Much the same in January (& Two Bays Trail Run)

I am now 47 years old and around this age your body is suppose to slow down. Are my training results lack lustre because of an underlying injury or is old age simply catching up with me ?

One of my pre-season goals was to post a personal best time at the Olympic Distance triathlon in St Kilda. In fact this has been a goal for the last 3 seasons, but every year my body has let me down.

There was no way my body could handle an Olympic Distance triathlon and the 28km Two Bays Trail Run on consecutive weeks. In my current condition a good Olympic Distance time would not be possible, so I would just be disappointed with the result. A wise man would have probably skipped the Two Bays Run as well, but I'd already paid for the entry (it sells out several months in advance) and Elaine was keen to race. So all focus continued towards Two Bays.

One of many famous features of the Dandenongs is the 1,000 steps. So popular that it is almost impossible to get a park on weekends, even though the carpark is quite big. Far less well known, much closer to home and without any parking issues is the Frankston 1,000 steps.

Rather than one big set of steps like in the Dandenongs, the Franskton steps are spread across about 7 different stair cases. They are all within a few 100 metres of each other on Nepean Hwy just before Olivers Hill. Elaine had discovered a Facebook group that ran the steps every Tuesday night and convinced me to tag along.

The group was very friendly and the majority of people were training for Two Bays. I enjoyed the session, but we only did it once because I don't think my legs (in particular my calf and achilles) could handle too many of these runs.

But of course now we know where all these staircases and hills are, we can do them anytime. Especially handy with them being around 6km from our house.

You can almost see our house from the view above.

On a clearer evening the city skyline would probably be visible (about 35km away).

The photos either side are of a ramp, but most of the hills were stair cases.

I don't usually run with my cap on backwards, but some of the hills were so steep I could not see the steps with my hat the normal way around.

Two Bays Trail Run - 28km

Ready or not the race was upon us.

The first kilometre or so is on the road, but it is pretty steep up hill. Lots of people running way too fast for the start of a long race and I could hear lots of puffing around me. How are these runners going to survive over 2 hours ?

Arthurs Seat is the main hill. What it lacks in height, it makes up for in steepness. The road is a very popular cycling route with classic switchbacks where you can pretend you riding up alpe d'huez. With the switchbacks, the road has an average 8% gradient for 2.5km. The trail we were running on goes pretty much straight up the mountain and I suspect is closer to 20% gradient.

With my conservative start I found myself behind a thousand people walking up the hill. Elaine and I had done several training runs up Arthurs Seat and I knew I could easily run up to the top, but now I was faced with people walking 5 or 6 abreast which made it close to impossible to find a path through. What seemed like stupid pacing from some of the other runners at the start now made a bit of sense. If I was to do this race again, I think I would try to push a little further to the front before the base of Arthurs Seat.

By the time I reached the top of Arthurs Seat I had made my way through most of the walkers and was amongst better runners. Unfortunately the descent the other side of Arthurs Seat is single track and most of the runners ahead of me were not good descenders. This was very frustrating as I was loosing out on free speed. But I placated myself in the knowledge that my legs would fall apart long before the end of the race, so any time lost here was really immaterial.

After about 2km of single track, mostly downhill, the track opens up. But then comes a short, but terribly steep, bone jarring descent down to the reservoir. My descending improved after the Marysville Trail Running Camp, but not when it gets that steep. The next 5km is mostly on roads, some bitumen, some dirt which some short trail sections in between.

By far the best part of the run is the 10km through Greens Bush. Beautiful Rainforest teeming with kangaroos and wallabies (and snakes, but didn't see any of them). Most of the track is two people wide, so no problems getting stuck behind other runners. The terrain is undulating, but not technical. I wore trail runners, but normal runners would be fine on this track. In all my training runs and during the race I found this area just made you happy.

The photo below is me near the beginning of the Greens Bush section

By the end of Greens Bush I was completely spent. Just 7km to go to the lighthouse at Cape Schanck, but I knew this was going to be ugly.

This last 7km is more of a sandy coastal track and has numerous roots sticking out just far enough to trip you over. By this stage, lifting my feet was quite a struggle. How I didn't end up face first on the ground is miracle (plenty of others including our friend Christian did suffer this fate). Maybe it was because I walked a far section of this last 7km that saved me.

A lot of people say how tough this last section is. When we trained here, we ran on fresh legs. Elaine commented that the big staircases you had to climb were easy and couldn't understand what all the fuss was about. No surprises that she very much changed her mind after climbing the stairs with around 25kms in her legs.

I limped across the line in a very slow time of 2h47m. The cut off for the race was 4 hours and you had to qualify by completely an earlier race that indicated you were a chance of meeting this cut off. Elaine qualified for the race (Salomon Trail Run at Silvan) but just missed out on finishing within the cut off. This meant her name did not appear in the results, but she still got her finishers and in general loved the race (despite how much it hurt).

I think we were both much happier once on the bus ready to go home. The T-shirts were supplied by Morgan from Physio+Fitness because we ran as part of that team.