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.
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