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Bush Orienteering Weekend

SATURDAY: Still in bed at 8 o'clock listening to the rain, wondering if I can be bothered going orienteering this weekend. Course opens at 10 o'clock, it'll take me 2 1/2 hours to get to Daylesford, and I haven't organised anything.

Up, breakfast, throw some clothes into one bag, food into another bag, and on the road by 9:20, wondering what I've forgotten!

Arrive at the venue around 11:45 - I'm one of the last to start at 12:30. Horror start - I take 27 minutes to the first control, and blunder through the rest. 11.1 kms in 2:18. The rain holds off until the last 2 minutes, and I'm hot in my thermal singlet (rain protection), and there's no water left at the water stops. I have the Gizmo recording my route, and I'm setting the lap timer at each control, so I'm well aware of how slowly I'm going! I finish eventually, and the organisers are starting to pack up.

There is a big mud slide at the gate into the paddock where we're parked, and better cars than mine have slipped and slided getting out, so I'm a tad nervous in my small 2WD. However, no problems. I take careful aim, take a good runup on the grass, and I'm through the gate and over the mud, slipping my way up the forest road towards the safety of gravel.

Drive through to Castlemaine and spend the night at the Northern Hotel in backpacker accommodation.

SUNDAY: Still in bed at 8 o'clock... hah hah... but the event is only 5 minutes up the road at the Castlemaine secondary school.

This time I'm one of the first to start, and have a better run for 6.8 kms in 1:28. No serious blunders, however we're using manual punches instead of the electronic Sport Ident system, and I keep forgetting to hit the lap counter on the Gizmo. However, I have no energy, and find it hard to run the hills.

Home by mid-afternoon.

Finally figured how to marry up an orienteering map with the Garmin output - without the fancy mapping software. Scan the map; turn the Garmin track into a jpeg using GPS Visualizer; and use PaintShop Pro to layer the two. It's not perfect - I have to manually "Deform" the track to make it fit the map. Even then, there are inaccuraces - due, I think, to gaps in the sattelite tracking. There are tracks and gullies that I follow that the Garmin doesn't record, but it's useful to see why I stuffed up #5 today, for example, by heading up a parallel gully.

Anyway - click on one of the pictures to see the end result.

Butterfly Gully (Saturday)


Castlemaine (Sunday)

Mind Body Spirit

I took the day off work today, and went into the city for the Mind Body Spirit Festival at the Melb Exhibition Centre. I was *hoping* to find a yoga retreat or something to go to, but the only non-meditation retreat was a Fitness Escape (isn't that an oxymoron?) which actually looks pretty cool. If I can justify the $3000 to go away for a week.

Spent money on essential oils, an electric burner, and hand lotion. Could have been worse, I suppose. :-)

Back home, my neighbour has just knocked on the door to tell me that they're going away for the weekend. I told her that I was thinking about getting a cat, and would her 12yo daughter like to feed it when I go away?
Ohhh, yes! She'd love that!
Good - one cat problem solved.

Street-O @ Box Hill

Pretty crap sort of a run for 6.6 kms. My heart just isn't in it.

mieow?

Just been reading Sarah's blog about LC, and it made me realise that I really miss having a cat around. Hmmm, I'm often not home until it's late and dark and cold. My house is a war (reno) zone, and probably will be for another 12 months at the rate I'm going. I'd rather have native birds around than a bird-chasing cat. But oh, I miss curling up with one. :-)

Nothin' happ'nin'

Well, nothing to report for the past few days except that I've cured my headache problem: go to bed without the blanket, wake up at 3am, put blanket on, and sleep through to the alarm.

Only this morning, I promptly fell asleep again, and woke up an hour later. whoops!

MONDAY: no exercise, leftovers for lunch, KFC for dinner
TUESDAY: no exercise, Nando's for lunch, cooked a proper meal for dinner
WEDNESDAY: leftovers for lunch, run tonight, with presentations and nibbles afterwards.

headache

all over

hurts

feel like crap

I woke up with it yesterday. And yesterday night was the first night I'd put an extra blanket on the bed, because previous nights I'd been waking up around 3am, and couldn't get back to sleep. So, no blanket = no headache + no sleep. With blanket = solid sleep + solid headache. Arrrgh. I think I'd rather be awake and pain-free at 3am...

