Oxfam night run

The whole plan was to get some Oxfam training in. Kathryn was injured and Andrew had to look after his 3 kids so it was just Chris and I and we had a couple of goals for this session:

1) Night run training – try out my new headlamp and just get the feel for running the trail at night for the first time
2) Running on tired legs – after having held nothing in reserve at the Striders 10km that morning, could we back up and knock over another 30km a few hours later? If so that had to be good training for the latter stages of the race itself.
3) See some more of the trail – I hadn’t seen any of the last couple of stages from Roseville Bridge and ultimately I want to run the entire course once at least before the big day.

We parked at Kambora at 4.30 as the sun was going down and hit the trail. There’s not a great deal to report except I was really surprised by a few things. I didn’t realise how much your world shrinks down to the circle of light at your feet so that you’re in sensory deprivation and able to totally focus on keeping your footing. Somehow not being able to see the trail ahead or anything around you makes time go really quickly. It also feels very surreal to be in the totally silent bush without another soul around. If Chris wasn’t there it would have been kind of scary actually!

We held a fairly good pace considering the dark and the terrain, apart from a couple of nightmare creek crossings where the water level of Middle Harbour was unfeasibly high compared to last time (and we would have been up to our waists if we’d waded) and we had to bush bash around on the high side. We chatted through and it actually felt incredibly good to be night running on the trail, the 10km that morning hadn’t really affected us at all. However by the time we started climbing back up from the Spit, our legs were done. The Mosman and Balmoral hills were not our friends, but we limped to Georges Heights and Chris’s girlfriend Catherine waiting in the car and were bloody happy to have had an amazing training day.

The final 3 stages of the race and 30km of bush running in just under 5 hours. I got home at 9.30pm, ate, watched some terrible DVD with Sarah on the couch and crashed out…. ready to get up in about 6 hours for an 80km hilly bike ride!