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Jesse Riley: final report on trans-Australia run

24 October 1998

I was running well and making good time, and the team I was "barracking" for in Aussie Rules Football (you don't say "rooting" because that means having sex) had just won the championship, the mighty Adelaide Crows.

Life was good, so in retrospect it was inevitable that I'd let down a bit, especially in that the finish was still 800 kilometres away and it was too early to celebrate.

We were still planning on finishing two days before the original schedule to have time to do the Melbourne Marathon on October 11, so a short ways out of Balranald I decided to get in some fast practice running and knocked out a 21:46 5Km, which was encouraging but left me tired for days.

For the rest of that day and almost all of the next 10 days, I just tried to make the cut-off pace. I walked mostly as we ploughed through more of the patented Aussie Long Dry Stretches. Even for a true believer like me, it was frustrating to think that we really wouldn't be passing through a lot of populated areas or get to stay in nice hotels until the very end.

That night we slept on the ground in our swags one last time at a dirt crossroad. Next morning we were just getting dressed when a stationhand drove up and asked, could we please move off a short ways because they were driving sheep across the highway there and our presence was spooking them.

It was like a sign - 'Sleep in motels, Jesse!' So that's what we did for the rest of the journey. The next five days passed slowly and without inspiration except for the extremely friendly and helpful people we met, mostly in the evenings at towns where we ate and booked rooms.

On Saturday, October 3, things changed when we made Wagga Wagga, population 57,000, the largest town in the race between Perth and Sydney. Among Sydney-siders it has a reputation as Nowheresville, the way a New Yorker might look down on Peoria, Illinois. But to us it might as well have been Las Vegas.

I mean, we still had the red dirt of Western Australia on our four- wheeler and our bags. It was a very striking feature of this race, ever since we'd reached Port Augusta, that while we longed for the luxuries of the towns it all seemed so artificial after the Nullarbor.

I'd be walking down the main street of some town saying "G'day" to each passerby, but the only response I'd get, if any, was shock or laughter directed at my dusty and sweaty running outfit. We were hopelessly out of place.

After Wagga, the scene turned to mountains and green pastures, and at the same time we struck onto a modern highway with wide breakdown lanes, so that broke up the monotony a bit and gave us a sense that Sydney was near.

By now much of the traffic going in our direction was headed for Sydney and would be there in just a few hours, and it was comforting to think of that, and when it would finally happen to me.

The weather changed too -- it was cooler and cloudier -- and after 59 days without substantial rain (just an occasional drizzle) it was pouring for the start of Day 60 at Yass. Soon I was drenched and forced to run just to keep warm. Same situation at Goulburn the following day, except that it also hailed abundantly as if to say that, yes, you really can freeze your ass off in Australia.

We were two weeks into the Australian spring but this was the first really cold weather we'd had the whole way.

The last two days were quite a push as I'd left myself almost 90 kilometres for Day 62 (Thursday, October 8) to get to the Sydney Suburbs, then 58 kilometres more to get to the finish at the Sydney Opera House, which I needed to do by noon in order to meet everyone I'd told about the finish. I was just living on caffeine and adrenalin so I could make eight or nine kilometres an hour instead of six.

We stayed at Pat Farmer's house that night before the finish and I can't tell you how great it was to have him as host -- a kindred spirit and one of my personal heroes. My brother, John, who had listened patiently for months to Trans Am stories, many of which feature Pat, was particularly happy to finally meet him in the flesh.

The last day was cool and cloudy and we weren't under way until almost 6 a.m. at Campbelltown on a freeway section of the Hume Highway, which John had nicknamed the Fume Highway.

Until we'd struck onto this road five days before, there really hadn't been too many places where I just couldn't wait for the traffic to clear before stepping to the side of the road for a leisurely pit stop, without fear of being seen.

Now we were in the Big City, though, and even blowing my nose on the ground, farmer-style, made me feel self-conscious. It's funny how much we'd adapted to being perpetually in the middle of nowhere.

Anyway, soon I was off the freeway and only dizzying city streets: lots of traffic, smog, and confusing turns at intersections where I had to sprint to beat the cars.

