I walked slowly out of Langford Gap as Tamyka struggled with a bag malfunction. I was getting far too cold standing still, so I decided to walk very slowly and let her catch up to me. While we had been at Langford Gap, the very familiar walkers, Cassie and Lee, had overtaken us again. I think it was around this point that I decided it was very important that we beat them. With Tamyka back with me, I passed the time by discussing how we could not be beaten by walkers. Although Cassie and Lee were lovely, they were walking and we were meant to be running. My bad tummy, twisted ankle and ITBS were not going to cause me to be beaten by walkers, surely. Upon deciding this, we decided to refer to them as our new ‘arch nemeses’, a flashback to The Kokoda Challenge in 2009.
Unfortunately, from Langford Gap to Cope Hut, we weren’t doing too well at achieving our goal to beat the walkers. We again swapped positions with them several times. Every time we stopped they would power on past us, successful with their consistent pace. We would then pull ourselves together a bit later and run past them. Then the weather would call for us to add an extra layer of clothing or there was a need for a nature break, and we would stop and fall behind again. Although the first few kilometres from LG were quite runnable, we still didn’t move too fast due to Tamyka’s bad tummy and out constant breaks.
Not long after Cope Hut we crossed a road with our arch nemesis and then followed a new track not far from the pole line. Although the map indicated we should be right on the pole line, but we decided to take the new track because it was nicer and we could still see the poles as well as the lights from Cassie and Lee’s headlamps. The two tracks soon merged and we were just a little bit ahead of the walkers.
Eventually we reached the SEC hut and turned right to follow a smaller pole line. We could see a blue light flashing very far off in the distance and figured this could be Paul, the RD, at pole 333. The track was wet and the water was freezing, so it was not a nice feeling when my feet went in puddles. Despite wearing 5 layers including thermals, I was freezing cold. To make matters worse, this section was extremely foggy so we couldn’t see the poles. We would stand at each pole and pear into the fog with the light of our ay-ups and eventually locate the next pole. On a positive note though, the activity of identifying the location of each pole kept us awake. When that didn’t work, one of us would yell out “wake up!”
Eventually we reached that flashing blue light at Pole 333. We spoke to Paul who was inside his tiny hiking tent, hiding from the wind and cold. Tamyka stopped to change the batteries on her GPS and I just moved around to try and keep warm.
From Pole 333 we headed off to Tawonga Hut which was only another 2.5km. Matt had hiked in to meet Tamyka at the hut so she was pretty excited to be stopping there soon. Although I would have liked to go straight through without stopping as we were now on the home stretch, I knew the break would help Tam. We even managed to run a bit of the track here.
We sat inside the hut where it was quite warm and drank tea. I tried hard to stay awake. By this point I was well and truly doing battle with the sleep monsters. This is the first time this has happened to me in a race, as my heart rate is usually high enough to keep the sleepiness away. I shoved down a few gels that contained caffeine and drank some coke but not much was helping.
My sleepiness decreased a little bit when we got moving again, but Tamyka did have to yell out “Wake up!’ a fair bit. There was only 21km of the course left and I was excited that it would be over soon. I told myself it wasn’t too much longer I had to stay awake for, and there would be a warm bed at the end of it. In fact, I think the lure of a warm bed is the only thing that stopped me from curling up in my emergency bivvy on the side of the track and sleeping. I started to appreciate the sudden shock of cold when I ran through a puddle because it woke me up and also numbed the pain from the massive blister forming on the bottom of my foot.
My memory of this section is quite hazy, probably because I did it half asleep. I think this is the first race I have done where I actually had a full appreciation of the term ‘zombie runner’. I mostly remember being very cold and having to stop a fair bit. I think we passed Cassie and Lee fairly early on and actually managed to do a bit of running.
I remember being quite excited when we reached Bogong Jack Saddle because it was a big landmark and indicated it really wasn’t long to go. By this point the battery on my Garmin was dead, so this was the only indication I had of how much further we had to go. This landmark also indicated that we only had downhill to go.
We stumbled along through the dark, sometimes running, sometimes chatting to keep ourselves awake and pass the time and sometimes to ponder upon the question of how much of a lead we had on our arch nemesis. Tamyka was still struggling. To add to her misery, she banged her toes quite a few times on rocks when we were running. I tried to encourage her to run (so I could get to a warm shower and bed faster) but I also knew there wasn’t much point. Tam is a tough runner who will push herself as far as she can.
Finally we reached the road leading us back into Bogong Village. I think I was far too tired to even cheer at this point. We managed to run the last kilometre or so to the finish line. To top off such a bad race, there was nobody at the finish line, not even a race official! There was a clock though, telling us we had finished in 24hours and 47minutes.
I really wish I wasn’t disappointed by the result. Given everything that went wrong and the fact I decided to keep Tam company, I know I should be happy with only being 47minutes behind my goal time. Moreover, my goal a few months ago was just to finish under cutoff, which I think was about 34 hours. I sound like a brat whinging about it, but I trained really hard and I know I could have done better.
I have been over everything I did before the race and I don’t know why I got sick. I didn’t do anything different to normal and I ate the same food as everyone else. The night after the race I woke up with night sweats and I had blocked sinuses and a sore throat. This makes me think that I actually just got a bug, a very poorly timed bug.
I think I will do it again. Maybe I will do the 100mile next time. I’ll dress warmer and carry more gels rather than solid food. I won’t be worried about navigation next time, or the dark. I’ll just be worried about getting sick.
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