"You went right to the top?" she asked in her just-as-well-I'm-the-primary-caregiver voice.
Yes we had. Right to the top, where a drinking fountain flows with the sweetest water known to runners.
Then we had a game of hide and seek in the stump-studded section atop the street, before running home (almost all the way without stopping).
It had been more than a run, it was an adventure, complete with dark skies and street lighting, flashlights and a running commentary.
We had left home, about 700m from the bottom of Baldwin St, with the intention of stepping up our cross-country training programme. The three of us that is, Hamish (10), Finn (8) and Tom (43).
Until that point we had limited ourselves to laps of Chingford Park, but it is getting dark earlier now, so by the time I get home from work, navigating the Chingford bush gets a bit, well, creepy.
Not that we haven't given it a crack, after dark, running the pitch black paths behind the stables, torches in hand, single file. And we didn't all freak out. The dark has never much bothered Finn.
All this physical activity began before Easter - when daylight still extended past teatime - after Hamish's requests to join me in my jogging became a little more insistent.
Up until that point, I had knocked him back, concerned that taking him out pounding the streets might not be the best thing for his young bones.
But he's in his final year of primary school this year. He'll get one last crack at the cross-country, and would like to go one better than 2009 - when he finished second in his class.
So we pulled on our jogging shoes together and set off, the three of us. Finn (8), was not about to stay behind.
The shoes I pulled on were the same bargain-basement no-brand joggers I have been massaging Dunedin's streets with these past couple of years.
The brands on their shoes will be much more familiar to athletes, so I figure the boys' bones have some protection.
Anyway, we began with laps around Chingford Park. It's close and once around seemed a good sort of distance. Around the football field, over the bridge, up and around the gravelled loop-track behind the stables, around the archery field in front of the stables and back to the main gate.
We don't tend to run across the archery field when the archers are there. But only because my wife would tell us off. Otherwise ...
Sometimes we add a football and bang it through the six goals on the Chingford Park football field as a finale.
Hamish always shoots ahead. There are several benefits to this. Firstly, it means he comes first. He's been able to tell us precisely how much he's come first by on several occasions by counting the seconds that elapse until Finn and I cross the finish line. The second benefit is that he can slow down, right down, on the steep bits without his dad hollering at him.
Finn runs with me. There's no-one in the world that can run and talk at the same time as well as Finn. The term running commentary was coined for him. It's amazing what you learn.
I recently suggested we should have a name for our running club, something like the Dragon Winged Warrior Ninja Dick Quax Fan Club. Finn said we weren't a club. There was only the three of us. But he conceded that Dick Quax was pretty funny.
It seems to me that Hamish and Finn's fitness picked up very quickly. Within a couple of weeks we seemed to be getting around the park more quickly, I was working harder to stay on the pace.
Most recently, we've added a jog to-and-around the North East Valley Normal School grounds, which must come to about 2km all up. We do it without stopping and include an improvised tour of the school's most interesting geography.
On the way, there and back, any and all obstacles are mounted or hurdled - low walls, electricity junction boxes, park benches. It's a steeple chase and the Grand National.
We're running fools, we live to run, we race our shadows and leave imagined rivals gasping. Before the year's out we'll have run to Haast, or maybe Fox Glacier. Maybe we'll go to Fox Glacier and run up that too.
We've conquered Baldwin St after all.
Maybe I'll enrol the boys with a proper harrier club.
But probably not. I want them to keep running with me.