There has been some surprising benefits of this COVID19 epidemic , one of which is Schlumberger asking all its employee’s,  i.e. me, to take 10 days off , furloughed, by the end of June. This translated to me as every Friday off for three months, which further translated as ‘Trail time‘ either alone or with the boys (many of which had been laid off and where now full time athletes or furloughed for a few weeks.) Another benefit was my daughter not really taking to her GoPro Silver7 and forgetting she had it, well truth be told she hadn’t, I had ! Winning… This has allowed me to take some rather amateur footage, I hope to get better, of some of these trail runs so you can experience life on the trails in WA.

Bells Rapids #1 with Rhys, Rob and Jeff.  Just over 24k and 2 two and a half hours. Great running conditions, 15c , 83% humidity (Thanks Strava). I’ve atatched a couple of videos of the run albeit there seems to be a lot of walking but in my defence the hills are bigger real time than shown on the video, promise.

Highlight of this run was spotting a carpet python on the way back, a good size one at that, if I’d known it wasn’t venomous it’d be in my garden right now chasing my daughters Guinea Pig.

For this post I’ll let the videos do the talking rather than me rambling on typing…..

Next we took on some of the trails around Lesmurdie Falls and the Kurong National Park. A beautiful park of Perth only 30-40 minutes drive.  We’ve had 4 or 5 runs there recently , using my furloughed days, and the odd weekend run thrown in for good measure.  I’ve attached various videos of those runs for your viewing pleasure. They  certainly serve to give you a feel for the beauty of the scenery,  if you can excuse the shoddy video work and the narrative, please take into account I’m normally ‘cream crackered’ as trail running is hard work.

The next four videos are from a run with Jon, Adam and Jeff.  Started out at around the 25k distance but soon morphed to nearer 30k, trail running has a funny way of doing that to you, unlike road running where you’re normally accurate to a kilometre or two, on the trail you can often be 10k or more out, an added bonus I suppose. (Once you finish!)

First video is the start of the run and we always start slow with some serious walking while we warm up to cruising speed. Always better to start slow and finish fast, albeit sometimes I think we are finished pretty fast, it’s all in the grammar.  In our defence, I seem to type that a lot on this post, this was a 30k run, well over 4 hours taking into account photos and video stops.

Next we have a downhill section so we can stretch the legs…albeit briefly.

Then some serious single trail..

before the Quad Cruncher !

I went back to this route alone, in the week,  as the boys were either not interested or working. I managed to add another couple of kilometres and got thoroughly soaked. Overall though it was a great day out and sometimes some solitude on the trails is just what you need, albeit I wouldn’t recommend too many of these type of runs, running is meant to be a sociable past time, apparently.  Again over four hours on the trail including stopping to take all the scenary in, taking photos and just stopping because I could and , towards the end, enjoyed it ! I also managed to get over 1,000m of vert on this run (Vertical elevation gain) , which translates to a hard run.

In between the Lesmurdie trail adventures I managed to grab some time on the Eagle trail which is another great part of the Perth hills, on the John Forrest National Park. Highlight of this run was Mike turning up with no water as we said it’d be 15k, turned out to be nearer 30k. (Remember what I said earlier about trails, always end up longer than planned!) Jon probably saved his life , sharing his water.

Finally a run a few weeks ago when Bart’s took us on a magical mystery tour around Lesmurdie Falls where we ended up in Kalamunda ! We did get back to the falls after 16k later !

Right that about sums up the last few weeks in isolation , well on the trails in isolation which is the same thing right? Please note at no point did we break any self isolation rules and always observed numbers with regard what was allowed at the time. We are very lucky , at the moment, to have avoided the nasty COVID19 virus and have nearly no cases left in WA and very few in Australia as a whole.

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