Gold Coast weekend...

Saturday

Flying Qantas, left Canberra on time (6:50am), arrived in Sydney with a two hour wait then, after everyone boarded, we were 75mins late taking off but made up 20mins of that to land at Coolangatta at 12:30pm…

Walked to the bus stop on Golden Four Drive and caught the local bus service to Southport (1:11pm, about an 1hrs drive on the bus) and went straight to the expo to meet up with the volunteer coordinator and get my "Race Crew 2007" shirt & accreditation…

Then it was back to Surfers to check into my hotel…

Had planned a (2 cache) caching run to combine with my planned 50min run…so caught a bus down to Jupiter's casino which was near the starting point for a multi-cache…did the required calculations to figure out GZ (the Spit) then walked to the beach to commence my run…

It was pretty cool running parallel to parts of the marathon course and in the second half of my run I even got a "Go Coolrunner" call which I duly acknowledged with a wave & a smile - I have no idea who it was!...even better it was nice to be warm before actually starting my run (I even ran in short bike pants)…

the stats:
start temp/humidity: -
start time: 4:19pm
total distance: 8.84
total time: 50:00
avg pace: 5:39
total calories: 667
avg/max HR*: 166/172

*Time spent in HR Zones:
00:00 [Z1 93-111]
00:17 [Z2: 111-130]
00:26 [Z3: 130-148]
29:50 [Z4: 148-167]
25:19 [Z5: 167-185]

1k splits: 5:18, 5:22, 5:37, 5:36, 5:34, 5:39, 5:45, 5:52

bit faster than I expected…I guess that was a combination of the location and the weather!

my run finished on the Spit Federation Walk where I still had about another 2.8k to go to get to the GZ for the cache (almost all the way to the end of The Spit)…unfortunately the light was all but gone by the time I got there and even with a near full moon I was unable to find the cache (note to self, take headlamp even if not expecting to cache at night!)…

so began the long journey back to the hotel, this time via the road…I tried to find another cache near Sea World but again the lack of light prevented success…

bumped into CR Benny who was on his way to the CR drinks (I pointed out the SLSC so he knew where to go)….finally made it back to the hotel by 7pm (all up, just over 19k on foot!)...SMS'd Cirque to see if people were going to be at the club much longer but they were just finishing so I ended up having a shower and grabbing something to eat from Cavill Mall…watched the Wallabies get up over the All Blacks…an early night as I was pretty tired…

Sunday

Another early start! I checked out of the hotel and was down to the start by 6:40am just as the half-marathoners went streaming past…

Put my luggage in a safe place then it was off to do my duty…

All up was "working" from 6:45am to 1:00pm…my main job was working in the main recovery area (as opposed to the marathon recovery area)…but first collected timing chips and handed out medals to the kids after they completed their respective Junior Dashes (2.25k & 4.9k)...some of them were having difficulty removing the chips their parents had clearly anchored to their shoes (not wanting to fork out $50 for lost ones)!...so I got to help a few of them remove them…

Then the remainder of my time was spent dealing with the half marathon/10k runners & 7.5k walkers…variously collecting chips, picking up rubbish and directing participants to refreshments/physio/medical etc…

After my duty was finished I was able to return to the site of the 2nd cache I attempted last night (near Sea World) and found it within a matter of minutes (amazing what a difference daylight makes!) before grabbing a late lunch in Surfers then heading to the airport…

This time flying Virgin Blue, I had to fly to Melbourne to return to Canberra…in Melbourne we were about 30mins late taking off and while I was waiting someone, after spotting my CR cap, came and spoke to me about the Gold Coast…

Finally managed to make it back home by 10pm…