WILD lite… My CBR 100 story

Posted on 22 March, 2015

My 50km walk on the Canberra Centenary Trail for the CBR 100 Challenge

I wonder how many hikers Cheryl Stayed’s journey in the book and movie Wild has inspired?

Twenty six year old Cheryl Strayed tackled the 1100 mile Pacific Coast Trail in an effort to piece her life back together. For me, a 35 year-old mother of one, I could identify; I just didn’t have three months to take off from life to find myself and forsake my responsibilities.

So I chose the CBR 100 Challenge and a course of 50 kilometres in one day to reset my life – a kind of WILD lite, minus the wolves and snow.

It was going to be more than a finish line I was walking over. I wanted it to be a threshold, a line to step over between my past and my future.

For the better part of the year through some professional and personally trying circumstances I had been struggling to carry my failings be it friendship, motherhood, work or weight.

A stone of disappointment had settled in my belly, some days it was heavy, other days it was just a subtle weight but always there and nothing I would do, could shift it.

I didn’t want to feel like that anymore and I didn’t want to keep over analysing my life anymore – when there is so much to enjoy.

I catalogued up the things I could no longer carry, looked at what I had brought to the situations that were paining me and set a timeline to sort through the crap and let it go.

Preparation is sometimes not what you think it is

I tried to walk at least one Canberra mountain per week, but fitness wasn’t going to be my issue, it was battling this niggling feeling that I might give up before I start or halfway through.

I thought about all the things I had given up on and walked away from when I probably should have just stuck it out – I didn’t want to be a quitter, I wanted to be a finisher.

And then an inspiring woman who has recently entered my life said “It’s mental, you have bucket loads of mental strength, you’ll be fine.”

It made me realise I had put the emphasis on the wrong things, it wasn’t all about what I had walked away from, it was about what I had stuck out and endured.

Massive amounts of pain struggling with endometriosis for years, childbirth, getting through grief and loss, working incredibly hard to deliver things I believed in, losing 20 kilos and keeping it off – this challenge was doable.

Friends make starting anything, easier

As the day approach, so did the jitters. What the F$%# had I signed up for?

But each morning I would get up and tackle a hill or mountain to train, I was not alone. There was laughter and great conversation in the company of women, it was hard work sprinkled with friendship and infectious determination.

Standing on the starting line, in the dark it was cold, it was early but I was not alone: we would do this together.

You find your reality in the first mountain

Ainslie. I had met her many a morning in the lead up to this 50-kilometer walk. Today was going to be different, she was dark and moody and swarming with activity. Her steep trail to the top seemed to drum home with every step just what I had signed up for.

Reaching the summit of sort, I looked out onto Black Mountain some 10 kilometres away as the crow flies but he would be our third peak of the day and not before we had rounded Northern Canberra by foot.

I remembered something my high school cross country coach had said “Briefly look at where you are headed but don’t focus on that, focus on each step, look down at the ground on a steep incline and just put one foot in front of the other.” That was all that could be done now.

Comparing yourself to others is futile

The track was busy, waves of people tacking the 50km and the 100km were starting to pass by, some of them running. It was hard not to feel intimated. My initial response was that ‘they will beat us; we won’t win’.

So much of what I do everyday is about pace, about meeting a deadline or delivering so seemingly, the sky doesn’t fall in.

But that was not the point of this. Getting to the finish line first was not the goal; the goal was finishing itself. The catch cry of the race was “It’s not a race. It’s a challenge.”

Accepting that was powerful and to continue to compare myself to other who were in pursuit of crossing the finish line as fast as they could did nothing but make me anxious and feel like I was failing already.

We can all get to wherever we are headed in our own time, with the right support and awareness of what we bring to the challenge.

Whatever you’re facing, life goes on around you

As we came down our second peak, Majura in the beautiful sunrise, we entered suburbia. It’s a very Canberra thing to be walking through the Transition Area at the foot of a mountain and bumping into people we know about to take their dog for their regular early morning walk.

As we walked further, families bike riding would glide past us, people on their way back from the Farmers Markets laden with fruit and vegetables would cross our path and the streets were a blur of cars ferrying children to Saturday morning sport.

