No Power Past Yellowdine

Day 11 started with a practical warning.

We were heading for a night without power, device charging would be limited, phone signal was patchy, and online updates might be sparse. The tracker would keep doing what it could. I hoped to add another 55 kilometres in a few sessions.

That was not a grand wilderness decision. There just was not a powered option close enough to make sense, so the overnight plan became simple: keep moving, park up off the road, and manage what needed managing.

We ended up with 60.3 kilometres for the day, the longest confirmed day so far. I think the plan had been around 55, but I felt okay enough to push on so we could stop at the place we would start from the next morning. That mattered. Finishing at the overnight spot meant no driving forward or backward at the end of the day, and no morning reset. When I was ready, I could just head out from the van and start walking.

That ability to push on did not come from nowhere. The rest and massage treatment at Southern Cross had made a real difference, and things were beginning to click a little. I was not suddenly invincible, but the body was learning, the crew systems were improving, and the day had enough in it to keep going.

The previous night, Ols had cooked steak pie, mash potato, and veg. It sounds small, but meals like that mattered. There is a kind of love in someone making sure you eat properly when your job is to put your body through the same argument every day.

The day itself became simpler: signs, scrub, sky, tracks, warning notices, the odd roadside joke, the occasional burst of crew silliness, and then more walking. There was a “get orf my land” moment, Ols doing his fully fledged undiluted Pom thing with his shirt off in the sun, and a strange roadside mark that was obviously not a roo, so naturally became a joke about trendy barefoot shoes.

That was the texture of the day. Not a single grand drama, but a long sequence of small things that kept the mind busy while the legs did the real work.

Somewhere in all of that, we crossed 500 kilometres. I noticed milestones the whole way: distances on signs, place names appearing for the first time, “halfway to” markers, and the mental arithmetic of how many parkruns were left. Five hundred kilometres mattered, even if there was no time to stand around being profound about it.

This was also the first taste of what the later remote sections would ask of us. No power overnight. Limited recharge. Patchy signal. Gas cooking. Wet wipe washes. A body that had to be maintained carefully. Feet that needed constant attention. A support crew learning how to keep the systems going when the usual comforts dropped away.

Looking back, this is the point where the support rhythm feels as though it was properly forming. Food, Tailwind, shoes, socks, batteries, check-ins, rest breaks, feet, dinner, sleep, repeat. None of it was glamorous, but all of it mattered.

Even the walking structure was changing. This was not yet the neat later rhythm of 15, 10, 5, lunch, 12, 8, and 5, but it was no longer just even blocks either. The sessions came out as roughly 15, 20, 13, 8, and 5 kilometres. HAA systems tended to arrive like that: not as a perfect plan, but as something learned while we were already doing it.

That night I thanked Gav at Tailwind Nutrition Australia for the bucket of unflavoured Tailwind, and Muz at Runwest as well. It is easy to skip past sponsor mentions, but Tailwind was not decorative. It was part of the daily machinery that kept me moving.

Day 11 feels like one of those bridge days: less dramatic than the campervan saga, less communal than Southern Cross, but important because we were learning how the next version of hard was going to work.

The first week had taught us wet trails, late finishes, highway anxiety, catch-up kilometres, and a leaking van. This day started teaching us power management, signal gaps, long dry stretches, and the need to keep the body fuelled when comfort dropped away.

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