I planned the route in advance, obviously, as I wold be running along roads in which I have only been a passenger before. I took around 1pm, I’d had some hummus on bread some 40 minutes earlier and I am feeling pretty good about myself. The plan is to take it nice and slow and to take some snaps on the way.
But before I had even gotten a kilometre down the road, I found myself having to stop and sneak some snaps.
The first 11K of my run is pretty much up hill all the way. But I am often running on small, tree-lined roads which are very pleasant. But soon I found myself running past the types of road signs one only finds in Australia and on the look out for some iconic wildlife.
The road I ended up running on, Menzies road, I have been along – in a car – quite a few times in the past and back then, I didn’t really think much of it, just a long rat run through some farm paddocks. Running it, I discovered that the road follows the top of a ridge. For the best part of an hour, I ran along this ridge and I think I spent more time taking photographs than running.
Eventually, I popped out of the tree-lined ridge on the edge of Kangaroo Ground and my run back towards Warrandyte was along much more wider (and busier) roads, although the views were still amazing.
In the end, I stopped at 18K. It didn’t quite get me back to the house but it was further than I wanted to. I made the fatal mistake of planning a run in miles but running it thinking I had planned it in kilometres, so my 14K run was actually 14 miles. Saying that. I am looking forward to running those ridges again very soon.
The Muddy Masochist 