Eureka Stair Climb 2009

Sunday 22nd November we headed to the city very early on a VERY wet day.  It had rained all the past night, and it was still going in the morning.  I was very glad that I was doing the Eureka stair climb… and not the Olympic Dream run!!!

Though it wasn’t the best day to be climbing the tower… at first we couldn’t even find the building… it was hidden in the clouds!

 

We picked up our race kits and team “Are we there yet?” were ready to go!  Looks like Carli didn’t get the message about the white top and black shorts! lol  Actually it just happened by co-incidence.

We raced through the first part of the hallway and up the first flight of stairs… until we were out of sight and then decided to stick to the game plan!  The stairwell was very hot, and there was hardly any air in there.

There were a couple of drink stops along the way up… and the time seemed to go quicker because each floor was one flight of stairs… not like when we trained and each floor we went up half a floor, turned, then up again… it made the numbers seem to go by quicker each floor.

While we were hard at work climbing up the stairs… Kel and the boys were outside taking some photos… during the short time when it wasn’t raining!

Some weird gold bees on the side of the building?!?!?

 

 

 

A nice shot of the city across the Yarra.  Notice the clouds at the top of the buildings!

The boys posing for some nice brotherly photos!

The best part of the stair climb was when the concrete stairs turned into red carpeted stairs! We knew we were close to the top.

Then the finally step out across the finish line into the very nice cool air!!!

We did it in 16 minutes and 33 seconds. (Don’t mention that the winner did it in 9 minutes!!!)

And our team came 7th! Not bad hey!!!

When we first got to the top, I thought that they had frosted glass up there!  I thought it was a bit of a waste of the view! lol but then realised it was because we were in the cloud!  It did part a bit so we could see a bit of the views from up there.

Oh and I almost forgot to mention my moment of fame (? maybe ?).  While we were up the top of Eureka and got to spend a bit of time trying to enjoy the scenery (pretty hard when you are surrounded by cloud) there were some fire-fighters being interviewed for the fire brigade channel (some tv station that gets shown in all the fire stations).  We were hanging around behind them while the interview took place.  Then Sunday Sunrise did a weather cross up there and I was standing behind the weather guy while he read out the weather.  (It was at 9:30am, for anyone who was watching).  Only problem was that none of us had phones with us, and it was shot live, so there wasn’t even time to get someone to tape it for us!

So, that is one more thing I can cross off my list… and I can probably say that I wouldn’t be entering Eureka next year… I think its best as a once in a lifetime experience!

Corporate Games 2009

Saturday 21st November was the Australian Corporate Games.  This year I entered the 5km running event.  Last year I did the 10km and managed to set a new pb of under 50 min.. but this year I wanted to focus on the shorter distance…especially since I haven’t done any distance since the marathon, and the Eureka stair climb was on the next day.

It was a humid morning for the race, which was one lap of Albert Park Lake.  I could see one girl in front of me, who was in 2nd place so I tried to keep with her.  I hardly even saw the girl who came first.  The 2nd place girl slowly started to get away from me, but luckily nobody else came to overtake me.

It was a hard race, and I ended up with a pb of 21:56.  There was a lot of motivating myself with talk like “if I can do a marathon I can do this”, and “think of all the stair training, must have helped heaps”, and just “keep going, its soon over!”.

Here is a photo from the medal presentation…

and here is the medal…