A quick trip around Sydney Park

parkrun - 2 

Beautiful morning, nice run, felt much stronger than the last one. Not that my perception of how I'm running, and the actual data, ever seem to match particularly well. I forgot the turn off the device as I came over the line, so I'll have to wait for the organisers to tell me my time. But the first 4k were definitely faster.

And I came 78th! Last time it was 80th!

Garrison Point

I had a few problems with the video technology, so I don't have the whole 20k trip, but this is one for the fragments (speeded up to avoid tedium) from my comeback bike ride. I've been off the bike for most of the rehab from the torn hamstring origin because the hamstring wasn't really comfortable with effort under compression. This trip was a bit of a tester, the day after my first continuous run, and top speed is about running speed - so the sped up video is still slower than Tour de France pace.

Cabramatta Creek was the tributary that got me lost; I set off on one side of the Georges River assuming that if I crossed the river at some point, and kept the river on the same side of me (left, as it happened, I was cycling widdershins) I would get back to the start. I didn't think about tributaries - if I'd kept this on the left I'd have ended up in god knows where (well, actually, Cabramatta). Fortunately, I got suspicious and had the mobile phone with universal street directory, and so was able to plot a way back to the car.

Garrison Point (below) was probably first spotted by white guys when Matthew Flinders sailed up the Georges River, which he did in a 12 foot (that's 1 foot longer than my dinghy, and about 3 feet shorter than Liz's canoe, and he sailed/rowed in it from Port Jackson out of the Heads, down to Botany Bay, and then up to roughly Bankstown) skiff as practice for his later trip down the East coast. I can recommend his diary - I read it on my phone (you can get if for free as an e-book, I guess the Kindle would have access to it) - as it's extraordinarily matter of fact. It's full of details, and helps quite a lot to clarify how resourceful a successful explorer needed to be.

Bankstown hasn't really benefited from being Sydney's first inland settlement. It's a very raggedy-ann suburb, main roads, secondary airports, warehouses and cheap housing. You'd think having a quite decent river in a place as water-view-sensitive as Sydney would've been enough to make it a prestige suburb, but it just hasn't quite made it. Strange. It isn't making much of its history either, but perhaps, since a lot of that history was agricultural, it has been largely erased.

Be that as it may, this section of the Georges River, Garrison Point, Chipping Norton, and Prospect Creek is very pleasant, and likewise popular. Apart from winter, any weekend here is busy with picnickers, fishermen, runners, cyclists, motor boat enthusiasts, canoeists and indeed, I saw a R/C yacht club racing somewhere along my path.

(I googled Garrison Point; it is allegedly the spot that Bass & Flinders disembarked, although the name came later)

In fact I ran a race here last year, at Mirrambeena Reserve (everything seems to have multiple names - I think each name attracts funding from a different piece of legislation) and there is a serious running club based here which organises regular runs; you can see the course markings at some places on the Garrison Point video. There is a ton of birdlife; there's an island which is by way of being a bit of a bird reserve. I can't speak with any authority on the vegetation, except that I suspect it is very largely re-plantings. The only tree that I recognise is the pretty much inevitable casuarina. They don't let a lot grow around them once they settle in, their leaf litter is pretty toxic.

I was pretty surprised by how quiet it was, really, because it was a glorious afternoon. On the other hand, it may have been more glorious than the forecast, and it's not a place you can easily pop down to - it's part of Car World.

I was very surprised - very unpleasantly surprised - when after about 12 km I caught sight of Warwick Farm racecourse. I don't have a very unified map of Sydney in my mind; I know it in pieces and the pieces don't fit together very well. I know Warwick Farm well from when we first moved to Sydney - but in my mind it was nowhere near where I thought we were. Well, obviously it was, but it was a quite a surprise to me. Irritatingly, there is a bike path along the river on the maps, but Warwick Farm has a fence that prevents bicycles from actually accessing it, so I had to cycle around the racetrack on a couple of substantially main roads. I suppose I should consider my success a confidence booster for daily commuting, but it takes a certain degree of obliviousness. In a way there's no point being careful - it's not the cyclist that's particularly relevant in the physics of being hit by a truck - but despite that I prefer to concentrate for all I'm worth in case that proves to be useful. Quite stressful, but, to be fair, no-one tried to hit me.

It's amazing how committed to the car some places are - great chunks of road don't even bother with footpaths, because who would walk there? Of course, they're right, even though it does seem like a self fulfilling policy. No-one would walk next to a 6 lane highway. Naturally, when the road came into being, people didn't need footpaths, because they could walk on the roads.

Eventually anyway, I made it back to the car just in time to help Liz out of the water. I hadn't been planning to ride quite so far, but I was pleased to have made it without any leg problems.