commented on last week’s blog about what I do pre-run… ‘Are you doing activations, foam rolling, drills or just getting out the door and into it?’. On easy runs or long runs or arvo runs I am just getting out the door and going for it. Maybe the first kilometre is a bit slower if I’m particularly stiff but that’s it. For sessions I do four strides of about 20s long with a few butt kicks and high knees in between the strides. This is the same procedure for races. Very simple and maybe not the greatest warm up but it’s what I like doing. I do a few more drills (like bounding, or hopping on one leg) out at Bowker on Monday afternoon’s and plan to do these twice a week from now on as well but I never really do any activations where I lie on a foam roller. The only time I do put in the time to do things like that is when I have a particularly bad niggle.

Back to the session now which was; a mile at tempo to warm up, 400m jog and then sets of broken kilometre repeats with efforts lasting 300m, 200m and 100m with some jogs in there to make up the kilometre. I started the mile off with Luke and Jacob but once we got into the broken k’s I let Jacob go for the first time in a few sessions. I went through the first few reps with Luke in around 3:06/km pace and was pretty content there. By the 4th rep though I got a bit of a sniff of a gap and decided to push it. F*** holding back. I shaved off a few seconds in the next couple of reps and then added a 2km at the marathon pace I was hoping to run on Sunday. It felt good and was a good long session.

A bit of gym and sauna to follow and then it was back home to relax. To answer the second part of Paul’s question from last week my gym routine at the moment currently involves:

• Two 30s single leg static holds of a yoga ball against the wall with my knee to turn on my glutes.
• Two sets of 10 repeats moving the yoga ball up and down the wall in a running position.
• Two 30s Copenhagen planks. Again for glute/adductor work.
• 2-3 sets of 10-12 calf raises using the Smith Machine. 40kg on the bar.
• 2-3 sets of single leg RDL using a 25kg dumbbell.
• 2-3 sets of 5-6 backwards lunges. 40kg on the bar.
• 2-3 sets of 5-6 squats. 40-50kg on the bar.
• 2-3 sets of 10-12 hip thrusts. 40kg on the bar. Do these ones pretty quick. Sometimes I do step ups instead of hip thrusts.
• 2 sets of 10-12 side squats holding a 12kg dumbbell.
• A couple of core exercises involving; planking, L sits on a chin up bar and the big kettleball swing type exercises because they feel fun. Usually takes me 10 minutes.
• In addition to this I sometimes have to do a few more calf/achilles specific movements to keep them happy and I have been trying to include more plyometric/bounding movements like box jumps or lunges.
• This routine takes me about 40-50 minutes to whizz through pretty quickly. I do want to improve it though and life some heavier weights for less reps and less sets but I’m mentally tired and not in a mood to push it too much when I’m at the gym recently. I save that mental effort for running training instead.

There you go Paul and any other readers interested in my routine. Please send through any other reader comments/questions as I enjoy receiving them. But now, back to home it was to relax for the rest of Tuesday…

Or not. Remember the fridge? Yeah I had to see what the heck was going on. One hour later, having defrosted the cooling element with a hair dryer I think I had it sorted. The issue had been that a drawer in the freezer had been overfilled and there was no airflow to the cooling element. Hence, the defrosting part wasn’t working, hence it was choked full of ice and blocking the airflow to the fridge. But, having spent an hour resolving the issue, the fridge was cold by dinner time that night. 

On Wednesday I skipped the usual morning run with Jess and Jacob for a bit of a sleep in and also because I wasn’t going as far as I normally do on a Wednesday (taper was starting). It also gave me a chance to run from home out to the Patawalonga. Nice run but a cold morning though. The real highlight of Wednesday was my arvo exploration out to Dover Gardens. I had planned on getting out to the trails on this day but time escaped me so I was left with no choice but to suss out how close the hills of Dover Gardens and Seacombe were from North Brighton.

Turns out they’re only 2.5km’s away! Perfect! And the gradient of the hills on offer is great! Even more perfect! AND there’s trails I can access after 5km’s away from home! Oh my god, no way! Yes way!! As you can tell I was very excited by the prospect of having hills within running distance from my place of residence. 

Thursday. Final little taper session before Gold Coast. The previous two Thursdays had been bigger 14-16km’s worth of effort. This time I went for just 6km’s at the pace I was being recruited to run at (3:25/km). It felt nice and cruisey which gave me some confidence. I took that confidence, added in a power point presentation about my life and the paths I’ve chosen since leaving school and gave a talk to Marryatville Year 11 students for forty minutes about it later that day. Don’t worry, this was a pre arranged thing. I didn’t just rock up. The talk went well though, adding further confidence to my pacing job. 

Back home and an arvo of getting ready for Gold Coast/towing up loose ends was wrapped up with a session of 10*100m hill sprints on my new favourite hill. Very nice. I made Alice and myself some fettuccine bolognaise to somewhat start my carb load and ate way too much. Not very nice.

I could still feel the bolognaise in my run on Friday but managed an easy 10km’s before Mum and Dad played Uber and dropped me off at the airport. Two plane flights later, a long 1.5hr wait and shuttle drive from the airport to the hotel and I finally arrived on the Gold Coast. It was nice to see Riley and Jacob’s faces after a long day of solo travel. What was even nicer was getting out for a jog on the Gold Coast esplanade. Strange place Gold Coast. The Las Vegas of Australia perhaps. Plus dudes with surf boards. A simple margarita pizza plus six bread rolls for dinner and that was about it.

On Saturday I opted to sleep in and watch the half marathon on the TV. Nice to see all the people I coach run a PB and nice to see some of my friends do the same. After that, I went for a jog with my roommate Julian who was also helping with pacing and then had breakfast. Calling it just breakfast though is selling it short. Imagine the best hotel breakfast you’ve had. And the second best hotel breakfast. Now put them together. That’s how good it was. I had two servings of fried rice, two bits of toast, two English muffins, four mini pancakes and a bowl of Rice Bubbles. Terrific. 

