It started promisingly enough. Here's Rog and Bride with me on the 7.25am train from Hornsby, on the first day without rain in a week, a glorious sunny morning, and we're looking forward to a good day's walking. But downstairs, a crazy/drunken guy was hollerin' up a storm of evil cussings and rantings... almost like he knew where we were headed and what we were going to try and do. If only we could have understood his mad ravings...
Instead, we suffered mass cravings. Mass cravings for coffee, at this coffee shop in Brooklyn while we waited for Flick and Nick. Nick, who I shall refer to from henceforth as our Native Guide, because he is hairy and wild in a herbal kind of way, knows the local Hawkesbury bush very well, and seems to enjoy observing the silly things us Trailwalkers try to do on his favourite walking trails. Unfortunately, the coffee shop served Sydney's slowest coffees, putting us behind schedule, which we compounded by failing to find the trailhead for another 30mins. Native Nick and Flick went off to find what they thought had been a trail sign earlier. Bride went to ask for directions at the Police Station. Being real men, Rog and I couldn't ask for directions, so we jogged up and down short, steep little hills trying to find the beginnings of a track.
Steep though they were, those little hills were merely foothills. When the track was finally located, we learned the hard way why the local landscape is called "Hawkesbury Sandstone" - because over bazillions of years, the mighty Hawkesbury River has carved its way down through the rock many hundreds of metres to find its current level, and if you wish to walk in the Hawkesbury river valley, you must be prepared to ascend and descend those hundreds of metres again and again and again as you cross the many creeks and valleys that feed the river.
Once you get to the top of the first hill (or shall we say, "mountain"?) the panoramic views of the sun sparkling off the river far below and the rugged green valleys stretching all the way north to the horizon almost make you forget that you just sweated a litre of sports drink to get here and left your right lung part way back along the track.
There's a dam at the top of that first big hill. There were also a few "buggers", "sh*ts" and "where the funkarewes?" because the most obvious track just goes around the dam in a big loop. More time lost...
(left to right: Nick the Native Guide, Flick, Bride, Rog and Al)
From then on, well, it just went down, down, down, and up, up, up, and down, down, down again. We passed some sensible ladies in sensible shoes walking from Sydney to Newcastle, but not trying as we were to try and do much of it in a single day. We also spent some time with an annoyingly spry little Swiss physicist in his late '60s, training for a 300km bushwalk next month in the US. He had a lovely line in pessimistic, satirical one-liners, like one of Shakespeare's chorus characters, always ready to point out that we'd never make it to Hornsby alive, much less by nightfall. We couldn't shake him off, no matter how we tried. He was like a little Swiss Pepe Le Peu, minus the smell. Each time we'd take a short break, exhausted, at the top of the next towering ridgeline, his little balding head would come bobbing up the trail unbowed and almost as fresh as the first time we'd seen him.
"Oh yar, zey'll be uzing ze corpz-zniffing dorks to locate your botties at ze bottom off ze ravine, I've zeen it happen many times befor", he'd cheerfully predict as he kept bobbing off over the ridge and down the trail in front of us. By mid-afternoon, I was ready to raise another $20,000 from our generous sponsors to put out a contract on his little swiss-movement mechanism, let me tell you.
Just after I took this photo of Rog, Bride invented a new sport, provisionally called "Mossy Boulder Surfing". To play, you step onto a large mossy boulder, let both of your legs suddenly slip out from underneath you, and bang your hip, wrist and shoulder heavily as you land. I don't think it's going to make it as a demonstration sport in Beijing, let's put it this way, although the rest of us were very relieved Bride hadn't fractured anything, because carrying her back out of the precipitously steep gorge we were at the bottom of would have been no fun at all.
On a trail with so little across and such an abundance of up and down, it was a bad time for Flick, who has a limited capacity for the upness. If you want to improve yourself, first you need to discover your limit, and Flick hit hers several times on the steep climbs. She never lost her sense of humour though, promising to kill the next person who made a helpful suggestion to help her with the hill-climbing. You were joking, right Flick?
Watching the movies, you know Indiana Jones is really in trouble when his native guide deserts him. I don't know why the same thought didn't occur to us when Nick our native guide decided to wait for the next train at Mt Colah, but he did have a very sore knee, he said.
As did I by this point. According to the best medical minds my not insubstantial means can muster, my weak VMO was causing issues at the insertion point of my ITB. In layman's terms, it means I had a helluva pain in my right knee, although it mainly hurt only when going down hill, which was, well, a lot.
Eventually, Berowra Waters appeared over the top of yet another ridge, and it was only 400m of excruciating downhill scrambling to our lunch spot. At least it still wasn't raining.
We have this weird thing in our team where we do this silly "ohmigoshi'mfallingovertheedge" thing for the camera. We've all got our brave faces on, but between you and me, a few of us were seriously considering jumping off, to bring an end to all the climbing up and down.
From here, I didn't take a lot more photos until we hit Crosslands, because it was too hard to get people to smile convincingly anymore. We'd been slow to get going, had found the going tougher than we'd expected (much tougher, even, than the Trailwalker course proper), and now we were in a race with the setting winter sun to reach our destination.
As we pulled into the reedy meadows of Crosslands, we knew the sun had won the race, forcing us to end our training walk half-way up one more very, very steep hill leading out from Crosslands gorge towards Hornsby. As the crow flies, we were barely a few centimetres on the map from Ginger Meggs Park at Hornsby, our planned destination. But as we'd discovered that day, a few centimetres of map can hide many, many metres of upness and downness, not to mention Pepe Le Swiss Peu.
As sometimes happens with Indiana Jones, our native guide Nick came to rescue his heroes just in time, his battered white Toyota crewcab nursing our battered white wrists, shoulders, hips, knees, quads, ITBs, VMOs and glutes back to Hornsby station were our cars were waiting. There was no talk of hanging around for a few beers and a debrief - we all just wanted to get home and collapse.
A long hot bath, two ibuprofen, a large glass of sports drink and a frosty cold beer later, I could nearly walk down a set of stairs again. The next day, I saw Bride for some physio, Flick for a massage, and even my chiropractor Tom for an adjustment, and by that evening I was feeling almost whole.
Mid-way through our training program, although much tougher than the Trailwalker course itself, the Brooklyn-Crosslands route has been a timely reminder that we still have more training to do, and that you can't just front up to the start with a moderately fit body and expect to make it to the finish line in less than 48 hours. It's a long, long way. But minus the quips from that twisted little Swizz guy on the trail, and knowing that Nick the native guide will always be there to pick us up at the finish, I think we'll make it.
