Wet Sundays

 It was wet down at Woronora (Burnum Burnum Reserve) this AM, and has been all week no doubt. There were a lot of fungi on the casuarina litter behind the car park. I had a bit of time to kill post run and pre the Liz return, so I tested the camera's macro abilities. It struggled in both of these to sort out the auto focus; the background seems to be winning. Still, call it art, who knows?

I don't claim to be an expert on fungi - neither of these are familiar to me (not that I pay that much attention to my feet generally).

It was wet for the running, too. I posted some shots from here a few weeks ago - so imagine those rocks with water on them. In fact, pretty much every path was a small stream, causing me to wonder which came first, the path or the stream, in fact, so I ran fairly gingerly. Plus the uphills are hard work; the ridges are very steep.

I've lost track of the rain. The rain gauge has overflowed twice. One night I had 9 pots out collecting the drips coming through the kitchen roof. Factory and office roofs over the city collapsed under the weight of the hail, so 9 pots sounds like an art house movie by comparison.

Saturday AM we had a respite, just enough to get the washing out on the line. And I managed to get out to the inauguration of a new parkrun, at Rhodes, on Canada Bay. The sun almost shone. It's a very nice flat course, roughly half in Bicentennial Park, next to the Olympic stadia, and the other half along the recently reconstructed edges of Canada Bay. My gym is in Rhodes, oddly enough, so I know the area quite well.

This whole area has been built by real estate developers; the land is reclaimed, some amount of toxic industrial residues removed. I was never here before then, so I can't tell you what industrial ambiance has been destroyed. I do know that there is a degree of racial tension between the Asian-Australian flat-dwellers and the European-Australian house-owners. It's a little disappointing that a nation of immigrants has so little respect for immigration other than their own.

Olympic Park looms large in the background - it's not pollution (today, anyway), it's cloud. The weather is the kind of humid where you can't be sure it's not raining. This shot was taken by the marshal at the turnaround point, so it's halfway. Hopefully I'm looking relaxed, but the resolution on the picture isn't up to the enlargement required to check. I did manage a "negative split" - out in in 10:07 and back in 9:58, by my watch. That's quite pleasing, I almost always start too fast.

Autumn footpaths - the day after the storm

Back lane in the threatened Victoria Rd precinct

 On the subject of industrial ambiance, here are some pictures I took last Sunday afternoon, pretty much the first day out in a week. I've been having 2 weeks off running, so I went out for a walk instead. Three of these are in the area tipped for re-development; but whatever happens, it can't be denied that the area does have existing charm. Plus, contrary to some of the propaganda, people. Two printing factories were open. Two recording studios. A couple of shops, and several food factories; a lot of the city & inner suburban restaurant food comes from here. I wasn't the only tourist, either.

The Red Rattler studio/theatre/concert hall was conducting its Sunday afternoon "refresh".pending the Sunday show. And the bowling club was open. although admittedly, not for bowling. But socialising continues even when the rinks are sodden.

Hailstorm - Shepherd Street

Hailstorm - look what blew in!

last couple of weeks

 Morning glory is one of the curses of the Wolli Creek bush, particularly on the human-natural borders, which, given that the whole strip of bush is squeezed in between the back gardens of Homer St and the railway line, means that in some areas it's winning. There are a couple of volunteer groups slowly working their way along the track eliminating the stuff, and doing a fantastic job. So, anyway, it's a pestilential noxious weed, why am I photographing it? Because I have been under the misapprehension that this is the flower from Hartley's Go-Between, and I felt I'd finally captured the

threatening quality that the book completely failed to convince me of. 10 minutes of research have just remedied my ignorance, so now all I have a faintly menacing picture of a faintly menacing flower - perhaps symbolic of its invasiveness. This other picture captures something of the glow of early morning sun; so I'm pleased with the pictures as pictures, even if they're slightly misinterpreted.

Reflection pictures; another weakness. Mangroves along Wolli Creek, although it was the steelwork that caught my eye. It's the bus depot; well, a bus depot for one of the private companies that survives on Sydney Rail's inability

to run a rail network, and school excursions. They're probably just holding on to the land so they can sell to a developer. I haven't included any pictures here, but the south side of Cooks River / Wolli Creek is being swallowed by high rise high density housing. Ten years and I think between the developers and the road builders none of this will be left.

It seems like lose-lose. If we accept the flats, it should be as a public-transport serviced (and it is, very well serviced) alternative to freeway commuting to low density outer suburbs. On that basis, I'd make the compromise; bush + flats-as-backdrop is better than a freeway which will eliminate this bushland pretty much completely.

