An Ignominious Failure

It was a simple idea as the best ideas are. Celebrate the winter solstice by seeing how far I could walk in the available daylight hours. Initially, I had thought I might do a “multi-sport” day: walk, paddle, boulder, perhaps bicycle although after riding Narooma mountain bike trails the day before my commitment to bicycling was limited by how tender my butt was. All the faffing involved in coming home to pick up bouldering pads and washing kayaking gear was enough to convince me that leaving home at dawn and returning at dusk and simply walking as far as I could was a much better and more elegant idea.

I left home at 6:30 am walked along the Headlands Track to Observation Point for the sunrise, so far so good, although my legs felt heavy and I had a tweaky knee. Heavy, as every endurance athlete knows is a euphemism for pretty shattered, and tweaks are those things that are best heeded unless you want some kind of tendon injury that will take forever to heal.

Five kilometres done by about 7:30 am when I swung by the house to change into shorts – I dislike walking in trousers. My back of the envelope calculation for the day was 40 kilometres so five kilometres was a mere sniffle in the context of the day ahead. The Headlands Track follows the coast south and goes up and over a series of small headlands separated by sandy beaches. There are lots of hills but none of them are significant, I’d call it an undulating track. I’ve been known to use the hills for sprint training.

The further I walked the more cramped my quadriceps became and the sharper the pain in my tweaky knee. I had a short stop at Garden Bay where a young lassie was drawing circles in the sand, decorating them with shells and stones and then dancing around them in some ancient fertility rite. This was modestly distracting but the climb out of Garden Bay – one of the few sections of the track which has not been upgraded with decent stairs was a bit ugly. My legs had cramped right up and I hobbled around the next headland, walking like a 90 year old in need of a bilateral hip replacement. At Malua Head I stumbled out the track to the lookout, on any normal day I’d be half an hour from the end of the track at McKenzies Beach but this was not a normal day.

Back on the main track, I stumbled down the stairs to Malua Bay and called Doug to come pick me up. An ignominious failure on par with the Erowal Bay affair in 2023 but I guess I can hang onto that old trope that trying and failing is better than not trying at all.