Metr-O @ Kensington Banks

Short course of 6.2 kms on a 1:6000 scale map around the cobbled streets of Kensington. An okay sort of a run - could do better (as my old report cards used to say).

Did a Pump class on Friday night. I'd warned the instructor that I had an injury, and I survived until the second half of the Lunge track (step lunges). The Ab track was almost a complete writeoff, with this sore ab muscle complaining loudly. I hate injuries - especially when I have to miss out on my favourite ab exercises (I love the lower ab work - and HATE crunches!)

Saturday morning saw me back at the gym for a sports massage. My usual masseur is still off work after slicing her hand open with a kitchen knife, so I was tended to by a masseur who also works with Collingwood AFL Club. She told me afterwards that she'd given me the "athletes" workover. Hah. Not feeling very "athletic" at the moment.

On the plus side though - that Ab muscle has quietened down. I can't feel it during the lean-back-on-the-ball test.

Also, over the weekend, I bought a new multi-player, all-singing, all-dancing printer/scanner/copy machine. Didn't really need a new printer (last one was only 5 years old, after all), but eventually bullied the scanner into working with my elderly PC. I now have a digital version of the orienteering map I've been playing with for the last week. So, into OziExplorer, calibrate the .bmp image into a .map image and... oh damn. The OziExplorer version isn't new enough to have the Garmin menu to download from the Forerunner. 4GB is way too big to download over dialup so have to wait until I'm back in the office to burn another DVD. It sure doesn't happen overnight...

But, like my bedroom renovation (now waiting for electrician and builder before I can do anything more), it will happen.

Friday drivel

Ignore this - I'm just crapping on about nothing.

I missed my run this morning, because I needed to be at work by 8am for a US client. I didn't run on Tuesday, or the Friday before that, so my mileage for the last few weeks has been right down. I haven't been to the gym for ages either - partly lethargy, partly because of a weird ab strain that I did during Pump class a few weeks ago.

It's right down in the pelvic region. If I lean back on my ball, and tighten the lower abs (to stop me falling off), I can feel it right down in behind the pubic bone on the right-hand side. I don't feel it running, but I notice it when I crouch down on the floor (painting skirting boards) or step up onto a sawhorse (painting cornices). I know - stop painting!! :-)

And you'll notice that I haven't made any pink diet confessions lately either. Well, that's because there'd be too much pink. I'll start with a clean slate this month. It's not that I don't like good food - I do - it's just that I need a wife to cook for me.

Renovating is going swimmingly. The lights that I ordered turned out to be the wrong ones, and the correct ones won't be in until next week. The new electrician wants to charge me twice what the old one (who went off to Queensland) was going to. I need to spend some quality time with a tape measure and some inspiration to decide how I want the new wardrobe, and then get the wardrobe guy in to give me a quote. And I need to paint all the trim. And buy a wall heater. On the plus side, the ceiling and all the walls are done! Until the builder comes back and plasterboards the new walls. More painting. *sigh* But it'll be really really good once it's all finished. Oh, and curtains - might go curtain shopping tomorrow. I was pleasantly surprised to find that I can get curtains to match my feature wall ("plum whip") - I thought I'd have to go plain white, but no, I can coordinate! Now the plum wall is painted, I can see what the colour really looks like.

Massage tomorrow.

Orienteering on Sunday.

Beer and Pizza this afternoon.

Gym tonight.

Street-O @ Scoresby

Wore the Gizmo with the HRM set to yell at me if my HR went into Zone 5. It did. I'd be running up a road (uphill) when it would start chirping, so I'd slow down. Sometimes it kept chirping, so I'd give up and walk! About 500m from home, I was running out of time, it was all uphill, and my wrist was making desperate bleeping noises which I didn't have the luxury of ignoring! 7.1 kms.

I've now found 2 workmates who run GPS Software. The favourite seems to be OziExplorer which has a couple of demo versions which are next to useless to test my setup. In one version I can't import a map, and I can't upload the Gizmo without having a map loaded. In the other version, I can get a map loaded, but the Garmin menu is greyed out, so I can't then import my data. Arrrrgh. So I think I'm going to "borrow" some licensed software (sssssh), to prove that I can actually make use of it.

watch this space. :-)