The bats have moved across the river - they've pretty much destroyed their homes on the south side of the river and they're settling in on the north. Let them back into the Botanical Gardens, I say. Why shouldn't the eastern suburbs share the pain?

Of course, everybody has to be somewhere, in the immortal words of Eccles.

Beautiful day. I'm typing this waiting for the next hailstorm. An hour ago we had 21 mm of rain in about 20 minutes. Factory roofs have collapsed under the weight of the hail. I had 9 bowls out

collecting water in the kitchen - beyond a certain intensity, it just doesn't cope. Like Sydney's storm water system generally.

Finally, a picture I'm immensely pleased with. A tribute, I suspect, to having a real camera - well, anyway, a camera with a real lens. Light, spiders' webs, framing; this part of the TVT really washes up well. The week's rain is still making its way down to the creek, so there are pools and baby waterfalls and lots of green everywhere.
Normally I run along here and it's bone dry. Today I felt that discretion might be the better part etc. It was a nice walk.

Later on I took out my boat, which is this silvery thing you see here, a construction style called "barracuda" - I don't know why particularly, although I guess it's to do with the fabric underlying the fibreglass. This is heavier and smaller than Liz's kevlar composites, but not much.

The bottle is a small part of the debris post-flooding from Tuesday's storms. Bottles and plastic bags are the bulk of the evidence.

 I enjoy the built structures as well as the natural world - this is the bridge carrying oil and gas pipelines over Wolli Creek, not the bridge in the above picture carrying the Princes Hwy. The bricks have an extraordinary patina, almost convincing you that they're contributing their own light to the show. I'm not sure if this is an old railway bridge that has been re-purposed for the pipelines; I have a faint idea that I read that somewhere, and I've noticed elsewhere that early 20th century railway brickwork is often very high quality.

I took a lot of these kinds of pictures; this is the best. The bush in the Wolli creek walk pictures above is about 20 metres up from these mangroves - this is the lower of the two daily high tides. Another metre up and you can see the plastic bags at flood level. If you come down here at low tide (the creek is navigable all the way to the weir at Turrella, even at low tide, but the rooks are more problematic) the smell of the anaerobic bacteria around the roots can be a bit startling sometimes.

This is the exhaust stack from the M5 tunnel. Apart from wondering why it's set in a valley, ponder that fact that the creek is actually flowing over a 4 lane freeway tunnel. The State government wants to double its size; except it's going to be hugely cheaper just to plough over the top than expand underground. And, even assuming that we all want to bear the cost of an underground expansion, the collateral damage above ground, both in construction and on-going support infrastructure (more smokestacks, emergency exits, access roads) isn't going to leave the landscape unscarred. And it's borderline now. It won't stand a lot more stress. You can see the difference in the bank vegetation on this side (the south); almost 100% weeds in the space between the depots and factories just behind the treeline.

That's the one threat, and below is the other. This is just one of the tens (and I don't think 'hundreds' would be much of an exaggeration) of blocks of flats springing up along the river and the creek. None of them are any more architecturally distinguished than this.

You can just make out a crane on the left; another block will be going in between the railway line and the block you see now. It's not easy being a bird in Sydney. This white-faced heron probably nests on Fatima island in the Cooks river (roughly behind the photographer), so its family has been coming here for a long time.

Below, a link to a much better photographer than me, and a fine collection of  shots of Cooks river bird life.     Cooks River Birds

 Finally, since the title says "...couple of weeks...", here's the approach to the finish line at St. Peters (Sydney) park on my record breaking run.

And below, the official result.

Next: 10 km sub 40, and a handicap score over 80% (which equates to a time of 19:23 - not so far to go). If you think about that handicap score for a second, you'll realise the record it's based on is around 15 minutes!

Prince Edward Park

 When Liz goes paddling at Woronora, I usually take the opportunity to do a bit of trail running, but today, Easter Monday, is a rest day post the Sunday long run, so it was more bushwalking than running. When we work out how to fit two canoes on top of one small car I may join her on the water - it really is stunning landscape.

I need to find out what these lumps in the trees are called, and the first cause of them; students always ask me when I take them bushwalking and not

 being able to answer damages my reputation for omniscience. I don't think you can make out the white cockatoos that were entertaining themselves in the vicinity, but I swear there is one behind that trunk in the left foreground.

