Wild Endurance 100km bush run

The short version: first time I've ever won anything at a running event!

The well-written version from one of my teammates:

Charlie's blog posting

The long and tedious version from me:

It all started when Charlie came up to me months ago at a Warrior Swim session and said “Mike we’ve got a 6 person relay team for the Wild Endurance and one guy has dropped out. Do you fancy it?”

It’s a 100km run on very hilly (and stairey – if that’s a word) bush tracks through the Blue Mountains. The way the relay works is that 3 guys run the first 50km or so and then hand over to the other three who run the last 50km. Naturally I said yes right away, but then over the next few weeks there were two more dropouts and I filled the roles with Andrew and Mark so suddenly we had Team Alpha - Charlie, James (aka Dr Skins) and Colin (aka Tiger) and Team Zappa – myself, Andrew and Mark.

Team Alpha were ultra organised. They had training runs on bush tracks from months before the race. They (or more correctly – James) compiled a gear list gleaned from the adventure stores around town, listing the very lightest materials known to man in order to carry all the compulsory race gear in a package the size of a pea and the weight of a gnat’s left testicle. They surveyed key sections of the course, organised a support crew and provided team race apparel.

On the other side there was Team Zappa. Clueless. About 4 days before the race Andrew sent me an email saying “Mate what’s going on? All I know is that we have to turn up and run 50km.” And I had no answers. None of us had seen a single step of the track. Both Andrew and I hadn’t really run for a month after Ironman for anything longer than 45 mins or so, due to recovery. Which left us time to do a grand total of 2 longish runs together, within the final two weeks before the event, where we did 25 odd kms on the Spit to Manly track for two Saturdays. Our gear consisted of giant thermals and beanies rescued from the back of the closet where they’d sat since the mid-80s.

Team Dinner two nights before to discuss what the hell we were doing

Were we nervous? You bet we were. On the car ride up we consoled ourselves by saying to each other in quavering voices, “Well we’re never going to win the thing. We should be able to make it through 50km, it’s just an easy run through the bush. We’ll walk if we have to. We’ll be right…”

It wasn’t a great boost for our confidence in our own navigation skills when we completely missed the turnoff to Katoomba and almost ended up in Lithgow. But we made it to Checkpoint 1 at the 25km mark, caught up with Sarah and Alice the fantastic support crew and were relaxing in camp chairs, shooting the breeze, when suddenly – oh my god there they are. Yes Team Alpha came striding out of the bush and onto the oval at a cracking pace, and very much in first place! They caught us completely by surprise as they were a full 30 minutes faster than the fastest recorded time for that leg the previous year!

Team Alpha carving it up

Andrew, Mark and I jumped up to help them through the transition and suddenly our hearts were beating out of our chests. The boys were focussed and running so fast, that meant that if they kept the lead for the next 25km leg, then all the pressure would be on the three of us to defend their lead. Oh boy...

They flew off after a 3 minute turnaround and we timed a full 10 minutes until the next teams came through. Quite a lead. We scrambled to get all our gear together, cram down some lunch in a cafe, frantically try to memorise the maps, buy bottles of gatorade and get ourselves across to the changeover point before the guys came storming in. Thankfully Sarah kicked our arses to get there, we had visions of pulling up in the car and the boys from Team Alpha already standing there looking at their watches and tapping their feet. But we made it, got our gear together and then Andrew and I ran to the toilet 4 times each in about 10 minutes as our bladders contracted with fear. You can see me here staring anxiously down the track at the point where the guys would soon appear:

Then they arrived. They'd completed the second leg another half an hour faster than last year's fastest team and were still very much in the lead. Surprisingly given the speed they'd been running over some pretty gnarly terrain, they looked fresh as could be! We did the quick handoff of compulsory gear and timing chip, a swift photo and then Team Zappa took to the trail at 2.15pm

Team Alpha checks into the changeover checkpoint

Handing off the timing chip

Team photo

Our half of the race was 52km, involving first a 35km section along undulating, but pretty easy firetrail. Then the final checkpoint before 17km to the finish. We had no idea how far behind the other teams were, so we just gunned it. It was a delicate balance of trying to keep the fastest pace possible so as not to be caught by the teams behind, but also not run too fast and burn ourselves out before the end, because it was a good 6 to 8 hours of running ahead of us. I did get a text after 15 mins which I didn't check, but assumed it meant the next team was 15 mins behind us. Correctly, as it turned out, although that was the next relay team. The next 100km team was only 6 minutes behind. I'm glad we didn't know that!

