the go-to run

Another running post. Sorry.

To add some balance, the house is looking good and is nearly finished, the kids are great and Alex starts school next week, I've not been diving in ages despite getting a new camera and housing for Christmas. That brings pretty much everything else up to date.

I've had a go-to run for quite a long time. Sometimes I'll have a couple of different distances, or one one with hills and one without. These are the runs I do when I think I need to run but don't want to think too much. Familiar, comfortable routes that I can tick off when done, runs  that make sure my legs keep turning over even if they may not want to.

Richmond Park was a go-to run. I briefly had a loop around London's dock area. From Willoughby I would head along the bike path next to the freeway. Now I have the 11km local loop that will have me running along Manly's 1.6km beachfront, and an inland loop that takes me along the Wakehurst Parkway.

It was as I ran the inland loop last week - three times, once anti-clockwise - that I started thinking about the go-to run. And then on to what makes for a good go-to run, which is worth pondering when you consider the Wakehurst Parkway.

Frenchs Forest Road becomes the Wakehust Parkway not far from my home. Depending how I leave my house I can justifiably say it is the road I live on…if you allow a few bends and couple of name changes. The stretch I run is probably about 5km long. It has no footpaths. The asphalt peters out to rough gravel and the road, which is either quite straight or dead straight, is edged by rough scrubby trees and grasses which provide little shade and look ready to burn any day now. I've run it day and night, and in the day it can be quite warm and still, most of the air movement coming as cars and trucks go past at around 80kmh, a couple of feet from your shoulder. But usually it is warm, the asphalt seeming to retain plenty of the suns heat. It's not so bad; this stretch of road is flat enough that I can plod through the heat and make it to the water bubbler in the small park near where I turn off.

In the summer I get to hear cicadas in the gaps in the traffic that the lights at either end provide. Very occasionally, or at night, there will be no traffic in sight, but usually it is the hum-to-a-roar of traffic that I hear. There is always roadkill. Mostly possum with the occasional wallaby. There is always litter; some fly-tipped, some that looks to have fallen from workmen's vehicles and plenty of fast food packaging that has got loose or been discarded.

So there it is. A quite dangerous, reasonably featureless, hot, noisy, litter and dead animal strewn stretch of road that places me on the very border of "is committed" and "should be committed."

But.

It is local. It is easy running. And it makes me feel like a real runner, one of those runners you see in documentaries training for a twenty three thousand mile solo barefoot desert mountin crossing. You get my drift. I love the look of this stretch of road, even when driving it. I took that picture today, pulled off the road onto the gravel with my phone stuck out of the drivers windows waiting for a gap in the traffic. And yes, there is a washed out filter applied to the picture, but it can look almost like that. In my minds eye it looks exactly like that.

I think that is it. A good go-to run is one that makes me feel like a runner. One that I can do comfortably so anyone catching sight of me would think "there goes a runner" and not "what the hell is that moron doing running along the Wakehurst Parkway?!" And it is one that I need dig into a bit to find interesting, something a little left field.

Yes, that's it.