A big day out...

The run...

The pedal...

So, a miraculous confluence of events saw what looks like me training for a triathlon, but which is just the result of Liz' dragon boat club having a social day out on bikes (one of the club members is chief bike propagandist for the local council) around Olympic Park and me wanting to try a run to Olympic Park. This is something I've wanted to try for a while, because I've been somewhat sceptical about the integrity of the bike path signs labelled "Homebush"  which can be seen along the Cooks River. It turns out you can get a fair way, but the last 5-7 km, as you can probably see, is on the road. Neither Richmond St nor Parramatta Rd are much of an advertisement for their local councils; the pavement on the one side of Parramatta Rd that has one is in a parlous state.

It was a fantastic day for a run, and indeed the pedal, of which more later, cold, clear and sunny. The water in the Cooks River was so clear that the reflection of the background houses (I want one of those houses!) looked more real than the houses themselves. Naturally, since I was armed with a camera,  there was no sign of any grey waterbirds. There were an amazing number of cyclists out but I didn't feel the need to photograph them. Although the Cook's is my regular stamping ground, I don't usually run on the north bank, so this was a relatively novel run. At some point I must have reached a point where I had never been before, but I couldn't say exactly where that was. There are lots of what the architect member of the club calls "remnant parks", an Australian Rules football club, swampy/wetlands bits, the back of a racecourse, plenty of overhanging trees and in general it was very pleasant, if ornithologically uneventful. One curious thing about my running at the moment is that it is, by the clock & odometer, much faster than it feels. I could've sworn I was plodding along at 6 minute pace this AM, but inspection reveals that I maintained a pretty steady 5:30-ish pace. It's very puzzling. Anyway, so long as the pace is OK, I suppose. Today was the "official" start of my preparation for the Sydney marathon, so all in all that wasn't a bad hit out. I'll be running a 4-week cycle of 20/24/28/32 km on Sundays for the forseeable future; although it might end up being 22/26/30 if the preparation for Canberra was any guide. I'm adding in an exercise component; well, hopefully. I find it quite difficult to do even 15 minutes exercise daily, despite cheerfully running of an hour and a quarter. Curious, n'est-pas?

The bike is really not much in the way of exercise after a run; admittedly this was an unabashed beginners hit-out, with frequent stops. But you can see we didn't go much faster on the bike than I can run - well, I read somewhere that a bike is 6 times as efficient as walking at converting energy into forward motion, so today's ride was roughly equivalent to running at 2 km/hour. Obviously I'm not complaining!

Olympic Park is a very good venue for riding; it certainly got us into parts of the Park we'd never seen. The armory wharf has been converted into a coffee shop/restaurant; very pleasant. They had an outdoor chess set (pieces about 2 ft high) and I watched some of the worst chess I have ever seen. The armory (I don't know when it was decommissioned) seems to have been mainly run by toy train; there are tracks everywhere. I guess that makes sense - no point in carry the bombs around by hand. Apparently the train still runs once a fortnight. One of the club members is trying to organise an outing for those of us interested; I'll keep you posted.

Most of the ride is through wetland, but I didn't see a lot of birds. It's pleasant, but might repay a more expert eye on a second visit, so I'll do some research. We'll certainly go back, if just as an excursion for Jill's kids next time they're up.

One nice feature of the ride is an artificial hill with a terraced(?) path up so that as you make your first turn and look up you can see rows of cyclists on multiple levels above you. Very amusing. But the really nice attention to detail wasn't revealed until I look at the GPS track above, which shows that it's exactly 1km up (and down) the hill. (Look at kms 3-5) Very cute!

You can correctly imagine that not much else happened today. Market shopping & some work on linguistics that I hope will feed into a project I'm working on. "Some work on linguistics" just means reading, but it's all very interesting.