|
RE: Gut bust August.
A Sydney disbeliever writes:
I can't believe I'm doing this...
That was my first waking thought as I sat up in bed, smashed off the alarm and swung my feet out onto the bedroom floor. The air was cold; damn cold. It was not even 5 a.m. and far more sensible people than I were still warm and toasty in bed asleep. They were not, as I was now doing, changing into running gear and hitting the streets after a long, hard week on a cold, bitter morning. Yet there I was, stumbling out the door and wondering if I had my running top on back to front or not and unsure as to whether it even mattered.
As I headed out into the dark, the 'I can't believe I'm doing this' thought stayed with me, etched into the hard, stone-like substance substituting for a brain as I pounded down the lanes and avenues around my home in the pre-dawn icy gloom.
I was a good 2km into my run before I began to feel even slightly human again. As I slowly came alive the sense of disbelief only grew, but also with it came a determination to finish the run, alongside a resignation that, yes, I may as well push on now that I was apparently out there. I slowed down, took my time and completed the requisite number of kilometers, along with half-completing this blog in my head. Not a bad effort for such a morning, or so I thought.
It was a court appearance, or rather, the aftermath of a court appearance that got me out there again this morning on a day when my exhausted brain just needed a break from such exertion. I don't make a habit of appearing in court - such things are mentally draining and stressful, no matter how well prepared you are. Yesterday was a simple matter, and I expected it to be over in thirty minutes ... which just goes to show how naive I am about such things as it actually took nearly five times as long. It was a strange affair, with the presiding judge appearing by video link from Melbourne, nearly 900 kilometres away while the rest of us, complainants and defendants all sat side by side in the pine-paneled light and airy court room on the eleventh floor of a government building with fine views to the south of Sydney. It was, it must be said, a little surreal.
By contrast my first ever appearance in a court room was a thoroughly different affair. It was 33 years ago, in an ancient, dark and sombre windowless magistrate's court that looked like something straight out of Gormenghast. Well actually, it wasn't quite my first time there. I had been there once before that, sitting on the media bench as a hack (and very temporary) journalist gathering inconsequential stories about drink driving offences and the like. Most of my time on that occasion had been spent trying to decipher the initials and names of previously bored-to-death reporters who had carved them into the woodwork between cases... Ken Gourlay, Steve Earling and Nicholas Webster were all there years before me, their penknife attacks on the timber plain to see and who were now star reporters for their various local media outlets. Rather than those long forgotten court cases, it made a far greater impression on me to learn that that many senior journalists had long before sat there on the same hardwood bench as I learning their craft. Or not, as the depth of carving seemed to suggest. It's even stranger now to think it was even possible to take a pen-knife into a court room in those days. How the world has changed.
My appearance there as a defendant early in 1983 was a vastly more dramatic affair, and resulted in me being led from the court in handcuffs, cheered and photographed by a crowd of supporters who had assembled out the front, there being no room left in the public gallery. On that occasion, it was a simple matter of political protest, and perhaps a tale for another book sometime, but brought to mind by its contrast to yesterday's bright and almost cheerful looking yet hi-tech courtroom which sadly had no cheering crowd of supporters outside or indeed anywhere.
The details of yesterday's court appearance are dull by comparison, but afterwards our lawyer quietly warned that even though we had won our case, it may yet come back to bite us. The case concerned flexible working arrangements for people with medical ailments. Our employer had been providing accommodating requests for a privileged few but refusing to allow the majority access to those arrangements or even explain the criteria used when applying them. The court order changed that, but the lawyer did say that a flood of such requests could cause our management to change tack and throw out all such arrangements, which they are entitled to do. The warning from the lawyer was that if we made a request on medical grounds, they would then have ammunition to throw us out of our jobs on the grounds that we were medically unfit, and so it becomes a double-edged sword.
Tedious as these details are, it is the sole reason I managed to drag myself onto the streets again this morning, when all my body wanted was extra rest. If I am to continue in my present job for another ten years or so, the physical and mental demands on my body as a result of rotating shifts in a demanding environment mean I have to be as fit as possible to ward off the disease and illnesses that inevitably results from such work. Every medico I have spoken with has warned me about this, and I have little reason to doubt it as all of us in my work group have ailments that I consider premature considering our ages.
And so I ran. After those first couple of wretched early kilometres it did seem to me that I was running a little better than my earlier efforts this week, but I'm still as slow. I'm probably running slower now than I ever have, and the fitness is taking much, much longer to return. Maybe it's age, maybe it's the weather. Maybe it's a lack of a proper holiday for over twelve months now, or a combination of things. Whatever the cause, I don't like it, but it's comforting to know I can still do something about it so long as I don't get hung up too much on details such as pace and distance.
Winning a court case is like taking 20 steps forward and 19 back. One questions whether it's worth the effort, except experience shows that to do nothing yields an even greater number of backward steps with no compensating forward movement, and so yes, you have to fight on regardless. And running is perhaps not so very different. It's worth it, even when it doesn't seem so.
But man, it's hard getting out of bed.
|
Gut bust August.
