When The Bubble Disappeared

Day 74 began with the 13-kilometre stretch into Horsham, and it was properly horrid (the 13-km stretch that is, not Horsham!).

We had finished late the night before, and then I was out again at about 4:15am, heading into a cold, foggy Victorian morning. Cold, darkness and tiredness all seemed to be having a meeting in my legs, and by the time I reached the campervan I was feeling pretty average.

A short power nap helped. Daylight helped. A fresh hot coffee helped a lot.

That was enough to get me back into the day. I let people know I would be walking east along the Western Highway, somewhere between Horsham and Dadswells Bridge. In the fog and winter layers, the easiest way to recognise me was the yellow beanie.

The next targets fitted HAA’s preferred unit. Stawell was 12 parkruns away, Ballarat 36 and Melbourne just under 59. Halls Gap was on the sign too, 68 kilometres away and in the wrong direction. Halls Gap, you were lost to me.

Horsham also gave us its own answer to Keith’s Jeep on a Pole: a roadside garden packed with homemade signs, models and country-music tributes, including a small vehicle mounted high above it. I never worked out whether it was a private collection or something created for passing traffic, but it made me smile. HAA needed those things. When you are asking your body to do the same hard thing again and again, a strange garden or a silly sign can become far more useful than it has any right to be.

Later, another sign gave me an obvious (to me anyway) joke: if turning left would take me towards Longerenong then straight ahead sounded like the Shorterenong way to go…

The bigger moment came in the afternoon. People kept asking how on earth I could walk and run 5400 kilometres across Australia. The short answer was that I could not think about it that way. I had to break it down, step by step and session by session.

Most of the time I was only doing a 15 kilometre session, or a 10 kilometre session, sometimes just five. Finish that stretch. Have a break and a cup of tea. See to my feet, change shoes if I needed to, then head out for the next one. That small circle of attention was what I meant when I talked about being in a bubble.

The bubble kept my mind on the session I was in rather than the full distance ahead. I knew roughly how much distance was behind me and how much was still ahead, but I could not focus on all of it every day. I was thinking about the next rest stop, not the whole of Australia.

Every now and then the bubble disappeared and the scale of the crossing came back into view. That happened when I checked the route from where I was back to Perth. The shortest route the phone could find was at least 3000 kilometres, and even that missed out parts of what we had actually done, including going up through Port Augusta and around. My feet had covered substantially more than the neat line on the screen.

That was the wow moment. For once I was not looking at the next 5, 10 or 15 kilometres. I was looking back at more than 3000.

I did not want people to stop at “wow, amazing” though. That was never really the point of HAA. The point was what all those small steps said about change. Wherever you are in life, whatever your health or physical condition, you can move toward something different. You can chase a goal, face a fear, change your health, change your future. If no more mr fat guy could be out there in a yellow beanie, still moving east after more than 3000 kilometres, then the invitation was there for anyone.

With about 20 kilometres left, a roadside marker reading “A 75” put Ararat within reach the following day.

The late part of the day became unexpectedly social. At one rest stop, Shev and her son Rylan came out to meet us. Shev had been following the page and had a particular interest in what we were doing because she was a Heart Foundation nurse ambassador in Horsham, working to encourage lifestyle change in heart attack survivors. I signed the ribbon from an HAA virtual run medal, she very kindly made a donation, and I wished her well for her first full marathon in Melbourne later that year.

Then Melissa spotted the high-vis, made a U-turn, stopped for a chat and donated. Shev, Rylan and Melissa put warmth back into the afternoon.

By the time Grampians Edge came into view for the night, I had another 53.2 kilometres behind me. The owners gave us a discount on the site fee too, which was very much appreciated. The numbers were still huge, but the next few days were starting to sound oddly reachable: Stawell, Ararat, Ballarat, then a weekend in Melbourne.

In the morning the scale would shrink again: breakfast, out the door and the next session.

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