I step on to the bottom of the ancient wooden escalator at Wynyard station and begin my 1 minute 15 second ascent (yes, sadly I must confess to having timed it). Above and around me is the mayhem of Sydney at evening rush hour, with a squillion anxious people all heading home, eager to get out of the cold and wet autumnal weather that is already presaging “winter” with as much torment as the busker outside the station murdering the blues.
I’m in one of my introspective moods. That’s perhaps not unusual for this time of year, but it’s more than just the miserable weather that has me taking a scouring pad to my brain. Unlike the thousands hurtling with manic intent around me, I’m on my way
to work, being in the middle of another stint of the dreaded night shifts. That means arriving in the city in the early evening as everyone else is trying to leave, and then sitting alone for twelve and half long hours in a control room waiting for something to happen. Which at night is a rare thing. This has its good points of course, but one tricky thing it does do (apart from add further introspective analysis) is mess up one’s training schedule. For example, this afternoon’s 5km “easy” was actually just plain hard work, being akin to a run at 3 a.m. The mind may be willing (just) but the body goes into a kind of primordial spasm, saying “what the....?”
Actually, this afternoon’s easy/hard run was just the start of it. In the mail arrived a copy of the fell running film
The Bedlamites (see review
here). This got me thinking about some of my favourite bits of RC running and as luck or fate would have it, whilst searching through the filing cabinet for some sheets of exercises my physiotherapist had given me a while back, I stumbled across some hard copies of favourite Running Commentary writing. And as luck or fate would
further have it, I was in need of something to read on the train, so into the bag it went.
It’s probably no coincidence then that those favourite pieces of RC writing were in fact all equally soul-searching pieces. They were:
• Seafront Plodder’s write up of his 2004
New York marathon.
• EG’s 2005
Almeria write-up that included his amazing escapades on the moors as a teenager.
• EG’s 2005
Hamburg marathon and the frustration of
kaput legs.
• Sweder’s frank and astonishing piece from January 2006 about his
father.
Of course there are many other superb pieces of writing, but these happened to be the four I read on the train. And I have to tell you, it’s impossible to read of the inner workings of a runner and not be touched by them.
So.
(Which also happens to be the first sentence of EG’s I ever read – right at the start of his London marathon training diary, and which had me immediately hooked on his writing.)
Here I am, suitably RC’d up after my train journey, and now being jostled by streams of homeward-bound city people going the opposite way to myself. And it’s cold. And it’s dark. And yes, it’s raining.
OK so let’s do this properly. In his Hamburg marathon entry, EG talks about liking
tabula rasa trips (don’t worry, I had to look it up as well). Well, I’ve actually arrived in town early. It’s my habit to walk 2km to and from work if I can, by getting off at the wrong station. Tonight I’ve caught an even earlier train than usual and so can take an extended walk through the Darling Harbour part of town and see what
tabula rasa-inspiration I can come up with.
I make my way toward the harbour via the side streets to try and get away from the crowds somewhat. I’ve never liked crowds except in a few special circumstances. Being in the middle of a quarter of a million people on Olympic Boulevard during the 2000 Olympics for example, was a strange and generally positive experience I have to say – and I think that if the crowd is a happy one, then I don’t mind so much. But a crowd of people anxious to be somewhere else is
not a happy one and I try to avoid them.
So, the side and back streets of Sydney it is – seemingly full of smokers trying to get a last lungful of cancer before going home (‘please hurry up and die’ is all I can think as I rush past holding my breath) and (more happily) packed pubs doing brisk after-work trade and of course heavy, impatient traffic. Probably a story repeated in cities all over the world. People are after all much the same everywhere.
There are however, also lots and lots of runners. I’m always impressed at the sheer numbers of runners in Sydney’s streets at any time of day, and with the first of two major city-based half marathons only two weeks away, there are hundreds of ‘em, which is a little puzzling at first until you realise that Sydney’s foreshore is a fantastic place for running. Sydney’s suburbs are generally quite undulating, so I suppose many take the opportunity to go for a run around the harbour on the flat before heading home at night.
Pretty soon I reach Darling Harbour and cross Pyrmont Bridge – once open to traffic but now a pedestrian and cyclist-only zone, except for the overhead monorail, which was pretty fancy and hi-tech when it opened as part of Sydney’s bicentenary redevelopment in 1988, but which now, to be honest, is a bit clunky and tattered-looking. Still, the tourists love it and I suppose it’s an interesting way to see certain parts of the city. No-one who lives here seriously uses it for public transport though.
