Full circuit again:
Water tower: six mins
Mt Nebo top clearing: 14 mins
Four ways gate: 18 mins
Waterboard gate: 23 mins
Rough trail start: 29 mins
Steep drop: 39 mins
Coal mine: 49 mins
Robertson lookout: 54 mins
Byarong park: 1 hour 16 mins (?)
Finish: 1 hour 28 mins
An obvious criticism: I am reducing the experience of running through the escarpment to an athletic event – a sad after-image of the conditions of mechanised labour. Lacking any capacity to imagine a genuine alternative, I render my space of freedom in terms of the very constraints that, at another level, lend the activity meaning. If I argue that here the conditions of time are my own, that I set them myself, then it becomes even more plainly evident how effectively I have interiorised the larger social system – how unfree and compromised my running actually is.
Without wishing to deny this criticism altogether, it naively imagines the possibility of a purely oppositional practice – one that does not in any way partake of given social forms. The subjection to clock time here lends the activity a specific formal coherence. It is a matter of pursuing and pushing back limits. Last week, when I’d finished some ten minutes slower, I doubted that I’d ever complete the run in under and hour and a half. I was very surprised when I managed to do it this week. The strange play between physical places and temporal targets. The sense of movement itself (with all its complexities of perceived effort, pace and recovery) and the sense of clock-time passing. And then the relation to the escarpment, which no amount of slowness of movement, no suspension of clock time, can ever adequately represent. It is a real space. It is a dream space. May as well pass through it quickly as slowly. There are correspondences to be discovered at any pace – in terms of any experiential conceit.