Not again.

I could hear the footsteps behind me, quicker than mine, and as he passed me I offered a friendly, ‘good work mate’.

I did not get the response I expected.

‘No, it’s not ‘good work mate’ - you don’t want to see me, I’m the sweep so you need to get your arse moving’

Shit.

‘You’ve got 22 minutes to get into and out of the next checkpoint or I’m binning you.’

Let’s get some context.

The next CP was the 50km mark in a 100km trail ultra - OscarsHut2Hut in the Victorian High Alpine Country.

During an Aussie summer where every stick is a snake until proven otherwise, last year the daytime temp hit 36C (97F) before a storm with over 200 lightening strikes. We were in for some type 2 fun.

Notoriously hard and technical trail with subjectively and objectively very tough cutoff times across a multitude of checkpoints.

Up until this point I was happy with my progress, keeping a solid pace on complex terrain and keeping my CP stops under a few minutes.

The fact that the sweep (the official who runs last and if you fall behind are ejected from the race) had arrived absolutely floored me along with my feelings, hopes and dreams.

And 22 minutes sounds luxurious for a km of trail but this is no ordinary trail - my Garmin on the regular that day had reported my current pace as ‘are you sitting down?’

I hit the CP in time and the sweep gave me and the two other guys present the riot act.

‘It’s 9kms to the next checkpoint and you’ve got 3 hours to get there and not a minute more. Now that sounds fine but in that 9kms you need to traverse the ‘Saw’ and get up and over Mt Speculation, that’s a 700m net gain. You will have to hammer’

So it was time to either throw the toys out the pram and bemoan unfair cutoffs or light the fires and kick the tires - so I charged out and hit it hard.

The ‘Saw’ is the Crosscut Saw - here’s a pic courtesy of We Are Explorers.

And Mt Spec was no joke.

I threw everything I had in the tank at it.

And arrived at the Mt Speculation CP exactly 8 minutes too late.

“Is that it am I out?” I breathlessly asked the volunteer manning the Aid Station.

“Did the sweep give the riot act?”

“Yeah he said I’d be out…”

“He’s the time sweep, it’s his job to be angry and get you moving. You’re out in the sense that you can’t push through the full night to finish, you have to do a mandatory bivvy at the next CP - you’ll be there by midnight, you have to be up and on the trails again by 5am and you can finish the job. Oh and just for reference, people who push all the way to that CP and have to bivvy have a 90% failure rate the next day, but I’m sure you’ll be fine.”

Shit.

Redemption is a fickle beast - I had a lot riding on this race. I had attempted a different race across the same countryside years ago and been DNF’d due to a time cutoff at this exact spot. Literally this exact CP. I’d come to right a wrong (in a personal sense) and was within a few minutes of suffering the same fate - in the same damn spot. Not again….

But if I was honest, If I had been cut there and then, 8 minutes late, my body would’ve been fine with it, because I was utterly cooked.

It was then that I noticed all the athletes sitting around - turns out this was carnage central. Six athletes waiting for evac and another 3 coming in behind me, all out of contention. due to exhaustion or injury.

“Even if you wanted to quit here there’s no point, you’ll walk out faster than we can drive out so you may as well carry on”

And so I did.

Under moonlight I pushed on to the Kings Hut CP at the 72km mark, rolled in at 1230am (having started at 5am the day prior) set out my bivvy on the dusty hard wooden floor of the colonial style hut and tried to sleep for a few hours - as my legs spasmed and jumped and the four other athletes present combined to produce a biological symphony of bodily function noises.

4am up and getting sorted - ‘Ok folks, it’s 7 km to the next CP and I’m not going to sugarcoat it, 6.9km of that is basically straight up. The other 100m is the very fresh river crossing you’re about to do - Good Morning!”

I spent a total of 25 hours on my feet accumulating my 100km, 5700m (almost 19,000ft) of elevation gain and the same in descent - the vast majority on what could be loosely described as ‘single track’

Destroyed a perfectly good pair of Hoka Cliftons and according to my Garmin managed to produce almost 22 litres of sweat under an Aussie summer Sun.

But most importantly, I did another hard thing.

Added another chapter to the body of work that is me and my story.

Yes I wanted to quit, yes I questioned why I do these things, yes I thought that perhaps my time of doing hard things had come to an end.

But then I stood on the summit of Mt Buller at 97km mark to get my final book page as ‘proof of summit’ - I grabbed the book and ripped out the page - it was a title page and said ‘Into the wilderness’ .

Turns out perhaps, there are still some chapters to write - because I was holding a title page - and that’s a start not an end.