Verge garden update

 The verge garden is coming along nicely 6 months down the track. This is the more successful end, it's booming. Council will eventually move those stakes, which will improve the look as well.

 This is a detail - this plant is pretty much overshadowed by the rest of the bed, but provides  a little surprise for those who look closely. There are some local geraniums just visible behind them - they are fiercely competitive. I'm quite curious to see who ends up "winning" this bed.

Below is the other end - it struggled for a while but is coming into it's own. The white flower belongs to a Randwick geranium. There's actually almost exactly the same mix of plants this end as the other - I'm amazed by the difference.
 I haven't quite got the layout to work - but you should be able to see (back at the lush end) the knotweed

fighting it out with the geranium.

Verge garden update

 The verge garden is coming along nicely 6 months down the track. This is the more successful end, it's booming. Council will eventually move those stakes, which will improve the look as well.

 This is a detail - this plant is pretty much overshadowed by the rest of the bed, but provides  a little surprise for those who look closely. There are some local geraniums just visible behind them - they are fiercely competitive. I'm quite curious to see who ends up "winning" this bed.

Below is the other end - it struggled for a while but is coming into it's own. The white flower belongs to a Randwick geranium. There's actually almost exactly the same mix of plants this end as the other - I'm amazed by the difference.
 I haven't quite got the layout to work - but you should be able to see (back at the lush end) the knotweed

fighting it out with the geranium.

Kamay 20K

Kamay / Kurnell

This was a fantastic little run; if you can follow it to Google Earth somehow and check out the pictures you'll get a fair idea of the landscape. The refinery doesn't intrude on the consciousness at all. I didn't particularly enjoy the 3 km on sand at the start, although it was reasonably firm. The breakwaters were awkward, as was the concrete under the pier. This bit of beach - Silver Beach - is not the scenic highlight of the area. There were a couple of people out engaged in some kind of structured activity - musselling? Beachcombing? I'm not sure I'd eat anything from Botany Bay.

So, off the beach and into the National Park proper, the track starts off with the usual Sydney scrub before getting high / exposed enough to drive a complete change of vegetation to the flat, dense, what I think of as heath-like, bushes and grasses, stunted trees, and sandy paths.

Then down to the foreshore proper, lots of rocky shelfs (shelves?), interesting erosion patterns. This is trick running for me because I've had a couple of falls and I'm a bit of a foot dragger, so I tend to slow down more than is ideal for racing. Well, it's not really a race, I guess. I absolutely don't want to fall. This is the first real view of the ocean as well, and with the sun in the East (it's only just risen) the light is spectacular. I was too busy concentrating on the foot placement to really relish the view, but it's amazing the extent that you can be aware of your surroundings without paying too much attention.

After a couple of km along the rocks the trail turns back inland for, first of all, some sand dunes. It's not completely surprising that here should be sand dunes near an ocean, of course, but they're not so obvious from any of the maps I'd looked at before today. Plus, with so much rock, the sand is a little unexpected.

I ran up the first dune, but that was it. The next two I walked up, and ran down. Not easy to do, irritatingly, because the downside combined rocks and sand, so no relaxed stretch out & run. Mid dune, I noticed some blue grass - vivid blue - and on a second look, realised that the grass was in low lying water that was reflecting the sky with close to 100% fidelity - I'd loved to have taken a picture of that, I've never see water reflect blue so truly before.

Hopefully you're getting some idea of the complexity of the landscape - the dunes debouched us onto the rocks again for a brief spell, then we headed back inland for ..... the puddles! The race director had warned us there was water on the track (Kurnel had 5 1/4 inches of rain on Tuesday) and there'd been the odd puddle, but nothing unavoidable. I had been thinking he was being a tad alarmist, but in the next 5 km there were a lot of puddles, 10 to 20 metres long, with nothing to do but run through them. Of course, you can't see what's at the bottom of a puddle, so there's lot's of foot lifting to avoid trip hazards, which means lots of splash as well. And lots of mud. Plus now, with wet feet, every bid of sand you run through attaches itself to your shoes.

About here we ran through some amazing stands of wind-blown purple flowering things that looked a little bit like small leaved geraniums, masses of them, very pretty. Next year I think I'll run this course with a camera strapped to my head! The path through the flowers was wet, narrow, muddy, puddly, and led straight to the most exciting section of the course, the bog. I'm not completely clear why the fact that there was a shoe sucking swamp at the 10 km mark wasn't mentioned in the pre-race notes. It would have been quite useful to know! At one stage here I was up to the knees in mud. Awesome.

You can see from the link that the course is mainly out and back, and the turnaround was not far post-bog. Coming back I noticed trail markings (pink ribbon mainly) that cut off about 80% of the swamp, so perhaps it wasn't the race director's fault. It may have been mine for not looking hard enough. I'm not completely convinced - I wasn't the only person to get bogged. In fairness to all, laying down trail markings in the pre-dawn (the 30k people were starting at 6:30, so the trail has to be marked efore them) cannot be easy. But following a trail isn't easy either - what the marker sees when laying a mark is not necessarily what the hounds see when following; the perspectives are different. The hare sees the turn AT the turn, already knowing where it is; the hound sees markers 100 meters off without knowing that they mark a turn. Once you've decided they don't mark a turn, you don't normally turn your head to check - worrying about your next footfall is a priority.