We weren't very organized about where to make the aid stations so in the end I only saw John four times all day. After the second aid station, I just carried cash and bought iced expressos and Cokes at convenience stores and McDonald's en route, standing at the counter dripping sweat -- very strange.

Meanwhile, we'd wandered off the course Pat Farmer had laid out for us (I just followed the signs that said 'City', reasoning that all roads led to downtown. So Pat couldn't find me either until John called him on his mobile phone and told him where I was.

Pat then met me at Parramatta Road about seven kilometres from the finish, all loaded up with a backpack containing a phone, Snickers bars and all manner of useful gear. Champion!

With him to pace me, it was much easier despite (by now) hordes of human traffic on sidewalks to contend with, in addition to cars. In between sprints across this or around that we still had plenty of time to recount all the old road stories, and new one too,

The actual finish at the Sydney Opera House was uneventful, just John, Pat and I arriving half an hour late. The Opera House, which I'd never seen before, had a wide plaza and a great many steps to the top. So I just jogged up, stopped my watch and sat down at the top.

I was very happy just to have, finally, a little unstructured time and I wasn't disappointed at all that it wasn't a big media event. Still, it was nice when four other people found their way over: Ian Kirkham of Epping, whom we'd met a couple of weeks before in Victoria; and Ewan Flinn, Stephanie Flinn and Charlie Wilkinson -- three of a group of expeditioners from Sydney whom we'd met on Day 14 on the dirt track in Western Australia.

They'd waited patiently for seven weeks for this day, and it was a real moment of triumph to see them again. Pat puled a large Aussie flag out of his pack, a finishing gift for me. We took heaps of photos and then just sat there for hours swapping stories while millions of tourist streamed by. It was very pleasant.

Around three o'clock we had to think of returning the four-wheeler before the rental agency closed. We were catching the train that night to Melbourne for the marathon -- we broke up and headed out.

At the agency we got a typical warm Aussie welcome -- they let us dump all our trash in their bins and were curious to know what we'd been doing with the vehicle for 72 days. When we told them, I'm sure they thought that this was going to be the rental car story of all time, and they couldn't do enough for us.

As we unloaded the last of our gear, one of the handymen noticed that we had a collection of car licence plates, stolen from abandoned vehicles at the roadside. Our collection was nearly complete but we didn't have one from Northern Territories, the least populated area of Australia and, coincidentally, where our rental car had originally been registered.

So he just took out his wrench and unscrewed the front plate off our car and gave it to us, another classic story in a race full of them.

The marathon two days later turned out to be more fun than I thought. I ran 3:54 alongside research scientist Jennifer Wallace of Brisbane, her first time under four hours in four tries. John did 3:10 and qualified for Boston despite the lack of training time (both my brothers are faster than me, incidentally).

Along the way, during the section where the frontrunners passed us, I noticed a great local runner buried in 30th or 40th place, a guy who I knew had won a lot of races here and been showered with medals and prize money for years. Nobody recognized him back there.

It was Yiannis Kouros.

Fame is fleeting, I guess. I can't speak for Yiannis but I was sure glad to have a little place in the sun while it lasted, and to be a hero to a very few people who recognized me: people like truckers on the road to Alice Springs; nine-year-old Cameron patrolling lonely Gunnadorrah Station on his motorbike in the Nullarbor; the miners at the pub in Tarcoola; the girls cashiering at service stations in all the one-horse towns; the engineers on the Indian- Pacific Railway; Ashley the sheep-shearer from Redhill, who took a break from his work to come out to the road, shake my hand and wish me luck.

And even when there weren't any people around at least here were stubbies, those big, slow-moving lizards, or kookaburras with their jungle calls, kangaroos by the hundreds, emus, or even just sheep and cattle.

All you ultrarunners who stayed away from this race, worried about the lack of organization, or difficult conditions, were wise to do so. It was everything you feared: primitive, dangerous, edgy, lonely, epic, unprecedented, costly and not very well organized.

Wouldn't have it any other way, myself. Thanks, Australia. I'll be back.

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