Running Into The Green

I have a decades long fascination with maps, topographic maps in particular. The spaces of green where there are no towns or buildings, just the words "forest" or "national park" written across them beckon like a set of Matryoshka dolls with secrets contained within secrets. If I explore one part of the map, there is always another segment, over a ridge, across a stream, into another valley where there is more exploring to do.

On run days, I look at the map, choose a location and head off into the green. Generally, I look for single track, although I will run old fire trails if no single track presents itself. But, I almost always find trails, and then I follow the trail, running for hours through the bush. Often the trail is what latter day runners would call "technical" meaning steep, loose, narrow, hard to run at speed, but I would actually call that normal. Life in the green is not a Disneyland side walk. The tracks are overgrown, rutted, draped in spider webs, slippery and wet or stony and dry.

Running around in the green, I have found quiet streams and small waterfalls, old mines, and big boulders, slabs of rock, and forests of tree ferns. I have heard koalas grunting in the trees and scared up big kangaroos and small wallabies. There are lizards and snakes, and once I even saw a sugar glider run downhill and fly off over a steep valley as I ran along a sharp ridgeline.

City dwellers have told me "there is no bush here in my neighbourhood" and I have shown them the corridors of green that link together and create long song lines of bushland that can be travelled by those willing to wander.

My store of maps are now criss-crossed with lines of trails I have run, different colours marking different days. Straight lines and loops, inter-linked figure of eights where I have run parts of one trail and then drifted off onto another new loop. My knowledge of the landscape grows ever more intimate as I recognise hills I have run up before, fire trails I have intersected, streams and waterfalls seen before but from different view points.

Today I ran single track from just south of Mogo down to Pollwombra Mountain closing another small gap in my knowledge of that landscape. I am pretty sure with another day or to of running I will have found a single track route all the way from Mogo to Moruya. It would be fun to push that north and run all the way to Nelligen - the map is intriguingly green all the way.