The back garden

We finally got around to replacing the predecessor of this thing - name temporarily absent from brain (well, I hope it's temporary) - which was the Australian version, and never recovered from the 45 degree New Year's Day of about 5 years ago. This is the South African, or South American, equivalent. It has curly leaves. We haven't used the black irrigation pipe since the water restrictions a couple of years ago; I imagine it's been colonised by ants, and is now completely non-functional as water transport. I probably should remove it. Easier to replace it than fix it, I expect.

The tree fern here planted itself and is now, some years on, at a height which makes this courtyard naturally shaded. Behind it is the water feature, and the other big tree fern. The 3rd, which is a Dixonia to these two's Cooperii (if I have that around the right way) is not so spectacular. Very understated, but it gets hardly any light or water.

The camellia is increasingly out-of-place, in terms of origins, but it's leaves really glory in the strong light. Aesthetically speaking, it's quite pleasing. Well, shiny, anyway. It collaborates nicely with the dappling initiated by the tree fern above.

Looking back towards the previous 2 pictures - my original water feature, the vertical pipe, still holding its own as a feature, although it doesn't have much to do with water any more. The ivy is a curse and this will have to be its last summer. We now have plenty of space filling local greenery - to wit, the swordfish fern you can see here, so the ivy is not required. We originally had a trellis roof over this area, but it collapsed due to engineering deficiencies, and it's only in the last year or so that the 2 tree ferns have replicated it's shade giving effectiveness. Consequently, we're starting to rebuild the bromeliad garden.

This is the site of the major works; the golden melaleuca has been hacked back to pretty much a stump - it's just started to sprout again. It had got to be a monster, plus it was pretty leggy, so I pruned it. Likewise the grevillea, on which I left one flowering branch, has been savagely cut back. Not that that seems to have disturbed it much; within days new growth was sprouting all over the stump. As a bit of a downside, the view through to the junk area has been opened up, but it's really an old problems, since we decided not to put in a garage.

What we want to do with this bed now is plant a lot of small flowering plants, because the upper storey on the other side of the garden is so well established now.

We've started off with these two yellow flowering things - one is an everlasting - and we're going to try and keep the sun vine under control. It had pretty much colonised the melaleuca, but it makes a feral ground cover as well if there are no trees. Plus, in the bottom right, you can see another plant, which is in fact a Marrickville indigene, threatening to fill up the bed. This will be the second completely different self seeding ground cover to turn up in this section of the garden, and it hasn't wasted much time in replacing the dampieria.



As you can see, losing the melaleuca and grevillea hasn't made a huge impact on the overall effect of the view from the upstairs window. On the right you can see the tree fern(s) and our eucalypt, but all the
trees on the left are borrowed.

There's a lot of work to do to make all this work, but I think it will be quite good. The biggest problem is that the last couple of years we've been slack with weekly maintenance, so there's a lot of weeding, pruning and miscellaneous small jobs to do. At the moment I'm putting out a green bin every two weeks which is completely full, and still losing ground.


I think I'll probably need a skip before I'm finished.

Royal National Park

Endomondo Running Workout:  27.49 km in 3h:24m:26s

Phew, this was tough. One thing about trail running is that when you get tired, the whole business becomes exponentially difficult; I lost count of the number of times I fell over in the last 7 km. It's incredibly difficult to just keep lifting the feet high enough to stay out of trouble, and this was a rocky trail. So rocky, in fact, that there were plenty of sections where walking was the only option. Tremendous concentration is required; there is nothing automatic, no sections where you can rest in the rhythm of regular movement. I dredged up a mental trick from my Wilke days on a production line; lower your expectations of time (Wilke's) or distance (trail) past and the finish line (lunch break) arrives unexpectedly sooner. It's a simple trick but it still seems to work. Not that it makes much logical sense.

Anyway, all I got from the falls was a couple of grazes on the legs and arms. I haven't quite overcome the nervousness associated with breaking a shoulder on a fall, but it is receding. In point of fact, I'm a lot stronger now than 18 months ago so I think that I have more resources to minimise the impact of a trip. These falls are more heavy stumbles than full on falls.

