It has been a tough year for those completing their HSC, so one Wagga father decided he wanted to do something special for his daughter, so she knew how proud he was.
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Lily Clark sat her final exam in Chemistry on Monday at Kildare College, and at the same time she was flicking open the booklet, her dad set off on a 12-kilometre run.
But it was not just any form of exercise. Andrew Clark had spent two hours planning out a route that would show up in his GPS as a heartfelt message - "well done Lily".
"I have seen how hard she has been working, and you see how much effort they have put in, and towards the end, they get so exhausted," he said.
"I was thinking of a nice way to cheer her up. She had a huge smile when she saw it."
Mr Clark said the HSC is a tough year at any time, but a pandemic increased the stress, adding that Year 12 students have done an "amazing" job to get through it all.
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"The 'n' in 'done' is a bit wider than it should be because I missed Biroomba Lane, and I was worried that the horizontal mid-line in the 'e' of 'done' wouldn't work as I had to cut through the South Town Walk arcade," Mr Clark said.
"I tried to run a love heart on the top of the 'i' in 'Lily', but for some reason, the GPS did not pause properly. This meant the 'L' and dot on the 'i' joined together.
"This was my biggest mistake, and I thought about starting again, but two seconds later decided not to."
The run took about an hour and 10 minutes, and Mr Clark said the final result was helped by the fact there "weren't any swooping magpies or chasing dogs".
He first had the idea to do this when Lily, who also studied art, showed him a piece of artwork that used a GPS tracker to sketch the artist Frida Kahlo.
Mr Clark joked that he was concerned he has created pressure to repeat this for his other two children.
"The problem is that their names, Edward and Maggie, are much longer and full of more geometrically challenging letters than Lily," he said.
"Also, my legs will be a few years older, but luckily, and similar to all writing, the final message doesn't depend on how fast you write it."
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