By Phil Jarratt
The crowds of early morning gawkers, walkers and joggers heading up the Park Road walkway to take advantage of a break in the clouds barely seem to notice the lanky figure in oversized runners pounding down the track towards them.
Maybe there’s a slight flicker of recognition as they note the wisps of thinning grey hair and the ever-twinkling blue eyes, but this could be any fit senior doing his dawn thing. Except that this is Bob Ansett, now 87, and over the past 25 years or so, he’s pounded out more than 9000 kilometres over this same challenging track through Noosa National Park, seven kilometres from his front gate at Sunshine Beach to the First Point corner of Main Beach, six days a week. Even God rested on the seventh day. Bob plays golf.
And the strenuous daily regime isn’t over when he hits Main Beach. He explains: “Then I do 20 push-ups, 40 sit-ups and then another 20 push-ups, followed by some stretching, and then I go for a swim. I used to swim the length of the beach but I’ve cut that back a bit as a concession to age.”
The reward for all this effort is a daily session of “coffee and nonsense” at a corner table at Caf¨¦ Le Monde, known locally as the “Table of Knowledge” because of the deal-makers and powerbrokers who regularly attended. “It’s diminished somewhat, we’ve lost a few, but the nonsense continues,” says Bob.
Not that the conversation is always nonsense. Many people played key roles in the heroic five-year struggle to reinstate Noosa’s independent shire council, but Bob Ansett was its undoubted figurehead, and many of the campaign strategies were thrashed out at the Table of Knowledge, or upstairs at Berardo’s restaurant.
As a regular early morning habitue of First Point, I’ve watched Bob running, swimming, stretching and sipping coffee, and always meant to ask him how he gets home. Surely he couldn’t run seven kilometres back! “Well,” he says, “getting home is a massive logistical movement. We (Bob and wife Josie) come over at night with two cars and leave one parked up the street here. Then I drive that car home after I’ve enjoyed my coffee and nonsense.”
Josie used to do the morning run too, but now she is tasked with walking the ageing Irish setter. Still, the Ansetts are (or were before Covid) inveterate travellers, and if they’re in New York, they greet the day with a run together through Central Park. In Tokyo it’s a circuit around the Emperor’s Palace.
Bob’s obsession with fitness predates his high-flying days as founder of Budget Rent A Car – in fact it goes all the way back to his US Army service in Japan and football scholarship to the University of Utah in the 1950s – but it was his Budget team management that provoked his senior regimes, starting with team-building and sponsoring fun runs around Melbourne, and leading to him running his first marathon just after turning 50.
When the Ansetts came to live permanently in their Noosa home, he discovered the Noosa National Park trails, including the notorious Tanglewood Track. He says: “Parts of the track are quite rough and I have come to grief on a few occasions. I try to mix it up a bit, and take the Tanglewood which can be dangerous. There are boulders on it, and even though I know it very well, you can make a slight misstep and go over. I had to have a hip replacement 10 years ago after a fall there.”
A recent melanoma removal and skin graft kept Bob off the trail for a short while, but he’s well and truly back, even through heavy rain showers last week. He says: “I feel invigorated by starting the day this way, and when I can’t do it because I’m away somewhere, I feel much worse. I’ve found that this regime has an incredibly positive effect on my health. I very rarely get any kind of sickness and I just feel better, more energetic. I look forward to challenges that otherwise I doubt I’d have the audacity to think about at my age.”
Are you reading this, you couch potato oldies?
