Can't decide if yesterday's run was a good run or a terrible run - or a mix of both. It just didn't go quite how I planned it.
I've been doing two things with runs and rides recently:
1. As much as possible I'm trying to go a slightly different route every time (I'm in a new city, so want to get as much of an idea as possible which are good and bad routes - and to not just settle on one or two that I happen to stumble across.
2. As well as loops, I'm doing more runs where I head out, then catch the train back. It lets me explore further afield and living in a place with a fairly good integrated public transport network, I'm yet to end a run or drop out from one due to bad weather, where I wasn't able to get home on public transport with only one change along the route. One problem with this is that weekends seem to be when there are often engineering works on the train lines - but there are still always replacement bus services if this happens.
So - yesterday's run I decided to head out to Waterfall. It's the southern end of the suburban train network (after that there are regional trains going further less frequently) and its name conjures up images of the sort of terrain around it. It's a small place on the main road, in between two different National Parks.
I tend to like running on trails, so heading to one or other of these National Parks appealed to me. I plotted out two possible routes to Waterfall a few weeks back, one through each National Park, both around the same length. I avoided this run tough in the weeks after, because each time I ran had followed multiple days of heavy rain and I didn't know how muddy paths there might be. Turns out this was a good decision.
So - I headed off, leaving the house later than planned. Total distance was going to be around 35km which is within the distance range of recent runs, although probably hillier. The first problem is that getting to somewhere like the National Park from a place in the suburbs inevitably means a fair bit of running along roads first of all - especially if trying to get a fairly direct route there. It was the first run of the year that has felt properly cold at the start. I wore arm warmers for about half of it.
One detail I should perhaps mention is that the national parks are the other side of a big river. In any other city, this would be seen as one of the key features of the place, but in Sydney, because it is less prominent than the harbour it is kind of forgotten by a lot of people. The size of that river means that there aren't many possible crossings to use - the one I took is basically a motorway, with a cycle path at the side. It is fairly direct, but not the most scenic route and the hill as you come up from the river, although seemingly gentle goes on and on. Early in this run I decided to walk the big hills, just to retain energy, as I know I'm not in the training condition from a couple of years when I could have run all of them.
Once on the other side, mentally I was going to be in the countryside, but the reality was that suburbia resumes for quite a way and even on bits where it feels more rural, there are still houses 100m away behind a dense woodland strip. The bridge was at 9k in, but I first entered the National Park at 18k.
At first, it seemed great - I was on a steep path that looked like perhaps it was once surfaced for vehicles, but the surface had nearly all gone. It went really steeply down, taking me down the 140m I had gradually climbed over the space of 10km in a little over 1km. Above me were big sandstone crags.
Not long after that, I was pretty much back at sea level and hist the first river crossing. A concrete ford
about 25m long stretched across the river and while it looked fairly shallow, it came up over my ankles. It hadn't rained for over a week, so it seems I made a good decision to wait for dry weather for this route, otherwise that part could have been fairly deep.
After the downhill was a fairly steep uphill, then I crossed a ravine on a narrow metal bridge connected to a large water pipeline. It turns out that this pipeline was to haunt me for a lot of the remainder of the run. I had wanted to be on rough trails, but my route was mostly following the once surfaced trail for maintenance of the pipeline, with the pipeline continually on my left side. This isn't really what I had in mind when I went for a walk in the wilderness - this constant reminder that I wasn't that far from the city.
Every time I thought I had left it, I found myself back alongside it a few minutes later. Looking more closely at the map afterwards, there was perhaps a clue in that the path was called the pipeline trail.
Beyond the national park is a large amount of fenced off land for a military base and I could hear the noise of firing from there. Annoyingly on some maps it is not that clearly marked as an exclusion zone and in the past I've plotted automatic routes that have tried to go across it, despite massive gates and fences when I've then checked out bits of it on streetview.
After about 10km of following the pipeline and a few more river crossings (including a really sketchy road crossing where visibility was poor in both directions), I finally saw my route fork away from it. There was even a sign to tell me I was going the right way - and that I was less than 5k from my destination. In my mind I was going to be hopping on the train in a little over 30 minutes...
After complaining that the trail run felt like it was on roads, this path (despite being a major signposted route) instantly jumped to the opposite extreme. It was steep and narrow, over and around rocks and trees. As this picture of that first part of it shows, very little of it was runnable.
Further one, it got more rocky and there were a few points where my GPS showed I was straying quite a long way from the supposed path, which I eventually found, although there wasn't much difference between being on the path or off it. At some points I was struggling to work out if I was following a stream or if the stream had decided to follow the path and there was a lot of sticky mud and fairly tricky scrambing across big boulders.
Eventually I passed a bush camp ground and then saw some waterfalls (possibly the ones the place was named after - nobody seems quite clear about the origin of the name).
After that, there was a really steep path up over boulders (although with a few arrows to indicate the best direction and suddenly I was out on a suburban street. The last 4.5km had taken me nearly two hours to complete though and by now the day was getting late - this run had taken way longer than I anticipated. After an 0900 start on an empty stomach, it was 15:30 as I got to the railways station and the realisation that this town has no actual shops - just a fish restaurant with some very prominent signage.
So I had to use the only available option for food - vending machines on the station platform and chugged a bottle of Powerade from them, before hopping on a train and then bus to get back to the house at around 16:40 for whatever meal you call combined breakfast, lunch and dinner (A massive bowl of Vietnamese pork with noodles).
So - I kind of liked the run - but lack of training and misjudging the terrain as well as not starting early enough meant that it took way too long. I feel I need to find trails that aren't tarmac, but aren't too much scrambling and this route wasn't it. Also, I'd prefer to avoid river crossings where possible as running with soaking feet isn't ideal. I imagine in summer that the river if probably pretty much dry - but also that I'd need to be carrying a lot more water. What still amazes me is that this route is still kind of within the boundaries of the Greater Sydney area - yet this was bush land that you could easily get lost in, once you were away from the main path.
I've misjudged the timings on runs before - but never to this extent.
I still have the other route to do to Waterfall (via Royal National Park instead of Heathcote). I've been in bits of RNP before, but suspect that this edge of it may be very different as it is essentially the other side of the road from where I was on this run. I'm also wondering whether getting the train at the start might be a better option - doing the hard trail bits on fresh legs at the start and then the roads later on.
The route started well. Took a lot of road to get to the trails, then disappointingly a lot of the trail was a tarmac path following a water pipeline. Then unexpectedly, the last 5k was on trail that was scrambling over rocks and through streams that kept disappearing, so took way longer than...
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