trailtom

Our Trailwalker | 100 km | team of 4 | 27 hr 20 min

One of the reasons for starting this blog was to write about my team‘s progress in training for Oxfam Trailwalker‘s debut in Brisbane. on 17 June, 2011, we did it!

19 June, 2011

A little over 24 hours after finishing Trailwalker, and the memories of pain are beginning to fade. My entire body aches because of it, but I’m already contemplating the next big challenge. How the mind works, I will never know, because it was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Twenty-seven hours of putting one foot in front of the other, uphill, downhill, crossing creeks, along the flat. Doesn’t look that hard in words, does it?

But doing it, actually doing it, was hard. Apparently at 70 km I turned around and said ‘what we are doing is not normal’. I don’t really remember saying it, but I guess it’s true.

An alarming start time

I won’t talk here about the three hours of sleep we had the night before, or the 3 am alarm of the morning of the event. I won’t talk about the long and winding bus journey to the summit of Mt Glorious at 5.30 am. And I won’t talk about every painstaking step, or every niggling ache. But I will mention a couple of my personal highlights and stand-out moments.

Southeast Queensland put on a spectacular show, with a perfect, clear winter’s morning. The sun rose and broke the chill.. We drank coffee and ate pastry squares, and then it was time to go – the moment we’d been waiting for for about nine months.

We started off, walked down the bitumen, and entered the trails, descending into the wonderful rainforest section of Brisbane Forest Park. A couple of teams ran off into the distance and we set out to enjoy our leisurely 100 km.

A perfect day for walking

After some great trails, and breathtaking views over the forest, Checkpoint 1 came sooner than we expected – we checked out about an hour ahead of schedule. Then followed a big descent, and a similar ascent, back up to Checkpoint 2 where I had the best peanut butter and Vegemite sandwiches I’d ever tasted! Everyone’s feet were holding up well, though the thought of another 72.5 km was pretty daunting. But, the profile didn’t look too bad (so long as you didn’t look too hard!), and we set off again.

The sun shone enough to warm, but not enough to burn. The green forest stretched out for miles in every direction, the sound of bellbirds echoed through the trees, and we couldn’t imagine a more wonderful time to do the walk.

We thought it would be flat as we approached Lake Manchester. A walk around a lake – I mean why wouldn’t it be flat? Anyway, it wasn’t. The hills looked smaller on the map. I think because the others around looked so big!

Support-crew heroes

And then came the wondrous Checkpoint 3 at Lake Manchester, and the first support-crew stop, where Dez’s wife, Andria, and son Nicholas, met us with food, drinks, and a welcome smile. We ate a hearty meal of curry, quinoa, cake and flapjack, all washed down with hot tea. We had blisters lanced and feet patched up by the amazing volunteers at the first aid tent. We watched the sun set, and we set out once more, this time into the night and onto the hardest section of the trail.

Moonlight shadow

There are huge sections of the course that I cannot remember. What I do remember, and what will stick in my head forever, is walking up what seemed like one of the longest hills I’ve ever encountered, and looking up at the moon and singing ‘moonlight shadow’ at the top of my voice. The rest of my team had powered on ahead. I know my limits, and I knew if I pushed on and tried to keep up I’d burn myself out too early. So I settled into my rhythm, I marvelled at the beauty of the wind bending the trees over, the moon shining down on me, and sang my little heart out. And do you know what? It worked, and I made it. So I owe Mr Mike Oldfield a debt of gratitude for getting me through that section.

While slogging up yet another hill in the penultimate section, I considered whether I’d make it. I had to stop and ask myself if I could. A couple of times I found myself having to sit down – I had to tell my team mates to go on and I’d catch them up. I just couldn’t keep going, and was starting to wonder whether I could see a way to the finish. But I got up again, and I walked. And then I thought about why we were doing it. Why we were putting ourselves through such a gruelling challenge.

I took my thoughts back to the people who walk for miles each day to fetch water. The others who have to leave their homes and walk for days on end to seek refuge in other lands. And I just got on with it. I put one foot in front of the other one, thankful that I was still doing this out of choice.

Another hero

Later on that night we were very fortunate to have two more supported stops by crew-extrodinaire, Jim Heaslop, who’d not only brought sleeping bags and hot water bottles, salty treats, flapjacks, and energy gels, but also a plunger and real coffee. I have never tasted food and coffee so good, and I’ve never been so pleased to see a chair in my life as I was at Checkpoint 5.

As the sun rose on another day we struggled up and down yet more hills, and met Jim again for a breakfast stop at Checkpoint 6. The hardest thing in the world was to get out of the chair and back onto the trails. We were all getting a little delirious at this stage, and just so desperately wanted to finish. Since making up time earlier in the night, we were now about 2.5 hr behind our target time due to the ferocity of the hills at the back of Enogerra Reservoir, and crossing Mt Cootha.

The final trek

The final trek across Mt Cootha to the finish line was crazy, and we questioned, several times, why they had to make it so hard – why they had put so many steep climbs between 92 and 100 km. Our legs were dead, our morale was fading. But there was no way on earth that anyone considered stopping at this stage. So we kept going exactly as we had started off, putting one foot in front of the other.

We descended Mt Cootha, linked arms, and proudly crossed the finish line – together. We were slightly over our target time of 24 hr, but then we hadn’t expected the trails to be so hard. But we finished together, and at time of writing have smashed our $3000 fundraising target.

It seems incredible – we actually did it! After nine months of planning, and quite a few months of training, we’re at the point that we’ve dreamed of for so long: sitting on the couch drinking tea, and knowing we’re allowed a break for a few days to recover.

Thank you

Many amazing people make Oxfam Trailwalker work.

We’d like to say thank you to all of the wonderful Trailwalker team and volunteers who sat out in the freezing cold all night to make sure the walk went ahead. We couldn’t have done it without our support crews either, they really do make the difference between finishing or not. So thanks to Jim, Andria and Nicholas – you were wonderful, and we’ve never been so glad to see people in our lives!

And last, and by no means least, thank you to all of our sponsors and donors – you got us through this too: knowing that we have raised several thousand dollars to help some of the world’s poorest people makes this more worthwhile than anything else.

You can read the latest here. The Melbourne and Sydney events have raised millions of dollars over the years for my favourite charity, Oxfam Australia, whose aim is ‘A just world without poverty’. Need we say more?

Donate to our team

We raised $3500 for Oxfam’s work here in Australia and overseas. If you’ve stumbled on these pages, and feel like donating to Oxfam because we suffered the 100kms, then please visit our team page and give generously!