The upside of trail running is of course the fact that the bush is a nicer place to be than the side of a highway. I haven't been in the Royal National Park many times (maybe once?); it's another reminder, in the South rather than the North, of the way that Sydney wraps itself in bush. Another, more subtle difference from Melbourne. The ocean vs the bay smacks one in the face, but the bush vs the agricultural hinterland  is not so immediately obvious if you are living in Marrickville. I think I've said it before - I've thought it before - and I'll say it again: I might have taken geography a lot more seriously if I'd grown up in Sydney. Sydney's geographical complexity is more visible than Melbourne's.

The out-and-back loop we ran has as its spine Lady Carrington Dve - it's a fire trail, despite the name - which runs alongside the Hacking River. We actually ran in three completely different environments; eucalyptus forest (by which I mean tall trees), rain forest (much wetter, darker and cooler) and then, on the way back along the top of some unnamed ridge, the kind of stunted, scrubby, wind-beaten brush that I associate with exposed landscapes. (If you click on the link above, you can select the satellite option, rather than the map option, and the colours will paint the picture for you). Likewise the rocks seemed to be in three distinctive categories, broad horizontal strata, tightly packed wavy folded strata, and amorphous boulders ranging from the bloody enormous to the not-small-enough-to-avoid-tripping-over. I'm afraid I can't offer any more technically precise description of the landscape. Apart from Lady Carrington Drive, though, it was substantially empty and judging from the extent to which the trails were overgrown, empty is its normal state.

Hawkesbury Canoe Classic

Canoe Race: paddling 102.55 km in 18h:00m:44s

This is the final of the marathon canoeing trifecta; interestingly enough, we were sharing trailers with a team who are doing the 2011 Hawkesbury Classic as the start of theirs. They will do the Murray in December & finish with the Yukon next year. For obscure reasons, we're doing the shortest race last. In fact, there are only four of the Yukon team left, Liz, Angie, Tracey & Sue. The rest have retired from marathon paddling. Dilettantes :-)

This time the boat was an outrigger, the training boat for the Yukon. It's not so easy to transport; it has to be broken down into pieces, transported and then re-assembled. The aku (the 2 arms holding the actual outrigger) and the anu (the outrigger itself) are tied on with nylon rope, re-purposed inner tubes and/or gaffer tape. It seems weird, in a way, to be so low tech on a modern (fibreglass) boat, but the tying provides the right balance of strength and flexibility. A mechanical solution that worked as well would be hugely more expensive. (And these boats are already ridiculously expensive).

We stripped the boat down on Friday night & loaded it on to the trailer fro transport Saturday AM. Liz and I drove up to Windsor Friday night to spread the stress a little thinner, so at least on Saturday we woke up near the race start. One thing noticeably different about this event is that, because it's squeezed in over a weekend, there's no real chance to dedicate preparation time for it. Packing, sorting, checking, everything is squeezed in around work & whatever else. With, say, the Yukon, we had 4 days doing nothing except getting organised for the boat. Here, we had to be at the marshalling yards at 11:00 to re-rig the boat for the scrutineers. They didn't end up turning up until after 15:00; as is normal for these events, the big boats get - well, overlooked, so we spent 4 hours just hanging around a very hot (29 degrees) not particularly shady park.

Liz got bitten on her thigh by a bull-ant, not at all the right preparation for 18 hours of paddling. Sigh; nature, not entirely wonderful.


To the non-paddler, we might look like we're pretty serious, but in the marathon paddling community we are rank novices. People who do this regularly know where to park for maximum shade and minimum walking; they have fans, chairs, canopies. If we'd been scrutineered early, we'd probably have headed off to sit in an air-conditioned pub until the race start; regulars know that that is all an idle dream, so they bring their own waiting spaces. If you want to understand serious; one guy was paddling in his 35th instance of this race, at 70. Probably the oldest competitor was the 78 year old woman paddling with her 74 year old brother. It didn't look like it was their first race, either. Anyway, finally, paperwork and hanging around finished, the boat took off at 1630, in the "social" Brooklyn-or-bust version of the event. Cue final land crew meeting. Andrew off to buy water - I remember the Murray -, Brooke off to pick up Scott and swap cars, Antonia (Tony) to pick up some groceries, and Martin to head off to Cattai, the 1st checkpoint. It doesn't matter how much planning you do, there's a few last minute things that have to be done. My last last minute thing was to pick up driving instructions for the checkpoints, lucky since Tony was using the supplied GPS coordinates, and at Cattai they ended her up on the wrong side of the river.

