trail

Things you don’t realise people need

/ Kelly / Leave a comment

There’s a bandage commercially available that is really good to carry in a trail first aid kit as your snake bite bandage. It’s called Setopress, and is 10cm wide and 3.5 metres long. It stretches and through that applies compression to the wound or snake bite. I’m not going to give you the current advice on how to treat snake bites, because as time passes the advice changes, and I’m not going to update this post each year. But you can probably guarantee that there will be some sort of compression required.

What makes Setopress particularly good is that if you sprain an ankle or something similar, you’ll want to use compression on the injury site to provide support to the limb.

Setopress bandage with rectangles printed on the bandage to easily work out how much stretching is required to have the bandage applied correctly.

Setopress bandage

You would be concerned about how much pressure you’re applying, and whether you’re completely stopping blood flow to the extremities, and Setopress factor that in with little rectangles printed on the bandage, which, when stretched properly, become squares. Use the green squares if you want to apply 30mmHg of pressure, and the brown squares if you want to apply 40mmHg of pressure. Every other collection of trail runners would buy Setopress just as a cleverly designed compression bandage, but Australians first think of it as a snake bite bandage.

We’re on holiday in Vancouver, and on Sunday we went for a walk down East Broadway from Main Street, where there are loads of outdoor apparel shops. We went into one, and realised it was more of a hiking and mountaineering shop, rather than trail running, but there’s some crossover and we wanted a sticky beak.

That’s where I discovered clotting sponges.

Yesterday, we hiked up the Grouse Grind – I can’t claim I ran it, because 2.55km at 33% took me 1h40m. I hiked.

I spent most of that time almost bent double hoisting my sorry body up this bloody mountainside, occasionally grappling with my hands (hooray for running gloves) at sharp edged granite rocks that served as steps. Occasionally I’d stop and rest, and look around at this gorgeous forest surrounds, breathing hard and leaning on – sometimes clinging to – a tree. It was beautiful, but it was really bloody hard, and I have no great desire to repeat the exercise (there’s a good reason there’s a $15, seven minute gondola ride up Grouse Mountain).

The Grouse Grind was also educational, because I swear to god I nearly fell down the mountain three times, and after the first time I suddenly understood why Vancouver outdoorsy people pack clotting sponges.

Versus

/ Kelly / Leave a comment

Jeremy had wanted to do Perth Trail Series Eagle and Child for a fair few years, so this year we signed up – him to do Eagle and Child, the half marathon, with me doing Eaglet and Bub, the 10km option.

It was fun – I got a nice wide descent after the hill for me, and Jez running with Emma completing the half marathon in just under 3 hours. When Jez got his medal, Melina (the Race Director of PTS) showed him how the medal for Eagle and Child would connect up with the other two medals for the runs in the Winter Series; Jolly Jumbuck and Truth or Consequences making a circular shield. Jez was sold, he was signing up for the other two races.

Which brings me to this morning, and Jolly Jumbuck at Bells Rapids. I’m not stupid, I went the 13km short course option again.

People talk about trail running, and how much fun it is, and they’re not wrong, but I’ve got to wonder if people whom have never run trail before understand quite how different it is to road running.

On road, the only obstacle you have is the occasional stick, fallen gumnut, wandering stray pet or child. That’s about it. You might have a hill, and it might be an absolute corker, but that’s it, it’s bitumen or concrete. On trail, you have umpteen obstacles, but you also have terrain. Today I clambered up a hill in countless other people’s footsteps, through slick, slippery mud clay and great lumps of granite. The bonus was because I chose the short course option I didn’t have to climb it twice.

We went to Feral Brewery afterwards, where one of Jez’s mates, Jimmy, had reserved a table. We all had a bit of a race debrief over lunch, and Six Inch came up in the conversation.

Jimmy has done three trail races; a section of the Margaret River Ultra, Eagle and Child half and the Jolly Jumbuck short course. He said that we were all mad, doing Six Inch, but I firmly believe that even though Six Inch is 47km long, when you’re running it, I swear it feels easier than a short course Perth Trail Series race.

Six Inch is almost all wide fire trails, and where it is singletrack it’s generally not technical, it’s just beautifully runnable. Perth Trail Series are often technical singletrack, and steep, occasionally muddy hills. The elevation for Six Inch is around 1000m, whereas the elevation for the 13 kilometres I ran today was 445m. The ratios of elevation and distance are completely different.

Today’s run was in the bush around Bells Rapids, which is somewhere Jez had never been before, and if I have, I’ve no recollection. We started from the State Equestrian Centre, down the Orlov Trail to the bridge over Bells Rapids, and into the hills above. Around the four kilometre mark you headed left and up, up, up.

With thanks to Smashrun Pro for the elevation part of this graph.

The first few kilometres were runnable, with a queue and a four minute wait for your turn to navigate a scramble over and around a granite outcrop, but it was beautiful. Because I could trip on cloud, I don’t trust myself to run and look up far ahead on trail, I run along looking at the ground three to four metres ahead of me, for the inevitable rock that I’ll trip on, or – in a fun change today – where everyone’s studded footprints suddenly blur and become lines, indicating that the trail has become mud clay and very skiddy. Every time I wanted to see my surroundings I’d stop to look, and a few times I wasted between a good thirty seconds and a maybe more than a couple of minutes taking photos.

That fourth kilometre has at least two minutes where I stood chatting with The Vicar who was marshalling that spot, directing everyone up the most ridiculous hill; twisty singletrack, skiddy mud and steep. Like Snakes and Ladders’ Three Steps, you occasionally you had to grab the rocks along the laughable path in order to haul your way up.

I’m a much happier descender when I’ve got wide trail and options – let me bomb down a hill picking my way down. I’m still not as fast as others, but that’s where I have courage. If it’s technical singletrack I’m not nearly as good, and today at points I had to hike down. There were some bits today where I think if I were mountain biking I’d have been a tiny bit more confident descending, solely because I’d be wearing a helmet.

The last three kilometres were the reverse of the first three, and because I’d now seen Bells Rapids I didn’t feel the need to stop in wonder every three steps I finally made it a decent pace; that said, the amount of rain we’ve seen has made the whitewater very foamy, and I think this year’s Avon Descent race will be a cracker.

The next race is Truth and Consequences. It’s a 50km two lap ultra, a 25km single lap half and a 10km out and back. I’m of two minds – it’s on the Saturday of the Perth Half Marathon weekend, so there’s no earthly way I’d be able to do a PB at Perth Half after having done the Partial Truth 10km, but the thought of doing all three PTS Winter Series makes me so tempted to ditch the Perth Half and do Truth instead.

Perth Trail Series races are testing, but that sense of accomplishment is fairly addictive. And as Claire Bradstreet posted on her Instagram about today’s race “Lost for words and a little traumatised, but alive”.