The course is largely out and back, so the out is, in the main, the story. One problem with this kind of course for me is where to drink? I hate stopping, because after about 12 km it's very hard to get moving again, but I don't like running without watching my feet, which is impossible if your head is tilted back guzzling fluids. The solution proved to be drinking while walking up the sand dunes. Pleasantly, on the return, the downhills were all soft sand so it was possible to stretch out. You don't go that fast, to be honest, because it's still soft sand, but it feels much better.

Connoisseurs of map reading will notice an odd detour at around about the 16 km mark. There were a couple of deviations from the outward trail on the way back - so we could practice running on new and unusual serrated (striated?) rock surfaces -  and I overshot a turnoff to head down the large and very visible road. I was starting to worry (no pink ribbons) when I met three returning runners who nicely told me that they were lost, so we retraced our footsteps together and found the missing path. It was so obvious on return, it was impossible to believe we'd missed it. I don't know how far they had been ahead of me, and I felt a twinge of remorse as I set off down the correct path in front of them, but their detour had clearly taken more out of them than me and I stayed ahead of them until the end. This last section of the run was a lot of fun; back on solid dirt, no major obstacles, downhill-ish, and trees overhead, so shade. even though it was only 8:30, it was hot without cover. I like the last 3 km, anyway, in all my races. I usually have enough left for a finishing burst to express my mounting optimism. This possibly means I should have run harder earlier, but I don't see it, myself.

I'm very happy with the time. Wingello was 1:49 for a full 21 km; this was only 20 km, so the 1:41 is not quite as good as it sounds, but the terrain was not easy. Wingello was hard, but primarily only because of a large hill, or seven. but the Wingello trail was mainly fire-trail and dirt road, so easy underfoot.(footnote: I won my section - but missed the prize due to presentation absence.)

For sure I'm doing this one again. And I think I'll be back to the National Park as well, for recreation, because there's a lot more. Annoyingly, it's 1 hour 25 minutes by public transport from the city, so it's a bit awkward for excursions.

Botany Bay - Spring

 Pines of some kind, I think. The stands of trees on the Botany Bay foreshore tend to be in homogenous clumps. Elsewhere banksias and Norfolk pines. Today every tree shelters a picnic.

 Pollution. The airport. A breakwater. A buoy - last year I knew what it meant, too.

 Nothing says spring family outing like a lost kite.

 Yacht race(s). Plane(s) landing.

It's pretty filthy, isn't it.

Spring - again

Heading towards the vernal equinox, and the sun is starting to make an impact on the garden. We've had this plant in the front garden for ages, where it spreads promiscuously but rarely flowers - or at least, rarely flowers profusely - and last year Liz moved it into a bit of a dead spot in the back yard. This is about 3 years worth of flowers from all the plants in the front in its first spring, so I guess it likes its new home. It gets more sun, but the soil is abominable.

The grasses in the background just go from strength to strength.

This is one of the few non natives left in the back garden now, and we really only keep it out of a mixture of sentiment (it was our first garden purchase for the original design) and the month of new leaves every spring. Sadly, the heat is going to destroy the tips of all of these, leaving a ratty looking and inconveniently placed plant (it was supposed to go up, but it only ever went out). It does stay red, but I think the heat is too much for it. Mind you, it was originally in shade, and nearly died. When we moved it to its current location, we didn't really expect it to survive.

 A bit of art, courtesy the auto focus function. The daisy-like flower is attached to something that I think was described on the label as a correa. I know they have a pretty wide range of flowers, but this one is a bit startling. It's in a new bed - well, obviously, an old bed, but one that has radically altered its nature after some savage tree pruning. We're not replacing the tree, rather we're going for an open bed with ground covers. Whatever this is, it's prostrate and sprawling handily about. It's main threat comes from neighbourhood cats - hence the green plastic you can glimpse. Since Eddie passed away the back garden is unguarded. Saffie isn't allowed outdoors.

This guy is having his time in the sun - I pulled out about a tonne of native iris that was obscuring this climber during the winter. It has flowered before, but possibly not with such enthusiasm. Plus, it was impossible to get close enough to get this kind of picture.

 This is the last of the grevillea - once these flowers finish we'll be pruning it back within an inch of its life. It's been going for close to 13 years now, and really held together amazingly well, but the rest of the garden has changed so much that it's no longer appropriate as a ceiling storey plant. We could easily have so much ceiling that we could grow moss on the bricks in summer, courtesy a couple of neighbours, and a dwarf eucalypt we planted on the other side of the garden that - well, wasn't. Or if it was a dwarf, it's lucky for us we didn't accidentally plant its full-grown sibling, because the dwarf is a good 4 metres high.

