Lizzie Ingham: Work now, play later

It's been a quiet couple of months on the blog front here, with my time being dominated by the phd side of my life. There has been far too much time spent shut away in the lab, and not enough time out training and enjoying summer. However, that's hopefully set to change soon, with my current aim being to finish off my phd measurements as soon as possible, to free up more time for training and racing in the near future!

Too much time spent in here lately.

Not enough time spent places like here.

That's not to say it's been all work and no play though! There's been a trail half marathon, a trip back over the ditch to watch the NZ football team fail at qualifying for the World Cup, a few trainings sprinkled in, and recently, my first trip ever to the USA. In fact, with all of that, plus Christmas, New Years, and 12 days straight of orienteering racing and training camp (more on that later), it's only now that I feel I have time to catch my breath!

So without too much detail (hard for me!), and in no particular order, here's what i've been doing/where I've been hiding the last 2 months:

The primary reason for my trip to San Francisco in early December was to attend and present my work at the American Geological Union Fall Meeting (along with 22,000 other geophysicists!). However, as orienteers have a habit of doing, I managed to end up with a map in hand, running around the local terrain!
Prior to the conference I was lucky enough to get a late entry to run the Sprint the Golden Gate orienteering events. The races were pretty low key, but had a warm atmosphere to them, and were great fun. It was awesome to meet such an enthusiastic group of orienteers, and to hear just what lengths some of them go to to get to even local events. Thanks to all who helped me get to and around the races and made me feel so welcome!

5 sprints in 3 days, in temperatures about 30 degrees colder than Canberra!

Many of us Canberra orienteers spent the cooler parts of our December daysknocking off peaks in the Canberra Cockatoo's countdown to Christmas. The challenge was to run up all of the peaks in suburban Canberra (30 odd of them) before Christmas. Although none of us fulfilled the goal individually, we did get there as a team, on the last day, and had a lot of fun in the process! I've set myself the aim to get up all of the peaks before the end of summer...we'll see how that goes! Maybe once the temperature drops a bit ;)

Spoilt for choice when it comes to hill training!

And spoilt for choice for silly selfies at the top of hills.

Way back in November, there was also the Orienteering ACT awards evening. Unfortunately, I missed the evening, as I was flying back from NZ. Bad timing, which I regretted even more when I found out I'd won the Orienteer of the Year Award, earned off the back of my early season form. What was a complete surprise however, was being awarded the Services to Coaching Award for my work with the ACT Junior squad - the blue lightning, in 2013. I think the kids, not me, deserve the accolade here though - every Saturday morning all through winter they'd show up, rain or shine (but always freezing cold!), listen to me in my not-quite-with-it morning state, and apply themselves to whatever exercises Rohan and I had thought up for them. So a massive thanks to the Blue Lightning kids, and Rohan Hyslop, the official BL coach, for putting up with me! I thoroughly enjoyed myself, and look forward to doing so again this year!

Improvisation is key! BL drawing their simplified maps.

I regret missing the awards evening, but what I don't regret is the all too short trip to NZ that I missed it for. Most of the 5 days was spent working, (albeit in a different lab!), but I did get out for some classic NZ back country running. I'll be heading back over the ditch in February for some more , but before then there's plenty of training to be done! Which has helpfully been kick-started by the Xmas 5 day races and the Australian High Performance Squad camp ( + a few kiwis) held over the New Years period. More on that soon, promise!