Inverloch Parkrun - Port Welshpool - 90 Mile Beach

One of the parts of my trip was to carry on doing my Park runs each week so my route up to Brisbane follows areas where each Saturday morning I could put on my wobbling hoofs and keep up my fitness while seeing how they do it down under. The first one I tried was in the coastal town of Inverloch. It’s a small town with a few coffee shops, ocean equipment stores and nice looking restaurants. My host Thierry was a member but hadn’t done many parkrun’s recently as he liked to concentrate on half marathons and triathlete events. He did say it was a nice run along the foreshore and there was usually around a hundred people taking part most weekends. I had sent a message to the Inverloch Parkrun Facebook page mentioning my trip and that I was doing Inverloch as my first. I turned up around 7:30 for the 8am start and was straight away made to feel very welcome by having a chat to one of the run directors. They did the park run pre-run talk where we thanked the volunteers, awarded people for notable runs and welcomed any tourists. For this run I wasn’t the only Brit taking part. There was a lady from Rye in Surrey who was over visiting her son. With a couple of minutes before the whistle we all lined up and set watches, logged phones onto Strava and in my case, synchronised my fingers to Aussie radar mode. Once running I kept a good pace around 3:57 per km for the first couple of kilometres and was holding 5th place behind a young lady, a guy that looked like one of the wildlings from Game of Thrones, a young guy who appeared to be strolling and an older man who certainly looked like he had run a few Parkruns previously. At 3 kilometres I kicked into 3rd place overtaking both the lady and the Wildling but immediately knew I had gone to soon. The thought came to me as soon as I went past them that they probably had a kick each to do and they were locals who wouldn’t want to be pasted by some tourist. At 4 kilometres the lady picked up her pace and went back in front of me and within a few seconds the man also went by. With half a kilometre to go they were to far gone to catch as my legs had nothing left and I started to quickly fade. Three days of hard cycling and two days of hot sun had emptied my tanks and I went across the line in 21:09. Not a bad time considering but definitely room to improve. The next run should be in the mountains of Bright or Mt Beauty. For the following two days of riding I completed a few of the Rail Trails. The nicest one was The Great Southern Rail Trail that ended at Port Welshpool were I camped on the village green alongside a lot of four wheel drive trucks with boats on trailers. The ride the following day was lonely and quite bleak. The weather was very cloudy but at least the wind wasn’t blowing a lot. I camped at the coastal reserve on 90 mile beach. If the sun had of been out this location would have been stunning. In hindsight it was nice but not really worth the extra kilometres and solitude. On a positive note I have a shortish couple of days of cycling as I head to sale then Bairnsdale where I have a host and a much needed chance to wash some clothing.