In July last year, 7 friends and I set out to walk 96km overnight through the Gold Coast hinterland.
Some of us did absolutely no training, which we later discovered was a very, very, bad idea.
We started walking at 7am, and it was all smiles until around 2pm, when I realised there was in fact no flat ground, and we would be encountering around 4000 metres of elevation gain. To be honest, I cried the whole rest of the walk. Luckily, my friend Rhys is the ultimate hype man and refused to let me give up.
We made it to what they call “heart break hill”, which is a very suitable name considering the brutally long and sharp ascent. It went on, and on, and on, for around 2 hours (You can see this section right before the blue line starts on the map I posted). When we got to the top around 4am, after 9 hours of non-stop hiking, we had to climb over a fence into a cow paddock - I don’t think i’ve ever laughed that hard, watching 4 of us try to get over that gate when we basically couldn’t even walk anymore. We had a 5 minute nap at the next checkpoint (temperatures around 7°C) and were awoken by someone blasting the song Thunderstruck by AC/DC, which was enough to get us up and moving again.
Watching the sun rise was the strangest feeling, I was super delirious and couldn’t stop laughing/crying. Really started to go downhill (literally, but also emotionally) here. Smashed 2 packs of lolly snakes, which was great, until I crashed, and it wasn’t that great anymore.
After a very long 14 hours of walking, I decided to tap out at 75km, I physically could not do it anymore and likely would have injured myself had I kept going.
That walk was easily one of the most transformational experiences of my life to date. A constant death and rebirth of thinking you’re incapable, yet doing it anyway, over and over and over again.
Pics 2 & 5 by
@chantjames_
All other pics by me
