Woodford to Glenbrook

With my new July program coming from SW on Friday, I basically had to choose between belting the Strider 10k at Homebush next week or belting this, and given the outside chance of a preferred start at C2S riding on the back of next Saturday I had to elect to cruise it today. So the approach was to treat it as a big STaR.

Accordingly, I was a little looser with the planning for this run and after some research on Saturday night decided the plan was to drive to Glenbrook in time for the 8:34am outbound train, alight at Woodford at 9:04, do the race, get a lift out of the park, and reunite with the car at Glenbrook.

Arrived at Glenbrook about 45 mins before the train (wasn't expecting the drive to take less than an hour), so had a read of the paper and relaxed. A few CRs and Striders turned up, and I caught up with Fats and twopennys which made for a very pleasant half hour train journey.

There was a very large collection of bikes up at Woodford. After catching up with a few of the usual crowd, including Sarge and his Japanese guests, I went for a bit of a jog to get a feel for the opening 600 metres, and have a look around. Watched a couple of the bike divisions start, stripped my excess kit off (and was wondering about the wisdom of the long sleeve top), handed the bag in, and formed up for the start.

After the rolling start through Woodford, the course basically drops straight downhill (619m to 500m by the GPS) for the first 4.4k, then rollercoasters back to just over 540 metres at the 12.5-13km mark where it proceeds to drop to about 120-130 metres by the finish at 25km. The downhill sections are quite tricky here and were quite slippery, with broken rock surfaces, and in the wake of recent rains, quite a bit of standing water.

I ran with Colin for a good chunk of the first 6-7km, and was pretty well ignoring the watch and just running on form and perceived effort. We had a good downpour through here, and whilst at the start I was cursing running with a long sleeve top rather than a singlet, I think I got it pretty well right - a t-shirt might have been ideal. We would periodically catch and be repassed by bikes - the highlight of which was passing a larger oriental gentleman who was a pedalling a very low gear up a gentle slope, holding an umbrella! Didn't see him again until the 20km mark.

The bikes were very polite, though, advising where they were passing, and providing quite a bit of entertainment. Highlights for them were 'Suicide Corner' - I asked the marshals here what they did with the guys who overshot the corner, to which they replied they left them until morning - and the tantalisingly named but ultimately disappointing 'Crash Corner'.

There were really only two or three steep sections up until the halfway mark. I worked on maintaining effort levels through these, and passed a number of runners. We hit the downhill section which, as Sarge predicted, was in great condition, but after warnings from Mister G during the week about killing my quads, elected not to bash it through here, even though so many others did. Colin caught up to me at, at a guess, around 14-15km, and we rolled along and chatted until Sarge rudely interrupted our 'knitting circle' at around the 21km - I thought we were being run down by Darth Vader!.

Colin and I put the pace on at this point, and with the slope quite gentle I decided to just open the stride up a bit at 22km and let gravity do the work. Came home in 1:46:38, which was fine - I was figuring something between 1:45 and 1:50 would be decent. Quads are a touch stiff, but no more so than after a H4 STaR, so the call not to bash it in the last 12k was a good one, although it took a lot of discipline not to chase people - mind you, with 12 x 400 in front of SW on Tuesday there wouldn't be anywhere to hide if I did! I doubt I would want to have been much faster to the 13km mark than I was if I had been racing it, though, and to fully capitalise on the final downhill I think you would need to do some specific work.

Good fun hitout, and probably not a bad introduction to trailrunning for those of you thinking of trying it. A Google Earth map of the course is given below:


Organisation seemed a touch 'vague' - all of the right things, like bag collection and the start seemed to happen - but information provided wasn't particularly clear, and I think there's probably a bit of room to improve on that for next year, although going on comments from previous years was a huge improvement. Finish area was a bit light on in the food stakes, too, although it was a great atmosphere there.

In a final bizarre twist, that was my 25km PB, a near 2 minute improvement on my effort at the SMC in February. 29th for my efforts today, and 7th in my category. Definite chance of a sub 100 minute effort here in the future. Definitely recommend it.