I don't quite feel that I've caught this picture as I wanted; the sunlight which makes the spider's web so strong an image in reality has to be shielded from the lens and the lack of exposure control on the phone camera makes it a bit dark.

But it's not too bad. What you also can't see is that the spider is actually weaving the web as this image is being shot - the hole in the middle is diminishing quite quickly. Almost certainly a golden orb - I saw plenty of other mature webs by the side of the path.

Another failed photography challenge; again, shooting into the sun. These "red" leaves - as seen by my eyes - are actually dead brown leaves

 rendered almost phosphorescent by the sun, but the camera doesn't reproduce the contrast that I saw in the scene. Probably with photoshop and a camera with more manual controls something could be done; on the other hand if 100% of a walk could be captured on "film", who'd go walking?

Spectacular rock formations, in a low key way. Sydney sandstone is everywhere, north, south east and west - I don't know what makes some parts of it more resistant to erosion than others. The path through here is concrete, which is not the style of the big national park walks; I wonder if they represent an older approach to bush tourism, or the difference between a council seeking cost-effectiveness, and a forestry department seeking minimalist intervention. Could easily be both of course. The concrete was what I - knowing nothing about the topic - consider "old-fashioned, by which I mean heavy on road-metal aggregate, which I see in the older footpaths around the inner city.  Newer pavements wear quite differently.

There's probably a book to be written on pipelines in Sydney. There was a time when they were buried (there's one running under the TVT along Wolli Creek/Bardwell Valley), and then there was a time when they weren't. Obviously a lot cheaper just to run them above ground. I'm thinking though, that probably they are now buried again, if any more are being constructed. I don't mind them - up to a point, I didn't enjoy crawling under one on the Manly run - because it

 seems foolish to pretend that there aren't actually people living in Sydney. The contrast between civil engineering and bushland is at least thought provoking. And, since the pipe itself is a kind of graffiti on the landscape, why shouldn't it in turn be inscribed? Really, there's a fantastic opportunity for a concerted attack of decoration here. Maybe I'll apply for a grant.

The banksia flowers are in a more open area, to the South. Again, the light hasn't really been captured as it is in my mind. If you were curious about trail running, this picture gives a reasonable idea of a typical downhill, although it probably

 isn't as rocky as it might be if we were in one of the northern parks.

Two pictures of Forbes Creek (possibly), which runs into the Woronora. In the picture to the right it's almost impossible to distinguish the reflection from the banks and the rocks of the ford; the picture below, downstream, is a simple 180 degree pivot - amazing the difference in the light in a matter of 20-30 metres. Well, the difference in light is in a way obvious given the difference in vegetation, but the sudden change in tree cover is unmotivated by anything I could see, other than the ford.

Easter Sunday saw me in Liz's new boat, at the Regatta centre in Penrith. You don't see me in a lot of boat pictures, but this particular boat is very persuasive. It's very easy to move through the water (my personal boat is a bit of a tub - for stability reasons), and it has a rudder for steering. It was a very warm afternoon.

Manly Dam

Left-leaning, as always

The photographer has done a great job to get a feel for the light at 6:45 this AM. You can tell summer is past! In fact, it was so dark when I was coming up Pittwater Rd (I think - it changes its name about 10 times) that I missed the turnoff twice, heading North and then again going South when I realised my error. Apparently Many Dam isn't a sufficiently interesting place to warrant a decent - that is, large, reflective, well-lit - sign. Well, I guess that makes it all the better for the locals, because it's a fantastic spot. I'm a bit surprised I've never been here before; I did, however, recognise a couple of spots in the Garigal National Park loop from previous runs on this side of the harbour.

I should find some stock footage - I had planned to take the phone for picture taking purposes, but I left it out of the bag (hence also the navigational problems) - but I'm sure Google can do the honours. I don't have enough of a naturalist's eye to describe the vegetation; predominantly the typical Sydney sclerophyll, with a

Best knee forward

mixture of both the wet and the dry varieties. There was one section in Garigal where we ran through the wind-stunted ridge-top brush that I'm particularly fond of. I think it's the sudden light, and sensation of space after the passageway of a lot of the trails. Plus, the sound is very different in those open spaces, the city's sounds are more accessible so you have the awareness of being in the bush in the city.

I also got that bush in the city feeling crawling under a bloody great pipe, twice, just rampaging its way through the bush from suburban outpost to suburban outpost. I guess it's water.

Speaking of water, people say the nursery rhyme Jack & Jill isn't plausible, because who would go up a hill to find water? Well, all the worst puddles and wettest section of the track today were high up, so you can put that in the Funk & Wagnalls! I've observed this phenomenon elsewhere, also.