This is just a glimpse of the entries lined up waiting for the start; most of the boats aren't very big ... More than 530 paddlers were entered, so that must be around 300+ boats, because there were certainly plenty of singles to offset the larger boats. More than 40 withdrew - even though it's significantly the shortest of the events we've paddled in in the last year, the night aspect, combined with the tides, makes it a long way from easy.

I don't have photos from the checkpoints. Cattai was not particularly significant; no-one stops there unless there is some mini-crisis, something overlooked, an

equipment failure. It was still light when the team passed through, looking good, and ahead of schedule. We had a lot of problems working out a timetable, primarily because of the tides which are significantly less predictable in their details, especially up a river, than I expected. Plus, there's the problem of the relationship between the tide and the current; plus the question of how many & how longs the breaks are going to be. We did have a pretty good idea of pace from the training runs, and I knocked up a spreadsheet to model a few possibilities. It was sort of OK - the tide was stronger than I modelled, the team took all their breaks at the checkpoints, we actually missed them arriving at Wiseman's Ferry (somewhat embarrassing) by 10 minutes, although at least we had the food hot once we tracked them down - but I was right to about 10 minutes with their arrival at Mooney-Mooney.                                                                                                                            

We proceeded in a leisurely fashion, pausing for a picnic dinner at Cattai, before heading to Sackville. At Sackville we had to park on a football oval that was, oddly to my mind, at the top of a hill. From there it was onto a minibus shutttle to the edge of the river in the middle of a caravan park. The beach for pulling up boats was about 20 meters long. 300+ boats; 20 meters. Something of a challenge. There's a standing instruction for the HCC land crews to not use lights so as to not to disturb the night vision of the paddlers. Did I mention the nearly vertical sand bank leading down to the aforementioned beach? Sackville was a pretty fair impersonation of total chaos, and we  hadn't managed to bring all the right bags for all the paddlers, so it was a bit tense. No-one could find the toilet, a couple of people nearly broke their ankles getting up the bank in the hopes of finding a toilet and we had a lot of trouble getting the boat off the mud - a big cheer here for Brooke who had to hurl herself into the water both to get the boat in and out. Then we had to grab everything out of the mud and queue for a minibus back, re-pack the cars in the dark and head off to Wiseman's Ferry. It sounds pretty bad, and it was pretty hectic, but the fact is that the Hawkesbury is NOT a very accessible river, and all the access is on private land. Really - and especially at Wiseman's - it's pretty damn generous of the caravan park inhabitants to put up with a nighttime invasion of 300-odd boats, 500+ paddlers, and probably 400-ish landcrew.

We did a much better job of setting up at Wisemans Ferry, although we had to park a long way from the beach an lug a lot of stuff a long way. Most of us managed to get an hour's sleep; somehow though, while cooking, we managed to miss the boat number being called as it passed through the checkpoint. (Due to the tide they arrived 15 minutes before the earliest point I thought was possible, so we didn't have anyone down at the landing) Fortunately the magic of mobile technology reunited us with the team, and apart from Liz missing some gloves, it was a very successful turnaround. Probably took a bit long, but everyone left in a very optimistic mood. They decided not to stop at the final pre-finish checkpoint (Spencer), which was a BIG relief to me, because the Spence checkpoint looked worse on paper than Sackville. Also, some rather smart navigation by Scott & Brooke meant that we could drive to Mooney Mooney without crossing Wiseman's Ferry, which, you can imagine, was somewhat busy. Mind you, it was a scary, scary road. Some of the hairpins had a recommended speed of 5 kph, and they were not joking. Any faster and you were on the wrong side of the road. OK, not a big problem at 4AM, but I'd hate to go along there at peak hour. It's not that easy to do 5 kph in a diesel in 2nd, and it's not that easy to change down into 1st.

We got into Mooney Mooney just in time to miss the last 2 spaces in the car park ( I can say that because Martin & Tony got them). I probably should have slept at this stage, but I find it hard to sleep at the end of a race. We had a great setup, we commandeered a picnic table next to the coffee tent, so I wandered around keeping an eye on things.

There was a dramatic moment when their number went up on the "30 minutes a way" board, but it turned out to be a transcription error. I didn't think they could be in before 9:00 AM, and 9:30 was my official estimate, but I wan't quite sure about the tide. They figured to catch some of the late low tide; it was a question of how much of it, and how strong it would be. They'd got in to Wiseman's very early, absolutely at their best possible time, so I didn't want to miss them twice in one race.

