One of my goals for 2024 was to run races and places that I hadn’t run before.

When Run Tarra Bulga popped up, a new race for 2024, standing on the legacy of the now folded Duncan’s Run in the same region, I added it to the list.

At a 3 hour drive from my home and 2 hour plus drive from Melbourne, it was a little too far for the morning travel to race start at 7am. My biggest gripe about running races is the unsocial start time. Why can’t races start at 9 or even 10? But I digress….

Run Tarra Bulga is located in the tiny town of Balook in the Tarra Bulga National Park. It’s about a 30 minute drive south of Traralgon and 2 hour, 15 minute drive from the Melbourne CBD. There is no public transport options to race start.

The event has four race options that all start from the race village at Balook.

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There were food vans at the hub, race check in tents and a few portaloos. The organisers made the point of promoting being a Trail Sisters Approved event and said they had a special tent for ladies to get changed, more on this later.

I decided to stay in Traralgon overnight and drive to race start in the morning. I collected my bib and had my special snake bandage checked.

The race director requested women head to the front of the starting corral in accordance with their Trail Sisters affiliation but no one wanted to go! Instead the start line looked like a guard of honour, with men in single file up against one side of the chute and women in single file on the other side. It was bizarre, like they had been told to social distance from each other.

The race kicked off on time and we headed off into some stunning green forest.

It was a little sloshy but really flowy and mostly downhill which was super nice.

You really had to concentrate so you didn’t trip or collect all the bark on the trail.

The first 10k or so was mostly downhill.

And then it went straight up.

I regretted not bringing my poles, not because of how sleep the climbs were, the second and third climbs were roads, but because of how slippery it was.

Slippery, wet, peanut butter mud. The kind of mud that cakes like 90’s platforms on the bottom of your shoes and offers little comfort in your ability to actually land each step.

It took me a while to realize it was actually a lot more stable to move quickly and even try to run on this stuff, kinda of like soft sand. There is less chance of your foot sliding out on your if it’s not touching the ground for so long.

Having treated this race as a training run, so no taper and basically a long run with course markings, I wasn’t too stressed about my pace or times, only that I kept moving forward and kept putting in some sort of moderate effort.

I was really tired at the start. I’d had a really busy few weeks at work with lots of travel in the car, so I wasn’t at all surprised when I felt sluggish and lead leggered at the start. I look so tired and puffy in the pre- race photos!

But I pretty much ran by myself for the entire race. It was nice when the front of the 25k race came passed, although watching them run up the mud while I would have been quicker sitting on my bum and sliding was slightly humbling.

I think the one person I actually spoke to I sent the wrong way and he ended up doing at least an extra 10k than he was meant to! Sorry dude, the map was an actual map and I wasn’t the best at using it!

I saw him coming back after he realised he went the wrong way. He didn’t seem too upset but I still felt very very bad.

I also felt kinda bad physically. I spent quite a while busting for the loo and by the human smells I noted a few times out on the trails, I wasn’t the only one who would have appreciated portaloos at the aid stations. No point advertising period products at aid stations if there is no actual toilet. Just sayin! So yeah, after a quick bush wee at around 25k, I was back in the game.

The climb up to Mt Tassie was actually not too bad, pity there was no views to be had.

When I die I’ll have a cool chair at the top of a cool climb though please! RIP to Haydn.

After that it was back to the start, once you go back up the mudslide!

I did have a thought while going back up the road that maybe there was no loo’s because they might have got bogged getting them in.

Once you get to the top, it was a fun trip on the Fern Gully track to the finish.

When I started I thought, considering the hills, I’d be pretty with a 6 hour finish but was planned for an all day affair.

Finished in 6:01:41* If I had known my Garmin would read 2km short I would have tried a bit harder for that sub 6, but I thought I still had two km to go!

Solid day out on the trails. Managed to not fall on my face, only attracted the attention of two vampire worms (leeches!) and ticked the box of my long run for the week.

Special thanks to Megs and Ben for sticking around for my slow and muddy butt to finish and being brave enough to have a photo with me dressed all in none trail running friendly colours!

Now as a side note, while putting together this recap and uploading the map I had a closer look at my Strava map and realised that I may have also gone the wrong way. At the time, I wasn’t 100%, I could see the markers a few metres down the road and just figured a marker had got lost or something. I took out the map again but couldn’t work out how to work out where I was.

I think I cut like 1-1.5km off the course! I haven’t actually done this and not noticed at the time since Maroondah Dam 2016 but I felt better about it since everyone stuffed it up!

Of course I emailed the race directors to confess. It doesn’t matter in the scheme of things, I was never going to win anything but it’s the principle of the thing. I feel terrible about it. I basically cheated. I’d rather be listed as a DNF than be ahead of people on the results list that actually did the proper course.

There is a lesson in every race. I’m so glad I learnt this one at an event I was only doing as a training run and not my A race of the year, but I can take comfort in the fact that usually when I’m lost I know I’m lost and back track. I honestly didn’t think I was wrong, I thought it was a lack of markers.

Moral of the story for me is to use the maps you know how to use, don’t just go with what the race recommends.

And this my friends is why I’d never remotely try to get into Barkley!