September 2009: The Perth 12km City to Surf Walk
By Mike Sheely
I have decided to bore you with some of my recent holiday activities.
Don’t you love it when someone goes on and on about their holiday and you have been slogging it out at work? Well tough I’m going to anyway.
Sue and I recently flew to Perth to catch up with our son Daniel. Some of you might have met Daniel at a club night some months back when he visited us. The lad is in training for an Iron man, so is mega fit and that should have been a warning for us.
We got off the plane on the Friday night and drove into the city centre of Perth where he lives. There was no mucking around it was a case of dropping our packs and we were off on a quick walking tour of Perth. This comprised about a 15km stroll of the highlights of the city. Up early and another walk was led, we picked up our race packs (number and transponder only) and walked around the river area and central park.
I must admit the place is very attractive and does have a good feel about it. I can see why it attracts so many of our young people. All this activity creates a thirst so a few beers were had. Unlike New Zealand the beer is expensive and a round at the pub can send you into Scotsman’s panic.
Saturday evening saw Daniel’s girl friend, Tammy Fitchett, (our very own Jane and Ash Fitchett’s daughter) flew into town to join us.
The second full day of our Australian experience was just as hectic as the first. All four of us had been entered in the Perth ‘City to Surf’ run/ walk event. We had to get to the start line by 0900 as did 38,800 other people. That’s three quarters of the population of Napier all in one area off to run or walk 12km. From the first start gun till we started walking took half an hour, it was an amazing scene but well organised. They categorised the participants into five groups from 'gun runners' to 'Sunday strollers'
All participants were wearing electronic timers and with so many people crossing the start line at one time it’s amazing the technology was able to record all our times.
Sue and I are used to walking at a reasonable pace but for 90% of the participants in the walking category a ‘shopping stroll’ was about all they could muster. We ducted and dived through every available gap in the masses, cut a few off, received some strange looks and soar comments but we maintained a reasonable pace. Of cause we were wearing the club uniform so if there is any complaints from Perth about some over keen walkers it’s most probably us.
Given we didn’t walk in a straight line our time of 1hr 44 wasn’t that bad, I reckon our 12km would have been 14km considering the extra distance walked to dodge everyone, it could be likened to a high speed drunken stagger.
I won’t even mention Daniels and Tammy’s time, they have youth on their side.
Now what do you do when you have 38,800 people 12km away from where they started and they all have to get back to town? The Aussie’s have it sorted. A fleet of buses transported us back to the city with very little time delay. It was a very well organised and executed exercise.
You would think that should be sufficient exercise for the day but if you are being looked after by an extreme athlete this is just a warm up. Yes there was more to be seen in Perth so off we went again to explore other sites of the city for the rest of the day.
Even at exorbitant rates the beer after a hard day tastes sweet.
Now I could continue with a very long monologue of our holiday but I won’t.
I will summarise by saying we travelled 1100km of very remote parts of northern Western Australia and were blown away by the size of the continent and the rugged beauty of the place.
They have snakes, spiders, sharks, stone fish, and God knows what else that can kill you but we saw none of them and came back healthy and wiser than before what more can you ask for.
