Waterfall again

Endomondo Running Workout: was out running

We got the word on Wednesday night that Glenbrook was on; just enough time to start getting properly nervous. Have I trained properly, should I drop down to the shorter distance? I've "tapered" pretty hard in the last three weeks through a combination of flu - ok, a filthy cold - and bad weather. Normally I'm happy to run in the rain, but not, I think, when breathing is difficult. I doubt, so bad was this cold, if I could have kept up with my nose.

So, anyway, it's been a bit light on, dropping from 100+ km a week to 40-ish. I'll have to file it under "experimental". At least my knees aren't too bad, and in fact on Tuesday I did notice that I was springing up the stairs quite lightly.

Ha! Just as I was starting to feel confident, on Friday the NSW Parks and Wildlife people notified the organisers that a 2cm rise in the river would mean the evacuation of all runners WITHOUT their cars. Leaving aside the fact that it would have been (surely) extremely muddy/wet/dangerous, I doubt anyone was particularly prepared to desert their car in a national park for an unspecified amount of time. There's clearly some irony in this - and I detected a degree on angst and conflict amongst the organising committee in the emails, but anyway, once again, Glenbrook has been postponed.

The CRRC decided to go down to the Royal National Park again, this time for the Waterfall-Loftus run. This is pretty much 20km (the GPS was off for about 20 minutes), with a very technical (read steep & rocky) descent, which we took very slowly, not being completely mad for the first 3-4 km, then a 3-4 km run through rainforest on what we call "single track", not rough, but challenging. It's easy to trip on the fronds, so you have to pay a lot of attention to where your feet are going. High stepping is good - shuffling means an almost certain fall. (My mind wandered for about 30 seconds trying to remember if it was Foster or Loftus we were running to, and that's all it took to fall over - nothing serious though). It's hard to concentrate on such a small topic; it's an interesting mental discipline. We disturbed a grey kangaroo having his morning drink at the creek - he hopped off about 50 meters and peered down at us with beady eyes before setting off up the hill. It's nice to see wildlife in the wild - most of the kangaroos you see around Sydney are on golf courses, which is not really quite right, although they are still quite good to see. I've now seen a lyrebird & a kangaroo while running. I will have to start a checklist.

After the first 8-odd km there's a fire trail, Lady Carrington Drive, for about 11 km, which is (relatively) easy running. It's not easy, because the surface is pretty uneven and you still need to pay a lot of attention to your footfall and stride, but it's possible to maintain a pretty good pace. We managed to keep a 5:30 pace going, which was good. It's hard to push yourself outside of an official race, but we were psyched up for a hard run so we did the best we could. In fact, we did pretty well, because my legs today (Monday) are definitely post-race legs. The final stretch, 3-odd km is pretty much purely uphill to the Loftus station. At the top of the staircase - try climbing a staircase after running 20 km - was an information board about the "honeymoon steps". Originally the steps led from the railway station to Audley House, a popular spot for honeymooners. Cue speech about the toughness of the average 19th century person; I guess if you could afford Audley House you could afford a servant to carry the bags. It wouldn't have been much fun toting the bags up and down those steps.

It's hard to say how another 14 km would have gone. It's always my view that the last 7km takes care of itself - what else is there to do except finish? - so I think I would have probably managed it, but I would have been a lot stiffer today! The Glenbrook organisers haven't finalised whether the event has been cancelled or postponed, so I may yet find out.

Sri Chinmoy - Cooks River

Endomondo Running Workout: was out running 15.77 km in 1h:18m:25s

Well, Glenbrook (the 34km run) was cancelled due to the rain, so we (the Cooks River Running Club) were able to attend our "own" race. We actually managed to recruit 3 members at the post race pancake prandium, so well worthwhile. Another bonus is that I was able to watch Liz in her first 8km race; she and a friend are aiming for the city-to-surf next year and it looks like they are well on target.

I managed a very narrow PB, which is sort of reassuring, as I'e been feeling very slow recently, but arguably the PB is only down to the "missing" 230 meters. Still, it's a PB on the course, about 5 minutes faster than this (my first serious) run last year. And I've been training for distance, not speed, recently, so it's OK. In fact, I probably had a bit more in the tank, given that my last km was about 25 seconds faster than my 2nd last kilometre. I had to shave another 2 minutes off to get into 3rd place though, and I'm not sure that was ever happening.

It was a fantastic morning for it; the breeze blew up a bit for the last 4 km, but it had a cooling effect as well, and of course, it's only in the wrong direction half the time. The sun was shining, and the river was full, and the trees provided a nice mixture of shade and sun. After the last week's rain, the grass was certainly green.

Keith Bateman (world champion in my age group) turned up and ran the 8km in 27 minutes. It's ridiculous, but very impressive.

Glenbrook now rescheduled for December the 18th. Lots of worries about the heat, but fingers crossed. A bit of extra training won't go amiss, either.

Glenbrook - 1

Endomondo Running Workout: was out running 22.73 km

Well, if slow is the go, I seem to have that under control. I'm just getting slower and slower.

Hunters Hill - 2nd try

Endomondo Running Workout: was out running 19.63 km

We tried this once before, and were thwarted by the Water Board. Sadly, they are running more than 6 weeks late on their bridge-closing project, so we were similarly thwarted today. Still, we didn't ge tlost on the fallback this time & so it was a nice 20km run in (mainly) the lane Cove National Park.

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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