Operation Opera House to My House

I normally write race reports as a means of looking back the following year when i go to tackle the same race, so as to avoid the same mistakes or to remember what went well, and lets be honest, I just like being able to look back and remember the special ones. I can rest assure that I’ll never be running from Sydney’s Opera House to Wollongong again, so this one is purely to remember some of the details and great memories of stuff along the way.

I can’t remember where the idea came from, or why it came, but for a while I was considering this run. I just thought it would be cool to be able to do it. So I started looking around and seeing if it was feasible, posting on an Aussie running forum. Well it turns out that a group of guys did this back in 2003 (I think 5 or 6 started, some bailed some bailed in Otford and a couple went the distance.) In any event, there was a website set up for it with directions, so I grabbed those and looked at ‘em online and started to think maybe it WAS a possibility. So I told Julia, she’s not surprised with this sort of crap from me anymore. Then I started to think of it in terms of planning to actually do it. Then I just sort of accepted the fact that I was doing it and started to get excited.

Yesterday morning I got up at 2:15AM to start gettin’ myself ready for the day. Had a feed and treated the morning like any other race morning. Julia and i met Jerry down at the train station for 4:15 and the three of us were on our way up to Sydney. Thankfully it was a new train because toilet facilities were used 3-4 times. We got to Sydney just before 6 and hopped another train to get down to Circular Quay. Once there we each had one more bathroom break and then headed over to the opera house. Something was going on as there were tons of these weird cars pulling in and people dressed in banana suits and all sorts of stuff. Anyways, we got a quick photo taken by a lady who was down there and then we were off. Shit, I gotta run for a while!

