Epiphany of adventure spirit

On Friday 31 October I went along after work to do the John Gilmour 10K track run. My aim was to do this in 45min (my ultimate aim is to run distance in 4min/km pace but I’m a way off that at present)

I got to Coker Park near Carousel and registered. I met up with John Gilmour and he seems in fine fettle. He is nearly 90yo now and looks like he could probably still run this event. I also saw Raf Baugh there and one of his charges( Mark)  won the over 40min event with a time of around 39m45s. The serious insects did it in just over 32mins.

I had type out my expected 1min 48s lap time for each set of 400metres and stayed pretty close to this for the first 15 laps. I blew out a little but not much and the last lap was a lot quicker. Tried to encourage a couple of women (both named Fiona) to stay on the pace. They also did a great job. A great event that I’ll do next year.

On Saturday morning, I drove down to Dunsborough and got in the queue for Anaconda registration around midday. It was still a 45min wait to get registered. I drove straight down to Vasse Felix to meet with Declan and Monica, some friends. I had gnocchi and a decadent 3 chocolates dish. We observed a wedding at which the bride was around an hour late. A beautiful place along Caves Road near Wilyabrup.

I drove down to Margaret River at Prevelly to our house (Dolfinn House). This was a beautiful big house and I’d brought down a spinach lasagne that Dee cooked. Monica had also made her famous Lamb Biryani so it was good tucker all round. Tim Roach, Steve Stick and Mick Edwards all made their way to the house and Craig Fisher popped in for a while (well, it is his house!)

Tim and Craig were in a team called Far Canal 1 and our other team was Far Canal 2. We set our alarms for 4.30am (ok, snoozed till around 4.50am). When we got to Dunsborough, the scene was surreal. There were hundreds of paddle skis on the beach and some dejected team members who discovered there had been a run on the Anaconda towels and no large t-shirts left.

The logistics of just organising one team was hard enough to fathom, let alone nearly 1600 participants. Mick started off the swim confident as he had a half ironman under his belt and was familiar with the ‘washing machine’. Even still, it was a 300m wade through the shallows near the end of the 1.9km swim and a further 400m to get to Steve’s ski. Mick had a nasty injury from stepping on a piece of coral but did a great job. Steve ended up taking a fairly direct path out (as had Craig a little earlier). I understand the 13km paddle was fairly uneventful and Steve paddle on strongly passing around 24 people.

I started the run with my 3 litre camelbak on and negotiated the first few hundred metres of rockhopping slowly. The path running over the first hill was challenging enough and the mixture of rockhopping and soft sand running to get to Sugarloaf was draining. A huge queue of people were at Sugarloaf. Organisers came around saying it was only a 10min penalty to walk around to water and a 15min wait to actually do it. I said to Serena Nathan, a Cool Runner , that I hadn’t paid my entry fee to walk around. Heck it was chalk and cheese compared to last year’s dip. The swell this year was quite big and waves just rolled in. I reckon I had 4 waves toss me around before I managed a secure hand grip on a rock and clambered up. Jacoby’s Revenge lay waiting and after about 1km of fairly flat running, I did the 1.5km hill. I saw a huge line of people walking up this so I wasn’t about to add contrast to that!!

After putting away my second carboshotz gel, I felt good for the meadow runs and passed quite a large number of people who were, by now, walking. Declan was ready with his sparkly Cannondale and took off on his mountain bike leg. There was a young lad challenging people to plough through a muddy bog with the reward of being on youtube. I think Declan may have reacted to the prospect of such fame as he managed a full layer of mud from head to toe. Unfortunately, no youtube evidence!! Declan emerged at Old Dunsborough and our team proceeded on its 1.8km beach run to the finish. Amid the courage of teams with amputees and palsy - afflicted competitors was the shame that they actually passed us. Good on ‘em.

We had a blast and all vowed to do the event next year. Last night I watched a fantastic documentary on Australian swimming and revived all the memories of watching great Aussie swimmers do their stuff. It was a great tribute to Australian swimming and reminded me that if you do something as a team you find a little bit extra so as not to let your team mates down. Anaconda was the epitome of that.

I drove home fairly soon after the event and ended up having a 40min snooze at a service station near Bunbury (to avoid falling asleep at the wheel)

Tonight, Dee and I will watch ‘Spirit of the Marathon’ at Cinema Paradiso in Northbridge. I am hoping to eke out some inspiration to enable these next 4 to 5 weeks to be meaningful in preparing for my marathon run as part of an Ironman WA team.

Big congrats to Raf Baugh who posted 1hr 11mins to win the Anaconda run leg quite easily. Also to Tim Roach who put in 5th best MTB in spite of his 1hr 43min run.

Kudos to several of my friends who put in a 170km bike training effort in their final IMWA preparations. There are 72 teams at IMWA in addition to nearly 1200 individual competitors. We’ll be staying at Peppermint Park Eco Village.

We have an overnight hike on the Bibbulmun Track at Dwellingup on 23 Nov down to Swamp Oak hut. Should be fun. I’ll also do the Deepwater Point 15km run on 30 November.

Reservoir for now.

CHRISTO