One good thing about trails is that they enforce a relatively slow pace on you. Of course they extract a massive toll on the uphill and downhill muscles, but there's always enough flatland muscle left for an eye-catching sprint to the line. I could hear these two guys behind me, and I was NOT planning to let them pass me at the finish. Two people had already out-descended me on the last big hill after I'd run past them on the ascent, so I was not in a charitable mood!

Woodstock is my new running club - this was the maiden run in club colours.

 I've linked the Garmin report (it's better than the one from Wentworth Falls, but still not perfect. The watch shuts down on hills because the horizontal movement isn't significant - particularly on uphill legs.

Course map and run details

It certainly didn't feel as brutally up-and-down as Wentworth Falls, but while there were no massive ascent/descent sections, there wasn't that much flat stuff either. Just a constant variety. I'm getting better at descending, without a doubt, for all the times I got passed today. I remember the first trail run I did northside (NOSH) I walked down the declines. Now, if possible, I bound, thinking - sometimes - of the Swallows and Amazons "galumphing" down the fells. In a bid for literary credibility I will mention that I also occasionally think about Japhy Ryder in Dharma Bums insisting that you can only run down mountains. It's true that your body does an extraordinary job of processing all the information, much faster than you can consciously think about it - up to a point at least you can really let yourself go, so long as you concentrate. I struggle a bit with my eyes - when it's cold, as in the early AM, they water uncontrollably which doesn't help the focus; and when I heat up, I sweat (profusely, as you will notice above) and again, that doesn't help the focus. But still, I was pleased with the technical side of the running today - very satisfactory.

After the storm...

With Grevillea...

...without Grevillea

Someone better than I am with post-processing software could probably have balanced the lighting in these two pictures (and someone better with cameras wouldn't be relying on the auto settings). It's actually quite difficult to see the Grevillea in the top picture; it's sort of left-centre-top, behind the Melaleuca. The Melaleuca had just undergone a vicious prune.

In the second picture the Melaleuca is growing back, and you can see the gap behind it which used to be completely filled by the Grevillea. Sunday's storm (last day of February) removed it partially, and Saturday I chopped it down completely. We can see a lot more of the fence - which is reminding me I have to get on to the neighbour about it.

Wentworth Falls

Wentworth Falls

It won't take an expert to realise that I didn't run in a dead straight line across this gorge in the Blue Mountains - something of a watch failure, or maybe GPS doesn't penetrate deep valleys. There's about 1.3 km missing from the advertised distance - that would be about the 9 missing minutes to make it all balance up. The 6 other minutes were spent lost - you can just about work out where that was, around where the dead straight bearing ends. I tried to run off down the Vera Falls track - fortunately I met a couple of people coming back from the same error before I'd wasted too much time. Well, it wouldn't be a trail run for me if I didn't get lost.

If you assume 6 steps to a metre (about 6.5" per step, I think, sounds fair), then this run involved 3500-odd steps up, and another 3500-odd down. Down is scarier, but up is much, much harder. I'm a little puzzled by this, but since I changed my running to focus on being really, really front-of-foot oriented, I've become much, much better at descending. It still takes an enormous amount of concentration (and regular wiping of the glasses on any dry-ish fabric around) but at the very least I feel much faster downhill these days, leaping from rock to rock like an elderly *gazoat.

* Not actually a word

Usually I try to run up hills, because no matter how slowly you do it, you pass a bunch of people walking and once you get to the top and get a head start on the downhill, how are they ever going to catch you? But hills are not stairs, and I did not run up many of these! I don't think many people did, in fact, except perhaps the first half dozen over the line.

A lot of this suffering was alleviated by the ambiance.

Random view near Wentworth Falls

Really, there was one spot where I emerged from running doubled over through a passage cut out of the cliff and could have run straight out onto that cloud; it was at foot level at the point where the path doubled back around the bluff. I don't have any photographs of the waterfalls - but I'm sure Google can provide some.

At the gun...

Coming in to the aid station @ 12k

Verge garden near birthday

Two angles, you can see it's booming along. The soil's looking a little dry on top, but we've had so much rain I don't think it really can be. You can see the Randwick geranium on the left is doing pretty well, and the knotweed is booming. I'm a little worried about the heath in there somewhere, but maybe when it flowers we'll spot it again. Still not very happy about the tree - and council has warned us not to prune it. They really are idiots - surely it's cheaper for them if we do.