Do not speak unless it improves on silence. – Buddha
I opened our Trailwalker team blog with that quote as it
surely resonated with a couple of my team mates. Whereas I may like to endlessly
chatter along miles and miles of ceaseless trails I do believe my team mates
prefer a bit of the “silence”. How we’re going to walk 100kms with a nice
balance between the banter and the sounds of the environment is going to be one
of the great challenges that face us as we head off at 8.30am on 19 April this
year.
The team interaction of walking with the same three people
(yourself and three others) who are tired, grumpy, smelly and hungry would test
the most solid of any relationship. The check in points where we’ll meet the
smiling faces of our support crew will break it up a little more than the
training walks, where we’ve hit the trails with just ourselves and over stacked
backpacks. Last Friday we headed on
another long training walk, intending to walk from Olinda to the end of the
course in Wesburn (according to the guide book 55kms or so). You can’t accurately gauge how far your
training walk will be as there will certainly be a few times where you get
lost, considering you’re walking through the night with head lamps your only
source of light, your Garmin only has enough power for endurance events that
last 7 hours or so, and the staggering that kicks in after 50kms or so adds a
bit of distance to your travels.
All up we ended walking about 57.2kms and didn’t even get to
do the final 6.7km section, which we cut out as our support crew member who was
meeting us to take us back to the start point, or home to warm showers and
crisp sheets, needed to be back in Melbourne at a certain time and pushing out
the last tough section was going to cut it a bit fine. We ended up re-joining
the Warburton Trail at the Warburton Golf Course and walking back to Millgrove,
the third side of the triangle as we’d gone through Millgrove a few hours
earlier before heading up into the mountains for a final 8+ kilometres of pain
as you push through elevation gain on bitumen roads before joining up with the Aqueduct
Trail in the Yarra Ranges National Park.
Now this blog isn’t just about keeping you up to date with
training insanities it also serves as a reminder that anybody who wants to put
their mind to it can achieve or perform quite extraordinary things. I’m not
putting tickets on myself by putting myself in a category to help people do
great things, but I would like to be able to motivate anybody who believes they
can’t do something, to at least stop and dwell and ask themselves “why not?”
Not that long ago I struggled to run 5kms without needing a break, and within a
year or so I’ve finished a marathon and am now training for another as well as
training and finalising plans to do a 100km non-stop walk, with three amazing
people who are also on that same journey, all to assist people who are less fortunate
than ourselves as well as learning quite a bit about ourselves along the way.
There is no way a team based endurance event could be completed without a solid
team interaction, each team member would all go through doubts, have periods of
pain, have times where they need self-reflection (where the words of others are
not welcome) and without the support of each other the whole event could not be
completed. This event is not just about your body’s ability to finish 100kms it
is also about your mind’s ability to handle 24 hours of constant movement and
team interaction. This is where our support crew will be angels from above,
they’ll know to feed us, even if we don’t want it, they’ll know to encourage
us, when we are feeling like we can’t go on, they’ll know to pamper us with
strange food requests or long black coffees at 4am, and most of all they’ll be
the glue that holds our team together when we get to the stage of falling
apart.
The image below is a little hard to make out but it is of the hill that awaits you once you've completed 93kms - you have to have a final push over that - to give you some perspective the light in the middle is a street light so this ain't no little hill. I can tell you that when we saw this at 6.30am on Saturday (as the sun was about to rise) we were a little bit concerned, I don't know about the others but if I'd had any fluids left in my body I may well have cried.
At this stage we’ve managed to raise $3,863 for Oxfam
through our events, sales and generous donations. And with one more event to
come and some memorabilia to sell we could well push the $5k funds raised,
which is a massive effort – works out as $50 per kilometre or $12.50 each per
km or about 1 cent per step we each take. Not that I’ll be counting them (not
out loud that is – that would certainly drive my team mates bananas).
Other training plans are centered on a marathon plan for
late May (which I am yet to commit to) and includes running the Geelong Half
Marathon on 7 April with a few fellow runners from Albert Melbourne parkrun. So
besides the insanity of 57km all night walks I’ve been putting in a number of
7km, training runs and the weekend before last put in a 17.7km training effort.
As you may know the weather in Melbourne went through a heat wave and that
threw running training plans into chaos with it being too hot to run at night
(35 degrees Celsius or so) and then you’d be way too tired to run in the
mornings after a restless night’s sleep. Things have now returned to normal,
for the time being, so the training plan will return to normal also, with an
average of 40kms+ of training kicking in. Surely that will help me shed those last
few kilos, you know the ones, the ones that I’ve been wondering why they won’t
budge?