Fuelled up and ready for the day I organised my drink bottles, attended to some messages and then went on a mission down to Georgia’s accomodation for lunch. Yep, pre race day is all about carb loading. I had my standard 500g of pasta at her place and enjoyed chatting with her and our friends Cohen and Ashlee. Doing so helps keep the normality to my running, rather than just being isolated somewhat by myself in the elite space of the hotel. To make this arvo activity even better I watched the Bombers for three quarters and then listened to them lose in the fourth quarter. Oh well.

By about this time it was 3pm and I had been on the Gold Coast for just over 24hrs. I felt adapted and over my travel/week tiredness. Nice timing. I was about to run a marathon tomorrow. I took the arvo off running, chilled out on the bed, went to the elite athlete meeting and then organised to have dinner with Jacob again. This time there were no margarita pizzas so we opted for the kids pasta meal instead like we did before the Sunshine Coast half marathon last year. I did have some extra rice before dinner so was all topped up and didn’t need another big meal. I was almost worried I was over topped up.

That worry crept in a bit more the following morning. It felt like I went to the toilet 4-5 times for number two’s which is a bit more than usual. Oh well. With the pace I was being given to run of 1:12 through halfway I was pretty confident I could pull it off even if I was really struggling. The heat and humidity was a slight concern of mine for the back end of the race but again, given I was operating at a pace that was seven minutes slower than what I ran in Launceston a month ago, I was pretty confident I would be ok.

The race started nice and early at 6:15 and the energy was pretty good. After all the build up in a marathon it’s nice to get rolling and we did just that, 3:26 for the first kilometre. A little in front of the ladies but it’s early days, maybe they’ll warm up and get on the pace. 

They didn’t, and what ensued was an interesting exercise in trying to tempt them to run faster by being 2-5m in front, speeding up and then slowing down when we realised we were 10-15m in front. It’s not the ladies problem though, they can run whatever pace they want, not whatever pace their managers want. What it meant practically for Julian and I was that we spent the first 21km’s getting overtaken by other runners. I was also recalibrating my expectations of the race and realising that if it’s slower, I’ll be able to train sooner rather than later next week. Admittedly I was also happy I hadn’t tapered too much for this effort as I would’ve been disappointed in dropping my km’s for an effort that I could’ve held regardless of a taper.

After 21km’s though, just when I was day dreaming, the ladies decided to pick it up. Here we go! We ran a few faster km’s and picked up a few of the other runners. It was definitely a racing tactic from the older Kenyan runners while the young Ethiopians were just happy to follow whatever pace they set. For Julian and I, we sat just in front. 

At 30km’s this game was still somewhat going on but from there it stopped and we slowed up again. Oh well, it was fun white it lasted. Getting to 30km’s is like halfway in a marathon so it was a nice milestone to arrive at feeling pretty good. Julian and I stayed with them for another 5km’s before he stepped off. I could’ve kept going with them but felt like as a spectator, I wanted to see them do battle with each other with no one else around. My money was on the young Ethiopian who hadn’t left the older Kenyan’s side (and I was proven right). For me, I had a couple of options, pull out and jog back, or speed up and hunt down as many people as possible.

Hunting down the first person I saw was Max from Adelaide (I was never going to pull off, that was never an option). I offered to help drag him to the finish but he declined, fair enough, so I kept going. I got a few more victim’s and then made my way to Vlad who runs Bix (the drinks and gels I’ve been using over the last month). I knew he was in PB pace and had been running pretty even so again offered to him a free ride for the last few km’s. He obliged and we left the little group he was running with and took off. Several more victims later and we hit 40km’s on track to just break 2:27. I thought I dropped Vlad between 40-41 without meaning to but then he was still there with 1km to go. Excellent, the race was on!

I enjoyed having him right behind me, hanging on for a great run and probably one of the best finishes of anyone on the day. In the end we ran 2:26:50ish and I felt pretty good. My hamstrings were a bit tight but otherwise I was pretty ok. Probably the best I’ve felt at the end of a marathon all year and ever maybe. 

I didn’t have too much time to relax though, I got changed and tried to get to the finish line area knowing Georgia was aiming for 3hrs but had no idea how she was going. I’d seen her, quite miraculously given the crowds, on course so knew she was still probably out there. I didn’t see her cross the line and couldn’t see her in the swarm of people who had just finished and neither in the group who had just exited. Maybe she blew up? Or maybe she crushed it and has already left?

I checked her result on my phone and she ran 2:59:11. Perfectly even splitting the race. On a tricky day, off a tricky build, with her last marathon ending in a stress fracture it was great to see her complete a goal that can never be taken away from her. 

Enough about her though, back to me, I wandered over to the RAO area, chatted with a few people, had a beer (yahoo) and then made the classic big event long slow process to escape and catch a transport back to the hotel. In the saddest news of the day, I didn’t make it back in time for breakfast…

Oh well, I got changed, said goodbye to Julian, had a sandwich with Jacob and Riley and then went to the airport. Two flights later and I was back in Adelaide. A busy little weekend but a great way to see the Gold Coast and experience another marathon. I’m hopeful I will recover well and can benefit from this as a good training stimulus. The most exciting thing now is that my next marathon is Sydney marathon and there’s no umming and ahhing of what that will look like which there was with Gold Coast to a degree, instead I’m excited to be back in the race at Sydney!

Until then, more training this week! Thanks for reading!

P.S At Gold Coast airport, I saw one of my child hood football heroes in Matthew Lloyd. Despite all the wonderful things that happened in my week with running, that period of sixty seconds where I saw Llody was the highlight.