Finally a coffee from Toby’s Estate


On Saturday I had a tasty breakfast in Chippendale at Cafe Giuloa’s (their website appears to be offline at the time of writing). Three super-thick pancakes with maple syrup and unfortunately not enough cream kept me well sated until later on in the late afternoon. But, I did rather feel like some coffee after walking around the overly muddy Live Green Festival (put on by the City of Sydney Council) on City Road, so we decided to head to Toby’s Estate.

If you’re moderately serious about your coffee in Sydney then you’ve probably already heard all the good things about Toby’s Estate Coffee (if not, then where have you been? 😉 ).So this was the first time I’d managed to get there for a coffee and boy did they deliver. A perfectly brewed, delicious picolo latte. Hmmm. Seeing as they’re a bit closer than the fab Campos Coffee up in Newtown, I think Campos has a new contender for favourite coffee in town (although I didn’t see any affogato on the menu at Toby’s Estate). Or perhaps there’s just a good excuse to drink more coffee on the weekends…

City 2 Surf 2007

So I had the goal of finishing up the City 2 Surf this year in under 60 minutes. In the lead up to the race (and in fact even before the Bay Run) I’d been experiencing some heal and foot pain, which I saw the physio for. My physio told me to take it easy and also to include some strength exercises (he thinks that my injuries were due to increased mileage and my leg muscles just not being strong enough to keep up with the continual). So the end result was that I just wasn’t able to put in the training that I wanted/required for the City 2 Surf. My legs are feeling much, much better now though with the leg strength training (with the added bonus of the new found leg strength really giving my rock climbing a noticeable boost).

Pre-race jitters didn’t help me much and I couldn’t get to sleep until about 1am or so (after going to bed around 11pm, that totally sucks) and I’m just not really a morning person. Morning runs suck. So I ended up finishing the race in 62:35, which is still 2 minutes 30 seconds faster than last year, but I really had my heart set on a sub-60 minute run. Oh well, something to work towards for next year when my legs are working better and I can put the time and effort into a proper training plan (I never really got into a training plan at all, even though I had one setout for myself). I guess it was kind of cool having my result on the first page of results. I placed around 1268 I think out about 64000.

Rozie’s uploaded a whole bunch of photos over at flickr, so you can laugh at me in my silly running tights.

Also, since I haven’t really got my mileage up, I decided that I’m not going to bother doing the Sydney Running Festival half marathon, since I won’t have the time to put the training in to put in a decent time. But, instead, Rozie and I are going to be in Toronto in October and that does give me enough time to train, so I’m probably going to enter the Toronto Half Marathon instead. I’ll see a bit closer to the date how my form is going before I put my entry form. If I’m feeling a bit sucky in my training, I’ll enter the 10km Oasis Zoo Run instead, which goes around the Toronto Zoo. Sounds like fun!