Tonky Talk

Paul goes walkabout in Australia. Nope, not the Outback: Sydney

It had been a helter-skelter dash between time zones: Toronto to London to Japan, then Australia – all in a week! There was little time to run. The gigs were packed too closely together, the flights too early or late, or missed. And above all this, my body clock was in a right mess. But now it was time to chill, a week with my exiled brother on Australia’s Gold Coast. A chance to scoff, sleep, laugh and run.

I arrived in the middle of a heatwave: 35C, humidity 98 per cent. That day, I ran on the treadmill for 30 minutes, which was good, but I was thirsty for an adventure, a foray into the environs in the manner of Derek Clayton. (Clayton was an Australian marathon runner in the 1960s and 1970s who, it was said, liked to get intentionally lost in training to boost his mileage.) I scanned the local area – there were a few 5K loops that seemed fairly simple. ‘In this heat you’d be mad to run for more than 40 minutes, anyway,’ my brother advised. ‘And take lots of water.’ I pointed over the beach to an outcrop of land sneaking out into the ocean and narrowing to a point. ‘That’s The Spit,’ he said. ‘ It’s ages away. You can’t do that.’ ‘Cool,’ I said. ‘ I’ll just do four miles or so.'’ The next day I ran to The Spit. I set off at about 5:30pm. The heat was fading, but it was still ridiculously hot. After 10 minutes or so, I was sweating. After 20, my T-shirt was plastered to my body, but I was heading to The Spit. What is the motivation at these moments? That instant, when, 20 minutes into a run, you decide not to turn back but to press on to an unfeasibly distant point. A point you’d been specifically warned not to run to. Is it stubbornness? Idiocy?

The way out was sort of OK, though I was aware I was running a fair distance and that all of those miles would have to be tackled again on the return leg. But I pressed on, down a long road lined with hotels, leisure complexes, harbour clubs. A lot of it was me hugging a high chain-link fence while dodging oncoming traffic. Not before time, it opened up into a large grassy plain cresting onto the ocean beyond. I ran the last 400 metres or so, down a narrow path and out onto a rocky outcrop with a beach on one side and the rough, swirling Pacific on the other.

I was knackered: only five miles out but the humidity was a killer and, of course, I had no water. My legs felt a tad tight, but the breeze was delicious and to be at the junction between a lovely beach on one side and the expanse of the ocean was invigorating. I could have stayed there for longer, but the light was fading and I was a bit scared of the return journey.

Don’t ask me how, but I got lost on the way back. You’d have thought that if you ran out keeping the sea on your left, then you’d just run back keeping the sea on your right. Apparently not. To be honest, I took a risk. The road forked and I made my choice thinking that maybe the two forks would eventually join up. For way too long I plodded down the wrong road, my unease growing. Eventually, I asked a local; I told him I’d been running for ages down this road in the hope that it would join up at the end.

‘No way, mate,’ he said. ‘This just goes out to sea. You’ll have to run back.’ I turned back and ran on – ever slower – plodding across the forecourts of plush hotels like a Pommie slug, guzzling from public water fountains. But running had done its work. I had found what I had been looking for, my body was drenched in sweat, my thoughts reduced to simply the next step.

I washed up at my brother’s door two hours after I’d left and 15 miles to the good. Derek Clayton would have been proud.