The CrossingToward Sutton Forest
Thirty parkruns From Sydney
Sydney dropped to thirty parkruns away, I chatted with Gus Worland from Triple M's The Grill Team, and HAA somehow turned up in a Grill'd Carousel community jar back in Perth. Then the afternoon dragged, the hills kept grinding, and I finished about 2 km before Sutton Forest.
While I was somewhere beyond Goulburn, HAA was also sitting on a jar at Grill’d Carousel back in Perth.
We had been selected for Grill’d Carousel’s Local Matters program for September. The idea was simple: buy a burger, put the token in the Hearts Across Australia jar, and help us chase the $300 community donation. It also gave my running mates back in Perth an excuse to eat burgers. Tough work, but someone had to do it.
From Grill’d to The Grill.
That was the other strange thing in the morning. I was not exactly sure whether the chat would be live, but I let people know Triple M’s The Grill Team might be worth tuning into. I ended up chatting with Gus Worland, who I knew of from watching the TV show Aussie Goes Barmy and who had recently run the New York Marathon after Hugh Jackman set him the challenge.
Oh what rarefied air I was breathing.
The walking part of the day had its own comedy too, because Sydney was getting close enough for the numbers to become properly silly.
Not long before, Sydney had still been more than 100 parkruns away. Now the signs were saying 161 km. Then 150 km.
In the standard HAA unit of measure, that was thirty parkruns.
thirty. thirty parkruns. bwahahahaha.
Calling 150 km a three-day walk only made sense inside HAA, but it really did feel close. Three big days could finish the west-to-east part of the adventure and then we would turn left towards Queensland.
The catch, obviously, was that those three days still had to be walked.
The morning had energy: Grill’d, The Grill, Sydney signs, and the weird thrill of putting a small, sensible-sounding number on something that had once seemed impossibly far away.
The afternoon took plenty of that energy back.
I had broken sleep the night before, and the long slow grinding hills did not help. The watch had already been showing 706 metres elevation in the morning, so my legs were not imagining it. After the media buzz and the milestone maths, the rest of the day dragged a bit. The going was tough and slow.
It was one of those days that made the mental side of HAA very obvious. The body had to keep moving, but the mind games could make or break the whole thing. Sydney was close enough to feel real, but not close enough to stop.
One thing that helped was the growing number of drivers tooting and waving as they went past. If people had told friends or colleagues to look out for us, it worked. Those little bursts of recognition from passing cars and trucks were genuinely uplifting.
Late in the day, it was nice to be off the busy Hume for a while. We were heading towards Sutton Forest, and I thought we would probably rejoin the Hume the next day. The finish point was about 2 km before Sutton Forest, with the overnight stop at Moss Vale.
Mittagong was also close now. Hoka OneOne Australia territory, around 8:30 or 9 the next morning. That had seemed a long way off when the route into Sydney was first discussed. Now we were following it.
By the time I stopped, there were another 57.3 km in the legs.
Thirty parkruns had already become less than thirty.
Images From The Day
