50km Trailblazer Hike in the Adelaide Hills – Fat Powered
Firstly, WTF was I thinking?
Come for a walk in the park, they said.
It’ll be fun, they said.
Man, this was an epic trek, I can’t even fathom the thought of doing 100km like some folk did, that’s just utter Masochism, surely.
For those wanting to see the trek – here’s the map: http://runkeeper.com/user/AshSimmonds/activity/122987273
(I didn’t turn on RunKeeper until about 7km in but manually added the GPS points and can’t change the pace stuff so it looks wonky at the start)
But yeah, wow, what a day…
It’s hard to believe we *started* the day by doing 1.5 times the City To Bay, THEN started trekking through the hills. What kind of idiots are we?
Ash, what kind of preparation did you do for such an amazing assault on the body, surely years of training yeah?
Nope.
My last meal (a seafood medley with eggs) was 22 hours before the event. I did the thing fully fasted and deeply ketogenic. The girlfriend cooked up and brought me some nice fatty lamb chops at a checkpoint, but I didn’t bother eating anything until the 34km checkpoint (1.5 eggs) and then having gone about 40km I broke out the chops – even then it wasn’t because I was hungry or anything, just knowing those delicious fatty meat bombs were sitting there in Jordyn’s backpack was enough impetus, and by then I was pretty sure I’d proven to myself you don’t need food to do this stuff.
Never got tired, no mental issues (any more than usual), no injuries (a couple blisters and general aching), felt great basically – but I don’t think I’d do the 50km again, by about 40km we were seriously over this whole walk the Earth malarkey.
The Proclaimers can get fucked with their walking 500 miles thing.
But anyhoo, it’s a great achievement that we’re all proud of.
We *may* have turned up late, Jordyn wasn’t impressed by having to wake us up with a phone call, but hey we got to see the start.
Ooh ooh slippery dip – only not so slippery.
Snailblazers.
Checkpoint #1 – 18km of boring suburbia.
Nina loved munging out on… well, everything – but especially the lamb chops.
To the hills for some Earth Porn.
Jordyn’s head is weird.
Just before the “goat track” of like 87 degrees incline.
Worth the climb.
?
Long trail ahead.
Can’t tell by the photo, but 6 inches from the edge of the trail is a sheer drop of like a million miles.
Checkpoint #2 – 34km.
Coupla blisters.
Seriously?
Mmm chop.
Camera was rooted after this point, but it got dark and frrrreeezing soon after, so yeah just imagine a bunch of photos that bore resemblance to The Blair Witch Project.
Oddly enough it felt like the last 4km or so was at a faster pace than the rest of the trek, me and Nina were just like let’s smash this shit. Also our good deed for the day was when we were 1km from the end the trail intersected with the last part of Mount Lofty which we recognised, but apparently some other wayward hikers did not – so we called out to them to set them on the right path. I can’t imagine the sheer mental stress of having gone 99% of the way only to make a wrong turn at the end and go wandering in the dark endlessly…
Great day.
Can’t wait to never do it again.
