One Last Half Before Departure

Six days before I left Perth, I ran the Joondalup Half Marathon.

That sentence sounds slightly ridiculous now. I was less than a week away from starting a 5,400 kilometre walk and run across Australia, and there I was, pinning on another race number like this was all perfectly normal.

It was not meant to be a hard race. A couple of weeks earlier I had already been tempted to run Joondalup for a third time, but the point was never to smash myself. By then the real work was not chasing a time. The real work was arriving at Saturday with enough fitness, enough calm, and enough working gear to begin.

So I ran the loop around Lake Joondalup as one last race-day rehearsal. Pin the number on. Move through a crowd. Keep the effort sensible. Finish, recover, and see what the body had to say about it all. The answer, at least from the outside, was reassuring enough: 2:46, a recovery shake in hand, and the thought that everything now pointed toward Saturday and the next four months.

That was the strange thing about the final week before departure. Ordinary running-life rituals were still happening, but they had stopped feeling ordinary. A half marathon was no longer just a half marathon. It was a systems check. Legs, head, nutrition, shoes, the nervous system, the habit of getting up and doing the thing in public. Even the little post-race photo with the shake carried a different weight because I knew the next start line would not finish back where it began.

The day had one of those supporter moments that kept appearing around HAA. After the race, I caught up with Bruce Hogg from The Athletes Foot Subiaco while buying a new pair of running sunnies. He helped me choose them, chatted about running and the adventure ahead, and then told me they were on him.

It was a small thing and not a small thing at all. Sunglasses are practical. They are kit. They go in a bag, onto your face, into the list of things you hope you will not lose somewhere east of Perth. But in the final week, generosity like that did something emotional as well. It reminded me that other people had started carrying little pieces of HAA too.

The scale of the thing was already too big to hold neatly in my own head. There were sponsors around the edges, supporters checking in, gear arriving, people asking questions, the Heart Foundation connection, the campervan pickup still ahead, and the quiet knowledge that very soon there would be no more training for it. There would only be doing it.

Later that night the SPOT GEN3 tracker got its own small rehearsal. I had activated it during the half marathon to see whether the public tracking setup would do what we needed. The old link would eventually expire, but the result at the time was enough: basic, a bit clunky, but working.

Six days out, enough was a beautiful word.

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