And no-one runs in Sydney without crossing Pyrmont Bridge and then cruising around Darling Harbour - surely one of the big city running delights of the world. Tonight is no exception and dozens more runners make their way to... wherever. All of them (so far as I can tell) are younger, fitter and definitely faster than me. Well, that can’t be literally true, but I struggle to see anyone my age or more. I try to gauge the pace of everyone I see, but it’s hard and I put them all into one of two categories: either “faster than I can run” or “I could perhaps run that fast for a short time”, with only a handful falling into the second category. I see none of the slow pokes I more often see during the day – tonight they all seem to be serious runners.
The mix of pedestrians, runners, cyclists and water sloshing down from the overhead monorail makes Pyrmont Bridge a little risky at times (I’ve yet to see any cyclist obey the 10kmh speed limit that supposedly applies to them), but everyone seems happy and takes the ducking, weaving and occasional drenching in their stride.
At the far end of the bridge with still plenty of time to kill I take a loop around the Maritime Museum and past Pyrmont Bay Park – usually full of personal trainers doing one-on-ones or working with groups, but given the weather strangely empty tonight. From the Maritime Museum is the classic view of Sydney: a metropolis-like skyline with the square-rigged sailing ships, naval destroyers and a submarine all belonging to the museum in the foreground. I want to stop and take a photo, but there’s no way I can do it justice with the camera on my phone. Anyway, I'm now very near the restaurant strip and nearly cry from the incredible, wonderful smell of seafood coming from the restaurants in full flight for the evening. I desperately want to stop and sample their wares or at least have a quick drink at one the bars, but ... duty calls.
I plod on.
Beyond the restaurants and water features I veer right, walking past the convention centre and exhibition halls. It’s a bit quieter here, but soon I reach the Entertainment Centre, near where the incredible expressways fly 20 metres overhead with thousands of vehicles log-jammed on their way out of the city. Under one of the fly-overs an Asian dance group are rehearsing in front of a boom box ... I’ve seen this sort of thing here before. I can only guess they are part of the show at the Entertainment Centre that evening and rehearsing in public is just a means of drumming up business (or perhaps just massaging their egos). I don’t know if it works, but they certainly attract an appreciative crowd (the girls are little short of stunning).
The Entertainment Centre car park access path runs from there behind the back of the centre and as I walk on I can see the stage crew setting up for the night. The stage door is also back here and a few weeks ago I caught sight of Lemmy and the guys from Motorhead arriving for a gig to the cheers of a black-shirted crowd of men and boys of surprisingly diverse ages ... now I can’t walk past there without thinking of Sweder!
Speaking of some of the heroes that often get mentioned in these pages, Bob Dylan is in town tonight, but he’s not playing at this venue, as evidenced by the dancing girls rehearsing outside – hardly Dylanesque. His Bobness is instead across town – I’d be at the concert myself if I wasn’t working nights. Hopefully next time. (*Or so I thought - it turns out Dylan
was playing there that night ... the girls must have been part of some other show.)
Just a short walk now past the Business faculty of the University of Technology and then I’m at work. So, was this a
tabula rasa journey, or just another walk to work? It’s hardly one of EG, SP or Sweder’s dark and deep soul-searching expositions following a marathon, but it does at least prove one thing: that running is good for the mental health as well as the physical ... erm, even if you’re only walking... erm... and er, thinking about running. Oh dear, this is not turning out all that well, is it???
Hell, just read Sweder’s magnificent piece about running along the
A27 and you’ll see what I mean. As he says, sometimes a run is not a thing of beauty but of
necessity. Sometimes I forget that.
Often I forget that, but that’s also why I keep hard copies of some of the best bits to come out of these training diaries.
There’s no denying we’re all getting older. However I still have a few running goals and I certainly don’t want to die wondering if I could have kicked them or not, but I’m also fairly well aware that some of them are beyond my reach now. Just at the moment I’m running OK, but I’m definitely (a lot) slower than I was and I’m alarmingly far less flexible than I was (and maybe the two are related). Hence the searching for physio’s recommended stretching and mobility exercises earlier in the day. And hence the digging deeper into the runners’ psyche.
And there’s still a little matter of a mountain to run up in a few months time. This for me cannot be a winter of lazy training. This winter has to be one of hard work no matter what. And half the battle is mental. Maybe more. But I’m even more determined than usual and I’m on the way. We’ll see what the winter can throw at me... I think I’m ready.
Thanks for listening.
April Cools
