Running Wild

[2010]

It’s 4 in the morning, and Sydney is sleeping. Dark and odourless bakeries sit with gates tightly locked, patiently waiting for the sun to bring its hot cross buns to life. Taxis cruise around the block, hoping for an early morning traveller or a late night homeward-bounder. The only sound in the city is the steady ticking of the little green man, faithfully giving invisible pedestrians permission to cross the deserted road.

But the little green man is not alone in the early morning fog. If he listened, his little green ears might pick up on the sound of footsteps in the distance. Gradually, the footsteps come closer and closer, until the little green man realises that they aren’t really footsteps at all. Steady, rhythmic and relentless, the sound fast approaching is the sound of running. This is the sound of Matt Thorpe.

Matt, with no i-pod blaring neither latest hip-hop hits nor heavy metal 80s classics, is the epitome of focus. All that he hears is the sound of his feet on the pavement, and he pays no attention to the little green man. Though slightly hurt, the green guy grudgingly grants Matt permission to cross.

While lacking earphones, Matt is not empty-handed. He carries on his back a tent, a sleeping bag, a change of clothes, aspirin, bandages, food and water—all in a backpack weighing around 15 kilos.

One mile down; 49 to go, he thinks. He’s glad that he decided to wear his lucky socks today, a thick pair with silver lining woven around the edges. Then again, one might need a little more than just luck to run from Randwick to the Blue Mountains, a distance almost twice the length of a full marathon.

The six-foot-three 22-year old runs on. He’d never competed in a race before, never participated in a marathon, and had never received any instruction on long distance running. Yet to Matt, the Blue Mountains challenge was no big deal. In fact, he’d only had the idea a few days before.

“I’d been meaning to get to the Blue Mountains for a while,” he says, “and I felt like taking on a new challenge. I thought that combining the two might be nice, so I just…did it.”

But just doing it wasn’t as easy as Matt makes it out to be. He’s only been running seriously for about eighteen months, and the novice runner still has a lot to learn. “My ankles were hurting because I was running in the wrong shoes,” he admits.

Dr. Vicki Anton-Athens, a podiatrist with over twenty years of experience, stresses that wearing the right shoes is the most important part of running. “Not only do they help to prevent injuries, but a good pair of shoes will help to create a much more efficient pace,” she says. An effective running shoe should also absorb shock, control motion and be flexible as well as sturdy.

It’s not a matter to be taken lightly, either. A recent survey shows that the typical sports podiatrist recommends that a patient purchase a new pair of athletic shoes between 10 and 50 times per year. Matt was recently one of those patients. His worst injury to date, Iliotibial Band Syndrome (IBS) was the result of running in bad shoes; it kept him from running for half a year. “It absolutely kills,” he says. “I never want to go through that experience ever again.”

A native of Preston, England, Matt has been in Australia for almost five months. He holds a mathematics degree from the University of Warwick, and is working on a masters of mathematics at the University of New South Wales. Someday he hopes to be a software engineer, and currently works for UNSW as a mathematical analyst and tutor, writing questions and solutions for students.

As he runs towards the mountains, Matt thinks. “I daydream,” he confesses, “and nothing else is in my head except for my running.” For him, the sport is a personal activity, and while his trek from Randwick to the Blue Mountains is well beyond what many marathon runners dream of accomplishing, he says that marathons just aren’t for him.

“I would feel boxed in,” he says. “There’d be too many people, I’m not that quick and it just doesn’t appeal to me.”

For Matt, timing is nothing and finishing is everything. He’s not bothered one bit about how long it takes him to finish a run, or how many people get to the end before he does; all that matters to him is finishing. He never even thought of timing his run to the Blue Mountains, and rarely times any of his runs at all.

En route to the mountains, Matt frequently pauses to rehydrate. He stops just once, however, about twenty miles from the mountains. Between the 30 and 35-mile marks, he says, was when the going really got tough. “I never thought I wouldn’t finish it,” he says, “because if you think like that—you won’t. I just had to plough through.”

Shockingly, Matt did very little preparation for this run. In fact, when I asked him what he had been doing to train for this run, he informed me that this run was preparation for another run. He plans to make a 100-mile run by December, but hasn’t quite mapped out where exactly it will be. One hundred miles from Sydney would land him in Muswellbrook the north, Bathurst to the west and Berrara to the south. As soon as he finishes his exams for the term, he says, he’ll start running every day.

Matt’s longest run to date is a 58-mile run, which he accomplished in Australia just a few weeks before his Blue Mountains trip. He created a path around the city and to the north, but never knows exactly where he’ll end up before he sets out. “I just run,” he says, “and Google Earth will tell me later how far I’ve gone.”

When he finally arrived at the Blue Mountains, Matt was disappointed to find that the path he had intended to follow was closed. By then, however, there was so much strain on his ankles that he decided to call it a day. Actually, Matt’s journey did take him almost half of an entire day; he arrived at the Blue Mountains around 3 pm, 11 hours after he took off from Randwick.

But Matt says that he didn’t achieve what he said out to do. “I wanted to run there, spend three or four days looking around, run 25 miles each day in the mountains, then run back,” he says.

Although the path he sought was closed, Matt says that he still had an enjoyable trip. After stretching and finding a campsite, he pitched his tent, had a beer and a pizza, and called it a night. “That beer was one of the most refreshing I’ve ever had,” he laughs. “After a run like that, you can actually feel it after just one.” After ten hours of sleep, Matt woke up refreshed and ready for more; he ran an additional fifteen miles to Penrith, where he caught a bus and a train back to the city.

When asked if he uses running as a way to cope with stress, Matt looked at me with surprise. “Well, I don’t get stressed very much,” he says, “but maybe that’s because I run so much!”