A Man and his Penguin

This morning, I did the Big Walk 2007.

The new Esplanade Station makes it so convenient! Rather than get off at Perth Station and then walk all the way down to the Perth Esplanade, I just stayed on the train and it delivered me to the Esplanade :-)  This year the start was in the Supreme Court Gardens, due to some sort of building work.

The actual turnout seemed to be down from previous years, probably due to the dark clouds in the sky earlier on. Unfortunately, the instructors doing the warmup were pretty clueless as to what sort of aerobics constitutes a good warmup, and there was only a halfhearted attempt at stretching. Most of the crowd didn’t pay any attention anyway. I had to do my own stretching.

Like always, people started leaving for Fremantle before the actual start of the event, but this year they left even earlier. One of the Rotarians was telling people that they could leave straight after they registered - dumb!

Although there were clouds, there was no rain, and the weather wasn’t too hot or too cold. Good walking weather, without much wind. There was plenty of water on the way, and the Rotarians were even handing out sweets for energy. Once again there was visible support from local community organisations for the Big Walk, with a band playing at one of the schools along the route (though when I got to it, they were just noodling around in between songs).

But yeah, the walk was quite nice. I hadn’t trained up for the walk this year; by the time I got to Cottesloe, I was really quite sore. I had managed to keep a reasonable pace going, but by the time there was 1 km left I realised that the time was 2:45! Only 15 minutes to go to complete the walk in a good time! It wasn’t at all clear if I was going to make it, even though I upped the pace to my maximum; but then finally I rounded the corner to the Esplanade with 2 minutes to spare.

So, I beat my Personal Best for the Big Walk, by 1 minute!

I wasn’t too impressed with the prize giveaways. Usually, the announcer says "The first two people to me wearing/holding abc gets xyz prize" or something like that, and so if you qualify you have to rush up toward the stage. This year, the guy from 94.5 was pretty much just saying "The first 3 kids to me get xyz", and then he was just throwing prizes across the field to anyone who could catch them. Once he’d done that for a few minutes, he got fed up and just told all the kids to come up to the table and take whatever they wanted. That was a major disappointment - I was hoping to get some sort of prize this year!

The person who won the car wasn’t there at the field when it was drawn. They almost never are!

I spent about another hour in Fremantle, getting some food, looking around the markets and shops and stuff. I sat down in one place with my lunch, and a busker was nearby - he wasn’t very good, but I stuck around, and once I finished my lunch I had listened to 3 songs. I decided that, since I had listened to him sing 3 songs, I should pay him whatever it costs to buy 3 songs on iTunes. So I gave him $5.

Then I walked to the other end of the mall thingy, where there was another busker, who was absolutely TERRIBLE.

Not a lot else ensued. I went back to Perth on the train, walked what felt like a kilometre and down a large flight of stairs to change from the Midland platform to the Clarkson line under William Street. Surely they could have built those platforms closer to the main Perth station!

Once I got back to my car, I drove to the shops and bought myself some gingerbread ice-cream. Yum!

Due to other things, which I don’t feel comfortable talking about here, this evening I started to feel frustrated. I feel like a particular person skipped out on me without giving me an answer to my question. When you do the Big Walk, you do it with the knowledge that it will eventually end. What this situation amounts to is starting on a walk without knowing how long I’ll be walking, and the kilometre markers are simply mirages which vanish as you get up closer to them. As you get up to an official to ask how much further you have to walk, they merely wave into the distance and grunt.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 21st, 2007 at 5:31 am and is filed under Backstory. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.