Monday, May 22, 2006
Noosa Ocean Swim
This past weekend Jim and I went to Noosa to do an Ocean Swim. We got up at 4:30am so we could make the 2 hour drive north and get there in time for check-in and numbering (yep Jim and Mieke up at 4:30 in the morning to go swim in the ocean)!Both Jim and I completed our races. Jim swam in the open category for his 2000 meter race against some of the best swimmers in Australia. Had he registered with his age group he would have finished 3rd. Me, on the other hand, swam in the 1000 meter race (which turned out to be more like 800 - much to my liking)! I finished ahead of 3 people in my age group, so I'm moving up from not being able to swim at all last fall to smashing people in races! The full results can be found at http://www.usmevents.com.au/s
eries/waterSwim/results.cfm.The top picture is of Jim playing on the rocks after his race. Then there's me checking out the water before hand. The last picture is of Jim and I just before I was about to do my race.
Noosa is a very nice little town located on what the Australian's call the Sunshine coast.
Tuesday, May 09, 2006
Western Oz
Jim and I arrived back in Brisbane yesterday morning at 5:50am, just in time for me to get a few hours sleep before my first class of my next teaching period. We spent the last 8 days over on the other side of the country, in the state called Western Australia.
The original reason for heading over there was for Jim to compete in the Busselton Half Ironman. He had a grea race, finishing in 4:15:56! That was a personal best for him at that distance by 14 mintues. He raced in the open category again. It was a mass start with about 800 people. He placed 15th overall and had he registered in his age group he would have won it by 10 minutes! The entire results can be found at www.busseltonhalf.com if you want to see his splits.
We rented a campervan for our trip. It was perfect for the two of us. It had a fridge and a gas cook stove, so we were pretty self sufficient. Two of the nights we just camped out in the middle of nowhere, one night on a nature reserve, the second time just off a gravel road by a bunch of sheep. We saw our first live kangaroo in the wild and lots of cool birds.
Jim was finally able to catch a wave during a surf attempt! One of the photos is of him surfing at Wave Rock.
The photo with the nice green grass is of the oldest racehorse track in Australia. It was supposedly given to them by the queen herself many years ago. At least that's what the caravan park owner told us. We had been looking for a place to run that day and started by trying to locate a track in Perth before we headed out. However, it was a week day and the parking lots were all full at the colleges that had tracks. In the end, it worked out as the campervan owner sent us to the horse track that evening! The grass was actually too difficult to run on because it was so think and had divots. However, there was a gravel/dirt road just to the inside of the grass that we ran on.
Western Australia is great! We'll definitely be heading back there some day in the future.