See, at Canberra I had hoped to get a half marathon PB of under 1:27, preferably 1:25, training leading up to it dictated I could. Something happened to my quad (I think caused by ITband tightness) and I had to run walk the last 17k of 21! Then at Gold Coast, I had hoped to PB and qualify for Boston, again, training dictated I could. On the Thursday before the race I went out for a quick tempo run and a couple K in, boom, same thing. Tried to run again on Sat, no go. I was cheerleader on the day for Julia’s first marathon! That was fun too, but my past two races were somewhat failures. Anyways, about 2k into this BOOM. YOU’RE F*%&ING KIDDING! Why am I fine in training and then it happens when it’s important?! So I’m uberly depressed and just about convinced that this is gonna be over even before it starts. I’m quickly reduced to a walk and just try to stretch it out. Julia and Jared are there for emotional support telling me to just take my time and that we literally have all day. So I run/jog/walk for a while. What seemed like a damn long while. We got ‘lost’ first around Eve street, right after the airport and ended up with a minor detour, not a big deal, what’s an extra half kilometre? We slowly made our way down to the ocean at the end of Bestic, not sure what that coast area is called, but it was really nice! Kinda like ours in Wollongong, but takes you all the way to the Captain Cook bridge and into Miranda. Along this section (I think because it’s flat and predictable) my leg started to feel good. We stopped for a quick bite to eat here and I put my SKINS shorts back on and started walking ahead a bit and told them they could catch up, as the route was pretty straightforward. I started to jog, it felt ok, I started to run a bit harder and it felt good. Jared caught up and said Julia was right behind so I started to push it and see just how good I was feeling, I got up to around 4:00/km! Hahaha, ok easy. Before we knew it we were at the Captain Cook Bridge and stopped for a quick photo op. Across into I THINK Miranda and through some more residential until we hit the park at Gray’s Point. Not much exciting here other than finding the cover for a XXX DVD on the sidewalk... we saved it to use as a belated b-day card for Michelle..hahaha. So we get to the end of Forest street and are faced with a path that ended up being these massive rocks to get down to the next area, which ain’t easy to navigate with bikes! We got a little confused, I asked a guy at a traffic light for directions and then we FINALLY made it to Gray’s Point and the first part of our trek through HELL. The Royal National park is beautiful, second oldest National Park in the world to Yellowstone in the US. COOOOOL. We got to Audley with no problems and then started to head down into the park towards Lady Carrington. This is about 40ish k now. Sir Bertram Drive is highway-esque with not a lot of shoulder (ok, NO shoulder) and with a runner and a couple of people on K-Mart mountain bikes, not too easy to navigate with traffic. We were on and off the road for a while, as we had to squeeze off onto the shoulder when a car would come and this meant stopping. We finally made our way to Lady Carrington, a nice flattish path that was closed to cars. WOOO HOOOO! Time to cruise for about 10k. 250M onto the path I tripped over a big rocked and cut up my hand pretty good, super. After a first aid treatment I just started to run as much as I could. I knew the turn-off to the Walumarra Track (which I was supposed to take but the bikes couldn’t so we needed an alternate route) was at 51.5k so I just looked forward to that so I could tell the troops we were over half-way. We finally made it there and then to the end of Lady Carrington where we stopped for a bit before tackling more of this damn highway type road. Here I started to feel light headed, and just awful. I called Lee to give her an update but almost passed out. I got worried about not finishing and was convinced I might not, but Jared told me to just keep truckin’, and besides, we’re in the middle of the park with no car so we gotta go at least another 15k til we’re out! I sat down and get some food and Gatorade in me and started to come around. We started out slow and just made our way down the road... or up as it was mostly uphill all the way. This took forever because we kept having to get off the road. Julia was a bit terrified of the traffic whizzing by and I felt bad that I put in her that situation. We got a few yells and head shaking along the way, but whatever, we were making it out. Finally we were at Otford lookout, 65km and an amazing view! Took a couple photos, a quick break, put the garmin back on and started out again. 35k to go and that amazing coastal highway to look forward to. One more terrifying road to come DOWN this time, but then we had sidewalk the rest of the way. That highway was unbelievable. Right out over the edge of the mountain with amazing views all around. It was starting to become night-time now and I knew I had to get as far as possible before it got dark, so we would at least be somewhere familiar (Thirroul). We just kept truckin’ along, looking forward to the 82k mark at Thirroul, where we’d take out last food break and then head home our familiar cycleway path. From here it was all gravy, other than a drunk couple yelling at us as we came by. From Fairy Meadow I thought it would be about 30 minutes to home as I had been averaging 7:30/km, but I just got this rush of adrenaline, and ran hard the whole way. At the finish were Erin and Erin, Michelle, Kym and BINGY, Michelle and Aaron Majovsky and Katrina! They had made a finish line tape out of streamers for us and were cheering us in, that was great! I sat on the curb a while and then came in and tried to eat this amazing meal that Lee spent all day making but my stomach was a mess. I started gettin’ the sweats at the dinner table and had to go lie down with an ice pack on my head. I slowly came around but couldn’t stomach the food, so it was breakfast. DELICIOUS.

So that’s it! 100k run on the resume! It won’t be my longest, I assure you that, but I think next time I’ll do an organized race so I don’t have to worry about all that BS we had to deal with in the park with traffic and such.

I’ll hafta get Jared and Julia to give me more details about the finer points of the day, as I’m sure I missed a ton.

I can’t thank those two enough for all the support along the way, and for Julia to put up with this shit. It’ll be one more adventure that the three of us will certainly remember about our time in Australia! Huge thanks to Lee for putting those updates up on facebook, mostly for my mom who was back home worried to shit about here little boy. J AND for the amazing meal she had ready for us when we got home. Thanks to everyone at the finish line who was there at 8:15 when we finally got home, sorry I was almost 4 hours late!

Huge thanks to Michelle Majovsky who took the train out to Bulli to meet me for my last 15 or so Kilometres, and I’m so sorry I wasn’t there on time to meet you, I feel terrible but I’m glad you still got the run in!

Thanks to anyone who fed the ego over the past few weeks and put the extra pressure on me to finish.