Sunday Run (11)

Endomondo Running Workout: Shepherd St to Doll's Point and back

Truly a difficult run, not least because of the weather. Irritatingly, the GPS software decided to stop after 7 seconds and since I was running with it in my pocket I didn't notice. But if you look at the Brighton lap from a couple of weeks ago (March 6th) and add this bit onto it, you'll get the idea. It's roughly 32 km, in 3 hours and 7 minutes. I have to say that the last 5 kilometers seemed to pass very very slowly but I've learned that "seemed" is not entirely reliable. As the legs stiffen up they still work.

Thanks to the weather bureau which provides 10 minute visual updates of radar tracking of storms I was able to avoid the heaviest rain. It's been bucketing down up here. Avoiding the heaviest rain didn't mean all the rain though, by any means, and on Botany Bay the rain was coming in horizontally from the ocean, along with a decent headwind. OK, it was a side wind, but according to my calculations only about 70 degrees out of a possible 360 of wind is actually helpful. Sideways or head on, wind just doesn't help.

Not that running in rain is all bad. At these distances you're going to be wet whether it's raining or not, and at least when it's raining you're cool, and cool is a good thing. It's a curious feeling, mind you, because the outside of your skin is cold, and the inside is hot. On average you might be cool, but no one place really feels that way.

The river was really high, as high as I've seen it, probably a combination of tide and rain, so the underpass at Tempe was half a meter deep in water, which meant using the station stairs as an alternative route. Luckily that was on the way out - not sure I was up for stair climbing on the way back. I saw a cormorant - I think - doing an impression of a bird choking; when it saw me it jumped into the water and swam away, underwater. Very curious, do cormorants always swim like this? Only about half the neck above the water, the whole body submerged? I thought it had a yellow beak, but Liz said she'd never heard of a cormorant with a yellow beak before. Who knows, but it was certainly the first time I've seen whatever it was around here. Actually, on Saturday's run (I missed Friday) I saw a pelican looking quite pleased with itself on the river near Canterbury. It'll be sad if the Libs sabotage the river for the sake of a new freeway, which they will be under pressure to do. I can put on a brave face about running beside freeways, but a river is better.

Practically no-one was out, unsurprisingly. A Korean Baptist picnic was gamely battling the wind armed with umbrellas and guitar, but I suspect they were grateful to have the place to themselves. A warm and sunny Sunday morning by the seaside is a pretty secular experience typically. At least, face to face with Nature, one has some sense of the magnitude of the world.

Brighton-le-Sands is quite visible from the beach, but as you run south a park intervenes between the road and the sand, and the park widens nearly all the way down to Doll's Point - a place I've never been before. Most of the trees in the park are pines, so the ground is a needle carpet. This emphasises the differences with the ocean beaches, where trees are typically figs & eucalyptus. The bike path & the jetties are more run down the further south you go; not many tourists down here, I'm thinking. It's almost - not quite, but almost - remote.

Then I ran back, uphill all the way.

Sunday Run (10)

Endomondo Running Workout:

These are starting to mount up now; I might have to find some new routes. A perfect morning for running, cool and clear. I can't remember if I confessed to getting lost on my previous run to Coogee, but I managed  to avoid that this time, arriving as planned, somewhat surprised by the number of people up and about in Randwick as I passed through. On the last run I arrived at the north end of the beach  and exited in the middle; this time I arrived in the middle and deaprted via the south end, which, I can now inform you, has an extraordinarliy steep hill. The leading light of the CRRC was actually running in the "Six Foot Track" (q.g.= "quid google") 45 km race Sunday AM and this hill forcibly reminded me that I'm not quite ready for the Blue Mountains yet. Just after I turned right at the top of the hill another runner shot past me (young, so knees able to move quickly downhill)  wearing a 6ft Track race singlet. That's a subtle - in the sense that only a runner would recognise it - boast because 6ft Track is a really hard race, but the way this guy was handling the hills he had probably earned it.

Apart from the fact that Coogee is about 1000 times groovier than Brighton-le-Sands (my other beach), it also has the slap-hiss of breaking ocean waves on the sand versus Botany Bay's gentle swell. Real estate dreams.

The run back through Kingsford and Kensington was all street/pavement, not so exciting. The Inglis stables are on Barker St, south of the Prince of Wales hospital, but they were deserted. Seems like an extraordinarily valuable chunk of land; I still can't really believe the horse racing industry exists at all, let alone that it finances this kind of operation. When we were living in Harris Park (near Rosehill track) there were a couple of two-horse racing stables operating out of suburban backyards: that's more my idea of racing, such as it is.

Anyway, an OK run from a training point of view. Maybe a little bit short.

Sunday Run (9)

Endomondo Running Workout

Looking for an easy run this week after last week's gut-buster (although more accurately, thigh-buster) and picked on the Brighton-le-Sands loop which in my mind is about 20 km (I remember the first time I ran it was on the day of the Sydney marathon last year, and I had to finish off with a couple of laps around a football oval to build up the extra 1.0975 kilometers. However, the best thing about it is that (when I run it by myself) is that it is substantially flat, as you can imagine following a river down to the sea and running alongside the shore would pretty inevitably be. Normally when the club does the run we come back through Arnecliff, for the hills. But this was a scheduled quiet day, and the other Andrew, who is the CRRC guide, was off resting up for the 6ft track 45 km race next week, so I had no guide and that meant no Arnecliff. I was a bit surprised when I got home and found I'd run 23 km - someone must have stretched the Grand Parade, Brighton's imaginatively named beachside road. Probably a real estate agent; it sounds so much better than General Holmes Drive, of which it is a direct continuation.

Perhaps I was a little late setting off because I missed the spectacular dawns of the last couple of weeks - mind you, that could also be a side effect of atmospheric conditions. Perhaps the air wasn't refracting. I just re-read a book on the surveying of India by George Everest; refraction played a big role in his success. Indirectly, amongst other things, it meant he was better off surveying in winter than summer (there's more refraction in winter and it means you can take sightings further) and this hugely reduced the toll of sickness in the surveying parties - which were enormous, I had no idea. Another thing I realised, in passing, while reading this book, was that all the maths I learned at school would have been more than enough to do the maths required for surveying. I wonder if that made school education feel more relevant to students? Probably not. (Thinks Stalky & Co)

I'm not sure how I failed to notice before that this run takes you right under the approach path for the EW runway - maybe the wind was in a different direction this AM -  but a point on the path halfway between the freeway and the hockey club (Kyeemagh RSL) is exactly in line. No more will I say that planes fly low over Shepherd St. I can't say I saw the pilot wave back, because the sun reflecting off the glass made him a bit invisible, but I'd be damned sure he saw me waving. Also, just past the hockey club, you get to run almost parallel to the runway for a couple of hundred metres, separated only by the engineered course of the Cooks river, which is pretty narrow at that point. Surprisingly the noise isn't particularly overwhelming from the side.

The beach was very empty and just raked, if raking is what tractors do. Manicured, in preparation for the day's beach volleyball. It was pretty cold this AM, so I doubt a big crowd was heading down (but our local market was packed - later - despite the grey skies). It's such an unimpressive beach - for Sydney - it's hard to imagine anyone using it, although of course if you live locally you do.

Having reached Brighton I turned around and came back. Nothing exciting happened, except perhaps that my fastest kilometer was the 19th; that's not usual. Normally it's the 3rd (it's downhill into the park where we meet)