Big Yellow Taxi

Today Total: 20k
Week Total: 20k
Month Total: 104k
Year Total: 1467.4

I haven't been able to run since last Wednesday. What started out as a sore throat driving home late from work on Wednesday night had turned into the full ubangi by Thursday morning - lots and lots of yukkiness. So this morning (being the first day of my holidays) I thought a nice cruzy 20k around my favourite bay/bush loop would help me make up some lost k's and also burn off the dregs.

It was an absolutely gorgeous morning, coolish, clear and still. The sun was sparkling off the bay silhouetting the early morning rowers in an ethereal golden glow *cue music*......zzzzzzzzip, STOP, STOP, STOP, hold everything! This is a supposed to be a running blog not some bloody nancy romantic novel........ sorry ;-)

Anyhoo..... I was running pretty neatly, the four days off gave all the niggles a chance to heal (for a while) and having done some harder runs recently it is amazing how easy it seems to cruise along now on a long run when just a few short months ago every run was a chore to be survived.

I was in the best of moods but then my world turned upside down, my (and I use the possessive deliberately) Foreshore Trail is no more, the Western Area Health Service is "paving paradise" with not so much as a by your leave. No signs, no nothing, just a fence blocking the trail and a bulldozer working behind it. All those lovely, lonely, relics from the war years are being dozed into the ground and the best part of the trail where it gets a bit technical with bush steps and a lovely little rock face are now inaccessible. I feared this would happen one day and today is the day. The bit that really irks me is there is no detour, so I was left to my own devices to make my way through the labyrinth of Concord Hospital to link up with the track on the other side of the construction (destruction) site.

I can't change it so I just had to accept the situation and move on, it was too nice a day to stay in the doldrums. Coming up through the ANZAC Memorial Walkway I briefly flirted with the idea of extending this to a 30k run but fortunately common sense prevailed - don't want to relapse back to fluesville, so I cut up through Rhodes and bugger me if there isn't a new railway station being built! It's only been a couple of weeks since I was here and it seems everything is changing, though this change is probably for the better as there are more stairs on the new bridge than the old one :-)

The rest of the run went fairly smoothly through the back end of Bicentennial Park and up through North Strathfield for a total of 20k in 1.55.34 (av 5.47). Pulled up clearer in the head than when I started though my throat is still a bit raw, might have to get some Betadine.