Here we were committed to a finish line that no one here could see, we knew we had ups and downs to tackle and yet the simple gift was to see happiness around us in the very mundane moments of life.

It made me think about a time when I was grief stricken and I’d gone to the shops to do something very simple, surrounded by people yet falling down inside. We never know what challenges people face around us and sometimes there is solace in just grounding ourselves in the simple activities of every day.

Getting past things is hard work and sometimes people don’t believe you will

Before I knew it, Black Mountain was upon us. I had trained on this bad boy, but with many paths through his foothills and to his summit he was like a trap. It seemed we were on this mountain forever, the sense of the peak in front or behind us, toying and taunting our every step.

It was as if we would never leave and we weren’t moving forward as the track doubled us back to make up kilometres, it was an agonising feeling combined with the fact that my body was starting to hurt.

Sometimes it’s hard to see past the mountain, like the challenge is always there never quite complete. You doubt yourself thinking ‘I just want out.’

I wanted to scream up into the trees, ‘What more do you want?’ and then came the patronising commentary of a 100km runner passing by, which was enough to boot my arse into gear.

“Oh well,” he said, “It’s good you’re giving it a try.”

“Bastard,” I thought. “I’m going to finish this course just to prove you wrong.”

No one puts baby in a corner. No one gets to commentate on your life or your challenges and you will always get through what ever you want to.

Stop to smell the flowers (or trees), it will keep you going

A wave of peace greeted us as we entered the Cork Forests at the Arboretum. It was as if, after the somewhat tortured track of Black Mountain, a storybook was opening to us. We took a moment to sit quietly amongst the trees and just breathe. Everything was starting to hurt but we also had planned moments to have breaks along the way.

Our dear friend was our support crew, driving to points and meeting us with food, water and her wonderful positive attitude (even pom poms).

I felt really lucky. These quiet moments, the kindness of our friend, they recharged my soul and refocused my mind, enabling me to patch up my feet and keep going.

It made me think about all the stupid times I had pushed myself for work, delivering extraordinary projects but at the expense of never stopping to feel the peace, to let help in to my life and to take moments to recharge.

Pit stops, in life, are just as important. 

If it’s not alright, then it’s not the end

I’d been carrying the map all day, we were now onto the final page and frankly a track neither of us had given much thought to. We knew the majority of steps were behind us.

I thought this last stretch would be pretty straight-forward. I was wrong. The terrain was not as tough but mentally I was tired, my feet were killing, my thighs had started to seize up.

It was twilight and we walked past fields with people practicing their golf swings, playing ball with their dogs and then we saw the sun setting. It was spectacular. The day had been all that, it was a mild 20 degrees and blue sky. We had seen one side of Canberra through to the other and were now South about to head back to where it all started.

And then I realised – Red Hill. It snuck up on us like an unexpected last challenge, as I saw the steep incline I actually let out a physical yell. It reminded me of the moment in WILD when Cheryl Strayed loses her hiking boot over the cliff. There is no choice in that moment – you just have to keep going.

We did it, with much swearing, marking the last of five peaks for the day: Ainslie, Majura, Black Mountain, the Arboretum and Red Hill.

As we walked down the hill in the dark, we came across another team finishing the 50km. We were all a handful of kilometers away. We walked through suburbia again and then up to Parliament House.

This was the home stretch. I was talking with one of the men from the other team and he told me the story of why he was walking. Ten years ago he was knocked off his bike by a car and had to learn to walk again. “Every step,” he said “It about not giving up, that’s why I do these walks, I had to reinvent my life.”

As we walked onto Commonwealth Bridge with the finish line in sight, I turned to my mate with whom we had giggled just a few months before and decided ‘ Screw it. Let’s do it.” I thanked her for doing this with me, and told her that she and our other teammate had made it a day to remember.

I walked quietly for a bit, tearing up and thinking that I had never once wanted to give up that this had actually been fun.

It didn’t matter what I did this year, I felt I could point to this as a mark of my endurance and that in the walk itself I had found it was not the pursuit of the finish line but the happiness of the pursuit itself that was the gift.

I crossed the finish line with my friends at 14 hours and 50 minutes, thinking I might actually do this all again.