Hot Steaks are good

Today was rather like the weather on 17 February last year but so far there have been no idiots cutting iron over the hill.  A few folk in the area (those who didn't get their fuel reduced last year) have been a bit edgy.  It was definitely warm at the start and there seemed to be a headwind.  However once on to the dirt track it seemed to switch to a tail wind,

I passed my version of 2km in about 19:30 which wasn't too displeasing - I seemed to be going a fair bit faster than my last effort.  It was good to be catching someone for a change.
Its even better to find Rad is out and about and enjoying his participation. 

But wait there's more good news .  We don't have to go all the way to the top of Oakey Hill!  Even with the tail wind that would have been ungood today.
There are two good things about this photo:

  1. I wasn't sitting in traffic on Hindmarsh Drive; and
  2. There's a nice shady underpass coming up!

Being in good form (OK sort of, I shall come back to that later) I didn't hang about in the shade but pressed on across the dust towards halfway ....
.. which I achieved in 30:46 (so km 3 was about 11:16).  On on over the crest and down to km 4 in a further 9:07.  The 5th km was even better in 8:51.  Being a chump I forgot to stop my watch at the finish but reckon I took around 10 minutes for that!

So I was very happy with my time of about 58:30.  Much more work to do but I'm going in the right direction.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A tour of the West (part 1)

Image
A friend from my time in the UN sent me some photos of her family trip along Route 66.  They did this is a large camperwagon rather than a Chevy Corvette (apparently the kids jacked up about being offered a trip in the trunk).  It seems to have been a very good trip for them and most interesting to see their photos.  It was also educational for me, as I found out the German for rocking chair (schaukelstuhl, since you ask). They did 7200 miles in 30 days - a pretty serious bit of distance. This made me think of the trips we did in 1981 when living in Denver.  Frances initiated that idea by getting a book about the National Parks of the West  and marking interesting places.  I then worked out a route on a Rand-McNally Road Atlas (GPS was unknown then  - as were iPhones, personal computers and the internet).  From memory, taking nearly the whole Summer school holidays we covered about 10,000 miles in 70 days.  Here, approximately,  are our routes: That map comes from Google Maps (G
Read more

Insects from pine trees

Image
This afternoon (13/1/2015) we were looking out of our sunroom and noticed a strange bit of mist.  On getting my binoculars on the case I found it to be a cloud of tens of thousand of insects.  They appeared with naked eye to be flying away, but with binoculars I thought they were circling. Here are some images In the second one it may be possible to see there are two streams coming from the top of each tree. There was a loud buzzing noise but that could just be several thousand wings. Earlier in the day Frances had been to some nearby willows and they were infested with many little black soft bodied insects.  Perhaps they shifted to the pines and were swarming? Help!! Any information welcome. A colleague, from Wamboin, had noticed a similat phenomenon, but involvng eucalypts rather than pines!  Here are the photos he took with his phone. I have consulted some expert friends.   Their responses were: I would have gone for chironomids. I recall years ago driving al
Read more

Maslins beach rules

Image
Anyone who was in Adelaide in the 1970s will be having a good nudge nudge at that title.  However the beach is really nice even though it is the haunt (in Summer ) of naked people.  (As an aside one of the 'van park staff was talking to some other guests and commented that the sights on the beach in Summer were not at all exciting.)  In April it is the haunt of seniors, many of them exercising their dogs, and thus a far more attractive place. Getting to the beach was a walk of about 1km along roads, from our van.  The second half of this went past a rather daggy looking paddock with many formed ridges in it, as though it was irrigated, although a water sources wasn't evident.  The paddock got interesting towards the end as some green parrots appeared.  Thanks to Frances eye for detail we have subsequently identified these as Elegant Parrots: my first lifer for 2014.    The locale is indicated by the red lines in this mudmap: Here are the birds: The view from the top of
Read more