By Len Johnson
As we travelled to Falls Creek for the forty-somethingth year in a row I had one of those existential-type moments. Had the journey up to Victoria’s Bogong High Plains become better than the destination.
Back in the day, that would not have even been a matter for consideration. Falls Creek was a place for high-class training, training that would set you up for the remainder of the Australian domestic season and – hopefully – an international marathon somewhere exotic like Fukuoka or Montreal.
My first High Plains visit was a weekend that turned into a long weekend – I phoned in a ‘sickie’ – so I could run the classic Fitzgerald’s Hut course on the Monday. From there it quickly morphed into an annual two-week training stint.
The Saturday morning run I did that first time was with Bill Scott. I didn’t start out to run with ‘Scottie’ but as the others did only 4km warming up for a session of 200s on the Langfords Gap aqueduct I found myself the only other runner with him. A short while later he said “Mate, I’m just going to pick it up for a bit.” We hit the turnaround point of what was reckoned to be an 11-mile run in 36 minutes, came back in 33. I’ve done that run many times since but never as fast again.
The next time Bill made an appearance at Falls was at the end of 1979. It was the turn of the Moscow 1980 Olympic year. Everybody was at Falls Creek. In those days – and since – I stayed with Chris Wardlaw. He’d organised a small flat for Scottie which Dave Fitzsimons was shoe-horned into when he rolled up unexpectedly.
“No worries,” said Chris. “Bill’s not coming until tomorrow.” But he turned up today, late in the evening, to find Dave sound asleep in his bed. Scottie magnanimously took the couch. Fortuitously, Fitzsimons left the next day telling a bemused Wardlaw, “Mate, this place is like the moon.”
It was, too. Rocky. Uninhabited, and little contact with the outside world. TV reception was problematic, and the papers arrived late in the day – or even the next day, if they arrived at all.
Deek was at Falls too, as were Dave Chettle and Gerard Barrett. Geoff Slattery and a photographer from The Age came up to do a story about the five Olympic marathon hopefuls all training together in the one location. A photo was taken of us all sitting on a large rock at a foggy Langfords Gap.
I stayed for four weeks that year with Wardlaw and another Glenhuntly teammate, Arthur Botterill. Soon we were pitched into a battle not just for places in the Olympic team but even to get a team away as the Australian government under PM Malcolm Fraser supported US president Jimmy Carter’s call for a boycott of the Moscow Games.
Then, I aspired to be a better runner. I’m still aspiring, but now it’s just to run. After 40 years pretty well free from any injury, much less a serious one, I’ve been laid low by a back condition. I can manage deep-water and altered gravity running, either on a treadmill or in chest-deep water.
But that’s about it. Which is why it sometimes feels better to drive up the mountain than to reach the destination. And lately, the drive itself has been part of the attraction. Though it was a case of leaving rather than coming up, we had to evacuate a few years back as bushfires threatened.
That time was all smoke and no fire, but another recent year it became clear only in the last few days before Christmas that the road would reopen following fires near Mt Beauty at the foot of the mountain. We had a contingency plan to go elsewhere but it never came to that.
Two years back there was the landslide which closed the road up from Mt Beauty. That was a formidable obstacle. Many of the groups who normally come up cancelled when the ‘word’ went round that ‘you can’t get to Falls’. The doomsayers had not heard of the back way up from the Omeo Highway. We took a scenic and circuitous route via the Murray Valley highway from Wodonga, followed the river valley through Mitta Mitta on the Omeo Highway and then up and over the High Plains to Falls. Simple, and only an hour or so longer than the direct route.
Last year we intended to follow the same picturesque route but abandoned that ambition when we encountered fierce storms along the first part. With similar storms threatening the whole region we decided the prudent plan would be to drive to arrive as soon as possible.
This time around it was a more pleasant interruption to the journey plan. A chance meeting with a couple of old running friends in Yarck, a small town in the upper Goulburn Valley, turned a brief coffee stop into a pleasant lunch.
It’s still the same when you arrive at Falls, the village magically appearing – unless fogged in – as you complete the last couple of kilometres up the twisting road.
And I’ve got to say that while not quite “into the mystic” walking on the Bogong High Plains is almost as good as running. Think we can go a few years more yet.
