So far December has proven more of a driving month than a running month. I've just driven my car 1,400 kilometres from my old home in Hobart to the new one here in Sydney. I broke this trip into three days: it required an overnight ferry trip from Devonport (northern Tasmania) to Melbourne across Bass Strait, and then an overnight stop in Canberra where I stayed with an old friend of mine before continuing on to Sydney.
The stop over in Canberra was sort-of running-related - Canberra is the location of my chosen marathon attempt for next April, and I had another look at parts of the course yesterday and early today. It is an extraordinary city, and the marathon takes in much of the aspects of Canberra that make it such a fascinating place. Canberra (pic below) is unusal in being architecturally-designed, the whole city layout being conceived before there was any significant population there at all. As a consequence, the landscape is quite extraordinary. It is hard to describe exactly, but for example there are vast lawns in parts of the city where you can simultaneously experience being in a wide open space and yet have all the significant buildings of Canberra surrounding you in a vast symmetry, many kilometres across. It really impacts you with its design and layout. A fascinating place if you open your eyes and look around.
The Canberra Marathon held each April has a reputation for being one of the country's best, and the chance to run around some of that city's great landmarks free of traffic has to be grabbed, I reckon. So I am. For now I've been maintaining just a modest base of running, but that will have to change in the new year when I have to get my mind properly focussed on the task at hand. For now though I'm by necessity concentrating on getting a new home organised and gathering my belongings from around the country and getting them here to Sydney.
But I am enjoying some new running territory. But I won't feel entirely happy until I get my treadmill back: at this moment its sitting in a warehouse somewhere waiting to be loaded onto the magic truck that brings it here for me, sometime in the next few weeks. It might seem strange to say so, but I've really been missing the tready! There's just something about its immediacy, its constancy and its programmability that I love. And of course the opportunity to run away from all weathers (and pollution etc) and so close to the drinks fridge is something I really do enjoy and have been missing of late.
Still, everything's looking up just at the moment.
Hopefully sometime soon I'll have a decent run worth writing about as well.
Decombobulating December.
