Not thirty five. Fifteen. That's it. ...that's ...it...
The basic premise of the walk is to raise money for the Mito Foundation, for research into Mitochondrial Disease, a condition that attacks the part of the body that actually makes energy in the first place. I noticed the uncomfortable parallel somewhere around kilometre ten and haven't been able to shake it since. My legs were rationing energy for one day. The people this walk raises money for are rationing it for life, with no five kilometre marker in sight telling them when the terrain eases up.
I'd stopped doing the maths on the whole distance somewhere back around kilometre five, because the whole distance was useless to me by then, actively unhelpful and honestly a number too big to be anything but demoralising.
Thirty five kilometres is not a thing a body can hold in its head while walking. Fifteen more, though. Fifteen more I could survive. Fifteen more felt like something I might actually be able to do without lying down in a gutter somewhere near The Brisbane Powerhouse.
The way I actually got through it, and I've thought about this a lot since, is probably one of the more honest things I've ever done under pressure - I broke it into five kilometre blocks. Walk five, stop, drink water, check in with myself, decide again. Give myself the illusion of choice to review if I wanted to continue at each checkpoint.
I had to veto thoughts of the remainder of the course - deciding whether to finish the whole thirty five - that question was banned entirely, too big, too far away, genuinely useless to me in the moment. Just decide whether I could manage another five.
Every single time, the answer was yes. Okay. Just this next bit. I can do that. I think so.
And it worked. I finished. I didn't really expect that.
I need to say that clearly before anything else, because breaking an impossible distance into pieces small enough to feel doable is not a trick or something to feel a bit sheepish about. It's a genuinely legitimate way to get a body and a mind through something that would otherwise stop you dead at kilometre six from sheer overwhelm. Five kilometres, then review. Five more, then review.
That structure helped me cross the finish line, but if I'm honest, the five kilometre method wasn't the only thing that got me there.
My friends did too, the actual humans who walked every one of those blocks alongside me, who matched my pace when I slowed right down and talked complete nonsense with me through the parts that hurt the most. They were absolute champions, every one of them, and there's a real chance I don't cross that line at all without them beside me. Love you guys.
And so by the last five kilometre block my feet had gone past sore into something closer to numb with opinions, and by the time I actually stopped moving, both knees had swollen up enough that stairs became a genuine three day negotiation. Oops!
I actually walk a lot, most days, without a second thought, so it wasn't unfamiliarity that caught me out. It was specific preparation for this specific distance, and I skipped nearly all of it. Hadn't done the long practice walks you're meant to do before you attempt thirty five kilometres in one hit. Didn't strap my knees, which in hindsight feels almost comically avoidable. Didn't get anywhere near enough sleep the night before either, because life got busy and I told myself I'd be fine on the day, and technically I was, in that I finished, and also I really wasn't, in that my body sent me an invoice for a solid week afterward and I was furious about it, at myself, mostly, for not taking the preparation seriously.
Seems silly now.
None of this makes thirty five kilometres some kind of Everest, to be clear. Plenty of people did it in shoes they'd never worn before, chatting the whole way, without a single complaint.
Some did it with genuinely bigger barriers than I've ever had to think about and still finished stronger than I did.
I just managed to turn an eminently doable distance into a personal referendum on my own preparation, through sheer, dedicated skill....which is the part I keep turning over. The five kilometre method worked exactly as intended. It got me through terrain that would have flattened me if I'd tried to hold the whole distance in my head at once.
That's what it's for. That's the entire job of thinking in small enough chunks to keep moving when the big picture is too much to look at directly.
But it was never built to ask the other questions - am I actually prepared for this? Should I be pacing differently? Is there a smarter way to do the next fifteen kilometres than the way I just did the first twenty?
Five kilometres, then review, is a survival question. It gets you to the next checkpoint. It was never going to get me there well.
And there's nothing wrong with being in survival mode, I want to say that as plainly as I can, because we treat it like some kind of failure when it's closer to a very specific tool for a very specific kind of terrain, one that does exactly what it's meant to do and does it properly. Some stretches genuinely need to be walked five kilometres at a time, your whole world shrunk down to the next checkpoint and nothing past it, because that's the only way through that particular bit of ground.
Using it costs nothing extra. What costs something is still using it weeks or months after the terrain that required it, has quietly changed underneath you, mistaking five kilometres at a time for how far you can actually see now, when really it's just how far you could see back when fifteen felt like too much.
I knew exactly which day I switched into that mode on the walk. I could tell you the kilometre marker if you asked.
That's the difference between it costing me a sore week, and it costing me a lot more than that, if I'd just kept walking that way indefinitely, never once checking whether the ground under my feet had changed.
Check the terrain. Not just the distance.
And thank the people who walk it with you. I couldn't have finished without mine. Somewhere out there, someone's running on a lot less energy than I ever will, permanently, with no finish line and no five kilometre markers of their own, and that's who all thirty five of mine were actually for.
