It’s an Art Hotel and there’s no gym. Milan at the front desk advises that the Hobart Aquatic Centre is 3-4 minutes walk away and gives me a map. “Just go up Davies St and it is over there” he says, vaguely waving his arm over his shoulder indicating a southerly sort of direction.
I walk out the door in my running gear and head away from the harbour towards the nearest main road and walk along looking for Davies Street. I’ve been working in the Hobart office and my colleague, Katey, knowing that I recently started running, suggested I might like to enter the Hobart City to Casino Run this weekend. It sounds like a good idea, I’m here and I have been planning to try a 10km event in a couple of weeks. I am not a confident runner, the Hobart race will be good preparation.
Tonight will be training my first session on a running machine. It takes me 3 or 4 minutes of walking to establish I am on Davies Street and, according to my map, heading in the wrong direction. I call into a bottle-shop and buy cigarettes, anticipating the pleasure of a cigarette post run.
Cigarettes and running are both post-Mottsu habits. It’s complicated.
The nameless guy in the bottle-shop point me towards the Hobart Aquatic Centre, telling me I need to use the pedestrian underpass and cautioning that it can be a “a bit dodgy” this time of night. It’s 6pm.
It is $12 for a casual pass and a green hospital id tag is fitted to my wrist. The running machines are daunting, but my whole life is daunting, the machine has lots of options for gradient and speed settings. I set a flat terrain and opt for manual speed control. The machine demands to know my weight but I am coy about revealing it. It wants to calculate how many calories I burn, I just want to run.
The machine records time, distance and speed, regularly flicking it’s Led display to my workout statistics, meaningless. I run in cycles of 10 minutes and then walk for 2. The sliding surface takes a little getting used to but I settle into running at 8k/hour and walking at 6.6. In my head I plan covering 6 kilometres but the machine decides it has had enough and slides into a cool down before I am ready. I get confused about the distance and the simple addition of the first burst and this subsequent bout gets hard to do while feet are pounding. I feel I should have covered more distance for the effort. I decide to stop fooling myself and count the distance run not the distance I wish I had run.
When I’m done and the machine has forced me through another cool down cycle I can hardly walk. My legs are expecting the floor to slide along at the speed of the machines and I experience a strange skating feeling. Finding my way back to the Art Hotel is easier than the original journey and I feel great, now confident about finishing in the City to Casino on Sunday.
My mind is made up I’ll play it safe and stay injury free by running the 5.8 km course rather than the competitive 11kms course. It’s only two weeks until my first planned competitive run so I convince myself not to over-do this running business.
While showering my decision is affirmed, I feel tension in my upper left leg, I’ve stretched a muscle, as far as I can tell, my bum knows I have exercised.
Sitting in the clear autumn night I enjoy a glass of chardonnay, while scribbling in my journal and smoking a cigarette.
The clock in the Hobart town hall strikes 8 as I wait for Katey. Despite the wine and cigarette I feel athletically accomplished and enjoy my post run endorphins. There’s a still and velvet black sky illuminated by lights reflected by the harbour. There’s a dull constant background hum of traffic passing on nearby Davies Street. I’m content and contained and not bothered by the Friday joviality of passersby. I am going to do the fun run, my first. It’s possible, my bum will recover. I can do this…
The bin on the nearby rubbish bin warns “Don’t waste Tasmania” and I have no intention of doing that I am making the most of Tasmania, and the most of me.
I recommend running,preferably without the post-effort cigarette but even so…
I did the run, finished and crossed the line. The course has a slight downhill gradient for most of the way, fabulous. The feelings that crossed the line with me were extraordinary, I was exultant with achievement and enjoyment, and at the same time depleted by loneliness. The person I wanted to tell was Mottsu, he would hardly have believed I had started running, let alone this achievement. I missed him and his support. I cried, tears didn’t show against the sweat.