Never having been the "hares" before, we were all feeling a bit odd being in that position. But the plan was simple - go a bit faster than we thought we could manage, because if we could get as much ground covered in daylight as possible we'd have a distinct advantage (everyone moves slower in the dark).

So we went hard. The first few km slipped by quickly. We knocked over 10km in about 46 minutes so we knew we were moving. The track was a wide firetrail with fairly minor gradients. At one point Andrew pointed out that this weather - warm sun directly after a foggy rainy morning - was prime time for snakes so to watch out. Five minutes later we all nearly had a heart attack when we flew past a 3 metre Diamond Python with a body as thick as my forearm, by far the largest snake I've seen outside of a zoo.

After 15 km or so we started the longest, steepest descent I've ever run down. And down. And down. It seemed to go forever! At one stage we were just laughing as we barrelled down thinking we were going to he centre of the earth. Finally we crossed a river at the bottom and then the inevitable... Actually the up wasn't too bad. A steep bit at first so we did our first bit of walking. The trail seemed to flatten out after not too long, but it was a false flat, and in fact was a gradual uphill for the next 8km or so. This was my point of maximum suffering.

Andrew was really pushing the pace just a little bit too fast for me to comfortably hold. Mark was close behind him and I kept dropping back then trying to surge ahead and hang on. I knew I'd come good eventually, but at the time I was dying. All I could think was, "Thank god these guys are running strong, we need to keep the pace up to stay ahead and I would totally slow down if it was just me." We were running directly into the setting sun which was utterly blinding and in my delirium I thought I could hear the voices of the other teams gaining on us, but I gamely hung on and when it finally flattened out a bit more I started to feel more comfortable.

Then there was a long section around Wentworth Falls of a narrow singletrack along a cliff edge under a rocky overhang. Wet slippery track and the sun had gone down so there was just the last pink glow of the sky to see by. Amazing views into the valley when we could pause long enough to appreciate them. We figured by now the checkpoint must be just around the corner (I felt this was for almost an hour) and we tried to hang on for the whole way without headlamps, but one more turn deep into the forest and it was just too dangerous and almost pitch black. We had our headlamps on in a flash and busted the last set of stairs into Checkpoint 3.

The other guys and girls were brilliant in getting us refilled and on our way in a couple of minutes and we sailed into the pitch black for the final push. We'd told them to call Andrew's phone twice when the next team came through so we knew our gap, and for the first few minutes did timechecks every couple of minutes.

After 10 mins Andrew got a text message. What did that mean? We weren't going to stop to dig out the phone so kept pushing hard, although it was up and down stairs almost the whole way so impossible to get a decent run on. Another half hour and we were concerned. That text message MUST have meant the next team was 10mins away, otherwise they would have called by now. My light started fading so when I stopped to change batteries, Andrew called Sarah and the news was good.

The text had been to say nobody had arrived yet. In fact we had stretched the gap out to 50 minutes! For the first time that day we breathed a collective sigh of relief that with only 10 or 12 km to go, if we remained uninjured and didn't get lost, we should win the thing.

Unbelievable. So we dialled the pace back a bit and tried to just make it through. Suddenly it all became less of a chore and more of an enjoyable time. I felt a lot stronger and we were all in good spirits. The nature of the trail from here on was almost all stairs up and down, so there was no chance of really running, but we kept a solid pace. It did make the kilometres go past a lot more slowly. We spent over half an hour thinking we must have gone the wrong way or completely missed the 95km marker, until FINALLY we passed it. It was a mixed blessing - great to know we were on track, but rough to think there were still 5km left when we thought we were at 97 or 98km by then.

But it was too close to the end to care. Up and down we went and finally burst out onto Katoomba oval at 8:10pm and crossed the finishing tape together with a huge crowd of 4 or 5 people cheering us on! Team Alpha (minus Charlie who had a mates 40th birthday that night so had to get back), the indefatiguable Sarah, plus three or four Wild Endurance Volunteers. It was a sweet sweet moment breaking that tape for the very first time in my life. I know it was a small field and the event has only been running 3 years, but that doesn't take away from the feeling of actually winning a proper organised event. I'm still on a high.

So in the washup it turns out that we ran 12 hours and 11 minutes. We beat the second placed team by one hour and twenty three minutes! We also smashed the course record by 3 hours.

Our times were:

Start to CP 1 - 3:06

Transition - 0:05

CP1 to CP2 - 3:02

Handover - 0:01

CP2 to CP 3 - 3:31

Transition - 0:05

CP3 to Finish - 2:21