It is a Saturday afternoon. The afternoon heat is like a big band in full swing as we gather at one of the Albert Park boat-sheds. Under the sun, we stand, clad in sporting motley.
There are three kinds of people on this particular Saturday afternoon – those completely at ease with themselves, having done this sort of thing before, those a little apprehensive that today’s race is 10 kilometers long (a quarter marathon, after all) and last, but not least, those who don’t give a damn.
I like to think the SKAAC spirit sits in the last category, but I myself was more than a little jumpy at the thought of the vaguely daunting course, lying in wait ahead of me. Only vaguely daunting, mind you – I’m not a coward. Well … not when faced with the autumn greenery of Albert Park … conspicuously large animals with distressingly sharp teeth are a different matter entirely.
Even so, vaguely daunting is enough for me to turn to SKAAC treasurer Dino Imbriano, the closest available source of athletic wisdom – what’s his advice for getting through such an egregious distance? “Try to make sure you run your first kilometer … at your average,” he tells me. “If you go out too fast, then you tend to get slower.” It’s sound advice and, I think, fairly applicable to life on the whole. Yes – life is not unlike a 10km race. Sometimes it’s fun and fancy free, and sometimes you feel like someone just took to your rib-cage with a blunt shovel and there’s all sorts in between. You have to take every moment as it comes though, at the right sort of pace. Don’t try and rush through it, or else it’ll be over before it started. How’s that for some homespun philosophy?
But as the race gets underway and the wind burbles titanic past our heads, my mind is drawn to a different comparison. Ken Orchard, the pilot – for whom the race is named. Ken’s plane was shot down during WWII, something we are all reminded of before the race begins. As I run, I wonder how Ken felt as that plane fell toward the ground at what must have been dizzying speed. All that frantic energy let loose in those final moments … what does it have to do with the race? Of course, Ken was a member of the APS community, someone’s friend, someone’s family – his presence deserves commemoration. But there’s something more, and it’s to do, I think, with life again. By running those ten kilometers around the lake, we not only remember Ken and others like him, but we demonstrate that the way they lived their lives was not a pointless exercise. We take to that vaguely daunting course because we can, because we’ve been given the chance to feel the air in our lungs and the noise in our ears. We run this race to show that we’re living life and living it to the full. And isn’t that the SKC way?