Liz, resisting temptation at the community nursery.

Council, being idiots, sent out their tree planting guys to put a tree in our verge garden. This despite the fact that the verge garden department had been explicit that there wouldn't, shouldn't and couldn't be trees in the verge gardens. As an apology they gave us a large number of plant vouchers for the nursery - but we don't actually need more plants, just as we don't actually need a 15 metre shallow rooted tree (a water gum) lifting up the pavement, knocking over our front wall, and trashing our storm water drains. Sigh.

 I'm hoping the fact that the verge garden people are nearly as cross as us will help us negotiate towards a more acceptable planting. We're quite keen on the idea of a tree - just we'd prefer to be involved in the discussions on which tree.

This is the (our) latest addition to the verge garden - sorry about the auto focus, I'm not sure what the camera thinks is in focus here - maybe the wind blew at the critical moment. You can see here, and in the picture below, that Liz is going for a massed small leaved over-planted effect, which, in the 6 months since February, has come along pretty well. It really is impossible to see how a 12 meter high large leaved plant actually fits into that design.  Well, I guess we can prune it aggressively - council calls that vandalism though.

The other peculiarly stupid thing is that there are power, phone and video cables overhead, at about 5 metres. If we don't prune it, council has committed themselves to a lifetime

 of pruning.

Somebody can maybe work out what plants are here. There's knot weed in the left foreground, half a dozen grasses, a heath-y thing whihc has been flowering madly for months now, I keep expecting it to die of exhaustion. There's a daisy of sorts, and native geraniums too, although I'm not sure if they're in shot. The shadow on the left middle edge is the new tree, obscuring the limited sun the front of the house gets (dawn until 10 in summer, hardly any in winter).

 This is the front garden. It hasn't changed much over the last few years. Occasionally we have to go o an onion weed war, but the rest of the weeds seem to be out competed, which is satisfying. These are some of the bluer blue flowers, which tend, to my eyes at least, to be significantly at the purple end of the idea of blue.

On the vertical garden in the back yard, a succulent whose leaves Liz harvested on a walk around the neighbourhood. We have about 30 succulents that fit this description.

This is the orange tree that was in the back garden when we arrived. It suffers a bit from serious competition (it's surrounded by bromeliads and swordfish ferns) and a total lack of citrus care from us, but still, amazingly, about every third year manages to produce a lot of fruit. The oranges are small, but very tasty and very juicy.

There was a bee on that flower when I decided to take the picture, but by the camera and I agreed on a focal point, the bee had gone. Auto focus is pretty astonishing, and sometimes it's a good thing, but I've decided that my next camera will have a manual focus button as well.

Wingello

Southern Highlands telemetry...

So, finally, pretty close to 2 years after my last serious run, I finally got out onto the road again. City-to-Surf was really a training run for this, the Southern Highlands half marathon in Wingello State Forest/National Park (although I have to say a lot of that national park appears to be pine plantation).

In point of fact, I ran C2S too fast for a training run, and the fall in the last kilometer meant that I trained lightly for this, so I was a bit underdone, but anyway it's going to take a bit longer than 3 months to get back to the level of endurance I had in 2012, when I was running 100+ km a week. Since I will never again be running that much, I'll probably never get that kind of stamina back, but that's OK. One of the things I discovered while injured was/is that I like running too much to injure myself doing it, so I need to set goals based on injury avoidance as the highest priority. That's going to mean a little tempering of the competitive spirit; I think I can divert that into the 5km Saturday runs.

So, despite the light training, I'm very happy with this run. 1:49 for a trail half - my PB for the half is 1:45, and that was on the road in Canberra. I know one of the guys who came in behind me has a 3:30 marathon in Canberra; extrapolating from that means this 1:49 is much much faster than that 1:45. If that's right, it means 45km per week training is going to be fine for some quite decent running. (45km is the current weekly ceiling, under advisement from physio & specialist.) It's difficult to know, from a subjective point of view, how to evaluate it. In terms of trail running, the surface was pretty good; dirt road, a bit sandy, some rocks & tree roots, a little wet but no puddles, not too slippery. It was hard to attack downhill (which is something I've learned to do on the road) because I really didn't want to add a third fall in three months; that was a bit of a problem because the uphills were pretty tough and cost a lot of time. I felt pretty rubbish between about 13-15 km, and I lost a bit of concentration, and slowed down a little more than I would have liked. Against that, I finished with 2 sub 4:30 kilometers, and that, for me, is pretty extraordinary. Arguably it means bad resource management, but I don't think I was leaving a lot behind.

The last trail run I did was Fitzroy Falls - now defunct - which was a full marathon. It's just impossible to compare them; a full and a half are such totally different animals.

I think the next run scheduled is at Kurnell, another trail half, but hopefully a little flatter. This week I'm resting completely; no runs, just a couple of swims.