‘You’ve run wearing a rectal thermometer before, right?’ asked Lillian, as she prepared the heat chamber. I laughed. Ho, ho, what witty banter! Ha ha ha. Ha..?
Yeah, it seemed she wasn’t joking. I figured doing the Ultra-Trail Des Cagous in New Caledonia would make for some interesting new experiences, but hadn’t expected them to kick in before leaving Hamilton.
Without a whole lot of training time after recovering from the 100k champs, I’d decided just to play with hills and warmth for two weeks, and Wintec’s School of Sport and Exercise had kindly agreed to assist with the latter. Cue the delights of a couple of sessions of monitored heat/humidity training. Many thanks to Lillian, Adrian and co for this opportunity. The aforementioned thermometer was actually no problem in practice but made for good war stories nonetheless. And Hadley gets coach points +1000 for taping the wire on to my back when required. It was interesting to see how quickly I got dumber over a mere 45 minutes of runnning in the heat – 80k could plumb new depths of dopey.
I also tried some Bikram hot yoga for the first time, which was intense but masochistically enjoyable by the third session. If only it was a tad cheaper. Also, the logistics started to look a bit like this, and that’s before adding in any child factors. I would like to do more though.
Hills were fun. Hills are always good. Oscar in his awesomeness accompanied me on some early morning Fanny Hill efforts, and I got over to Te Aroha with Ange, and Karangahake. Then it was pretty much taper time – again.
It feels like I haven’t ‘trained’ since pre-Tarawera in terms of proper mileage, but I hoped muscle memory would do the trick for my New Cal adventure. Spoiler – it pretty much did. Watch this space for an inordinately long writeup of a most excellent experience..
Dawn Tuffery 
I look forward to reading about this, and the accompanying drawings.