Sydney Trailwalker 26-28 May 2000
Dan Appleby - Run Gurkhins RunI've attached my team mate Dan Appleby's summary of our 2000 Trailwalker effort. We seem to keep plugging away at this event with varying degrees of success, this was one of our better years. All four of us have secured a place in this year's HK Trailwalker too, our main goal is to get everyone home and if we can do it under 20 hours then even better.
RUN GURKHINS RUN
Previously, in the Gurkhins saga, the Gurkhins completed the Sydney Trailwalker 1999 with three out of four team members in 23 hours and 20 minutes. A pledge was made to return and finish as a full team of four, hopefully even faster. Months of preparation involving distance training, night training, and intensive gym work culminated in the week prior to Trailwalker 2000 with a team screening of Run Lola Run (which inspired our bright red t-shirts) and a mass carbo-loading session on Thursday night, mmm…Pasta Pantry.
On Friday morning the Gurkhins, or the Red Team as we were affectionately known to some on the trail, lined up at Hunters Hill to take on the trail. Our team consisted of Sark - antique dealer, carpenter, sky diver; Dan - lawyer, biker, diver; Monika - marketer, model, motorcyclist; and Fred - lawyer, father, and single minded masochist. Fred, who traveled over from Singapore to do Sydney Trailwalker, has completed some twelve Trailwalkers in the past (HK and Sydney). Only once has he finished the event as a full team of four. Sark was competing in his sixth Trailwalker and had never completed as a full team. This year would be different.
In the interests of brevity, I will not provide a blow by blow description of each stage of the event, but will simply relay some of the more obscure and amusing instances that have stuck in the minds of Team Gurkhins. We started off with a bang, getting completely and utterly lost in the first thirty minutes of the event! After last year’s event we had trained and re-trained on virtually the entire trail, with the exception, of course, of the very first stage. The result was a blur of red shirts running straight past a critical track head and straight on into the wilderness. By the time we realised that this simply wasn’t the right way, we had lost over half an hour and were desperate to make up time. As we rejoined the race at the back of the pack, most competitors did not know what to make of the four bright red, utterly fuming Gurkhins running past them attempting to make up that lost time. One rather intelligent fellow saw it as his duty to remind us that we should take it easy as there were ninety kilometres remaining. Hmm, like we’d forgotten that! Coming into Lane Cove National Park, we learned that another a rather enthusiastic support crew from another team was avidly watching our progress. My devoted sister, Chief Support Crew, learned that this fellow had spied part of Monika’s large dragon tattoo emblazoned up her spine and seemed to find the notion of a fit and leggy blonde with a mysterious tattoo on her back utterly overwhelming. We encountered this screaming fan at the next six check points as he cheered on the team and leered at Monika.
In the combined Hong Kong and Sydney Trailwalker experience of Sark and Fred, and the extensive Sydney Trail experience of Dan and Monika, never before have we come across a streaker. This year was different. As the Red Team jogged its way down from Thornleigh station and into the Calicoma Walk a local resident appeared to have come out to check his mail, in only a pair of socks and a very short t-shirt. With his best assets clear for the world to see, this nudist resident of Thornleigh looked at us in our team shirts and race numbers with what we feared was mock surprise, and meekly asked "is there some kind race on here?" We gave him an… affirming, answer, focused our eyes back on the trail, and carried on. The team continued to maintain pace throughout the night, finding it especially difficult to tear ourselves away from the raging bonfire and sausage sizzle that had been organised at the Crosslands checkpoint, fifty-six kilometres in. Although I do not know why there was a podiatrist on duty at this check point, one look at my feet would have had him shaking his head in disgust, but I am certain there was nothing that he could do at this point to fix it, we were half way in and there was no turning back.
In the wee hours of Saturday morning, Fred’s body decided that it urgently had to eject the volumes of energy bars, soup, and electrolytes that he had consumed throughout the preceding eighty kilometres of racing. Forgetting that there was one team member travelling behind him, Fred simply stopped, and squatted. The spot that Fred chose happened to be one of the narrowest stretches of rock on the tricky and treacherous climb up to Cowan. I had the benefit of knowing exactly where Fred dropped this unpleasant parcel, and could tenderly make my way around it. I did not envy the next team to climb this hill.
We left the final check point at Cowan in high spirits, and maintained our steady but brisk pace. With just a handful of kilometres to go we watched the sun rise over Brooklyn, shortly after which Monika exclaimed that we could make it under twenty-two hours if we ran right now! Run the Gurkhins did, for the next three kilometres into Brooklyn and the finish of Sydney Trail Walker. Once again we were a bright red blur as we streaked through Brooklyn town to the finish line (although we were very nearly mown down by a horn-honking Sarah Lawson!) to the adoration of the organisers, competitors, and our amazing support crew.
The final scene of Run Gurkhins Run saw the full complement of four Gurkhins finish the event, under twenty-two hours! Our finishing time was twenty-one hours fifty-six minutes, good for eighth place overall, and we loved every minute of it! Fantastic team work and a relentless team spirit had got us through, together with the unfathomable loyalty of our support crew, which provided hot soup, coffee, and foot massages at numerous points throughout the race. There was only one injury from the 100 kilometre race, an annoying spider bite that didn’t rear its head for some hours but took weeks to heal.
The next installment of the Gurkhins’ saga will take place in November 2000. The entire team is travelling to Hong Kong to do HK Trail Walker 2000, with a new goal. The Gurkhins will attempt to conquer the terrorising climbs of the Hong Kong Trail, and continue to eat away at our finishing times. Thanks must go to the organisers of Sydney Trail Walker, who once again provided a world class event that is a challenge to competitors, and provides so much more to those around the world, whose lives are enriched for the work of Community Aid Abroad and the donations that are extracted by each team.
Dan Appleby
