We spent last weekend at Lorne with friends at their beach house. Their place is stunning, set up on the hill, backing onto the Coastal Park bushland that abuts the Otway National Park. We were socialising on the deck our first evening, eating cheese and drinking wine while two wallabies munched on the grass down below. Over the weekend, we also saw Splendid Fairy Wrens, Black Cockatoos, Kookaburras, and White Cockatoos, among other birds. The weekend’s focus was the run and swim organised by the Lorne Surf Life Saving Club. The Mountain to Surf Run was on Friday morning. The run is advertised as 8km, but is more like 7.2 on all our watches, on a mixture of roads and trails, starting straight up a ridiculous hill. I’ve included the race elevation below so you can see what I mean. I got caught in the scrum of participants on the oval, and by the time I was funnelled into the starting chute, it was twenty minutes after the first wave started. Unfortunately, since G hadn’t taken his phone, I couldn’t text him to say go and do his cool down instead of waiting for me near the finish line. With the twenty minutes and my expected ten-minute slower running time, he would have plenty of time to get it done.

Since I have only been running properly again for a few weeks, I was severely underdone for a race of this type and went in with modest expectations, including allowing some power walking if the hills were too much, which they were. Once we had done the two steep hills at the start, we hit the narrow trail through the bush. I was caught at times behind a bit of a traffic jam when people started walking, but overall, this was a beautiful and fun section of the race—definitely my favourite. Once I popped out of the bush and hit the Great Ocean Road I quickly ran across as we were being warned that they were about to shut the crossing to let the carts past, and I didn’t want to stand around waiting. The road curves around above the ocean with beautiful views up the coast, but a lot of this was uphill again, and by this stage, the lack of training was really kicking in. I hadn’t done any work at all with a sustained elevated heart rate, so I didn’t push at this stage. Around the pier, the course cut back onto the gravel coastal walking path for the final push to the line. I did manage to pull out a last-minute change of pace to pass one person in the finish chute. Is that a mean move? I mean, it’s not like we were at the pointy end of the proceedings. I finished in 47:45, which was 47 out of 124 competitors in my category. There must have been a lot of people walking! Overall, I was happy with that, and I know what needs to happen before my 10K in February.

Afterwards, I was very hot and sweaty, G wanted to know if I’d poured water on myself, so once we got to the car, I popped over to the beach for a swim while G ordered some drinks. Then we headed back to the house for breakfast, which included some fabulous raspberry and white chocolate muffins made by our friend. We put on the washing, then played some rounds of Bananagrams. (highly recommended as an easily transportable game). After a few rounds, my brain was shutting down, so I took myself off to bed for a nap and didn’t surface for an hour and fifteen minutes. By then, everyone except G, who was working, had gone down to the beach. Except for Lenny, who looked like this:

G drove me down to the beach, and I found the cabana with lemons in the sea of cabanas covering the beach. The sun was coming in and out of the clouds, but I had a lovely swim, spent a short time lying in the sun, and then read my book in the shade of the cabana. I spent a good few hours down there before we packed up and headed home for some more Bananagrams, accompanied by more cheese and wine. Dinner was at the Lorne Bowls Club, which was good. The food was better than what you’d typically expect at a club.

Saturday dawned hot and sunny. G and another friend headed out super early to do long runs while the rest of us headed to the beach a bit later. Two of our friends were doing the Pier to Pub swim and needed to pick up their gear, and I planned to do a short, easy run. Our first job was to put up the cabana and controversially reserve our spot on the beach. Even our Prime Minister Albo has weighed in on the cabana question. I’m going to justify our actions with the fact that we did use the cabana in the first hour or so as we variously finished runs, gear pickup and coffee runs. We left it there while we went back to the house to have breakfast and showers and then occupied the spot from 11:00 onwards. Anyway for my run I went a short way in both directions. The coastal scenery was stunning and the town was pumping as everyone got ready for the swim.

The Pier to Pub is one of the largest open water swims in the world. There were over 7000 entrants this year. Waves of swimmers began at 11:00am leaving between 5 and twenty minutes apart until 3:00pm. One of our friends swam at 12:30 pm and the second at 12:30 pm. It’s a 1.2km swim starting in deep water near the pier and ending in beach in front of the surf club. We took our lunch down to the beach and spent most of the day down there. I had another swim and G and I also met some friends from church for a drink at the bar next to the beach. Late in the afternoon we packed up and went back to the house for BBQ dinner.

Sunday morning we got up and left just before 10 am. Luckily because just after we left there was an accident on the GOR and the traffic didn’t move for an hour. We didn’t beat the massive thunderstorm though, which hit us between Torquay and Ocean Grove. We were lucky the stormy weather was Sunday and not Saturday.