I would like to clarify that between the last jogging-themed post and this, I have been doing completely un-sporty things like eating cheesecake and caramelised figs, so don't think I've turned healthy or anything of the sort.
Yesterday I began at Sydney Olympic Park and worked out a route to Parramatta train station. Turns out that avoiding Parramatta road and the M4 is hard even on foot. It's an extra 1.5km of jogging to avoid that hole.
Almost immediately, maybe 400m into my jog, I come across my first hurdle: that damn Easter Show. Although it's in its pack up stage, the thing is still taking up all of Australia Avenue.
In hindsight, I then should have turned left, not right.
To the right, the road turned into a building site very quickly. Just beyond, however, there looked to be grassy fields that I hoped I could just cross and get back on route pretty easily.
There was an annoying fence in the way with some equally irritating barbed wire. Total overkill, I thought.
For the next kilometre or so I pretty much just stared at my feet and tried not to wrench my ankle in some unidentifiable and completely inaccessible srcubland.
When I finally looked up, this is what I saw:
That's weird, right? And that photo is actually less surreal than at twilight when the sun is setting behind it and the orange and yellow panels are glowing...
When I jogged a bit further, I realised that the fences had probably-maybe been to stop people falling into the quarry.
I've since discovered that this old quarry is called the brickpit and many of the bricks that built Sydney in the 19th century would have come from here. When the Olympic Park was being built, developers discovered the Green Bell frog, which is apparently a big deal, so it couldn't be built on.
Then in 2006 a walkway, 18m high and 550m wide was built over the quarry.
I don't know why. To scare stray joggers presumably.
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