Fianlly at 9:00 we got the word they were 30 minutes out, and they really were quick in that last stretch. Sunrise, and the sight of the finish must have woken them up. In the end, their time was 17 hours, 4 minutes; 2 hours better than our pre-race estimates. A big success.

Good to finish. Smart move to sleep before driving.

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End to end TVT

Endomondo Running Workout:  18.57 km in 2h:05m:00s

Sharon and I went on a good run at a steady pace (both still post-marathon) up past the waterfall and along cup-and-saucer creek and eventually by a bit of black magic that I didn't quite understand and couldn't really guarantee to replicate onto Bexley Rd and down to the M7 (or maybe the M5) where the TVT (two valley track for new viewers) actually begins. Or ends. Anyway, this was good because I've only been able to find half of the TVT whenever I've gone out on my own, and running both valleys is obviously better. I'm looking to increase the amount of trail running, and even though it's not the most difficult, sorry, technical, trail in Sydney, it's not a road. It has rocks, hills, trees and water crossings. And some rather poor signposting, meaning it's almost impossible not to get lost. Not so badly lost that you can't get un-lost fairly easily though. Of course, in addition to being off road, in summer it being under-tree is a huge bonus as well, typically 5 or so degrees cooler along the track compared to the road.

We met a few people on the track; there's a definite moral hierarchy involved with being a track user; clearly, judging by the disapproving looks and lack of cheer, bird-watchers believe themselves to be higher up the hierarchy than runners. Walkers don't appear to be particularly morally sensitive, but dog walkers all clearly have guilty consciences. Cyclists, thankfully, aren't seen.

Tracks are interesting things. Since I was eleven, I've been thinking about them; how they form, how they evolve, how they disappear. People follow each other, but in the beginning there aren't many clues about where to go. So "follow" isn't quite the right word. A track comes into being as an average of new attempts to go somewhere. Changes happen through a mixture of accident and enhancement. I'm thinking about this because at the point where we got lost, the one track has developed two offshoots. One of those I've seen before, but it is much deeper now. More people have pushed along it, each one perhaps a little further before deciding that it is the wrong track and turning around. One day perhaps it will no longer be the wrong track, because its end point will be somewhere useful. The other false path we followed is new to me (I've been lost at this point before). As you'd expect from a new path, it's quite short. But it will also probably continue to grow.

Both of these false tracks came into being, presumably, because the bush mimicked the first metre of the continuation of the real track, leading people astray. Impressive mimicry, when you consider that the real track is there, it's by no means invisible or overgrown; when you find it after trying the two dead ends you wonder why you didn't immediately see it.

Further along, though, someone;s decided to take a hand and run a bulldozer through the bushland. Yes, well, that's a track too.

This reminds me, suddenly, of a conversation I overheard, and some thoughts I had thunk after Jabulani. One guy was complaining, moderately heatedly, that he would have been competitive in the 46 km event if it hadn't been for the incredibly bad signage. He'd had to wait, on several occasions apparently, for someone to catch up with him and show him the way. Like me, it was his first run in the National Park. The organiser was a bit surprised; the track was well signposted, he said. I was ambivalent; my own view was that the directions the organisers had provided were pretty sub-par; they were directions written by someone who knew the route too well and didn't have the imagination to look at it with a stranger's anxious eyes. But having said that, even though I had a lot of doubts, I was able to follow these sub-par directions to the finish. Perhaps this complaining runner just wasn't accustomed to reading the signs of the bush; perhaps he read them in a different language, coming from a country or a region where the bush is not the same. Perhaps, short of providing every runner with one end of Ariadne's thread, it is impossible to map an unequivocal path through the bush.

Endomondo Running Workout

Endomondo Running Workout: 12.57 km

A gentle run, provoked by the act that it was raining somewhat more heavily than I was prepared for. Plus it was extraordinarily cold.

Nothing much to report, except perhaps another fine example of Sydney's civil (so-called) engineering. The bridge that carries Canterbury Rd. over the Cook's River has what seems a lot like an afterthought path under it, in that it's very low and narrow; there's also a head high storm water drain outlet, which in heavy rain does quite a good impression of a fire hose.

It reminds me of a joke - sadly not a repeatable one.

(This brief entry brought to you by the Dvorak keyboard)