It started to hit Andrew how close he was to the finish line, and how special that would be after having no permanent home other than what was packed in his pram for the last year and a half. But, like other times when he had too much time to think, he wasn’t sure who and how many he wanted to be there or walk in with him. He’d spoken to Kane the night before, which sparked him to record this: ‘I spoke to Foley last night and it got me thinking. Wednesday is going to be the most special day in my life, except for the day my baby is born. I thought about reaching the bridge and I only want people there who really want to be there. From where I was last year, the lowest point of my life, one of the only things that would make me feel better was when I spoke to the boys or family when they would ring me. I didn’t want to speak at times and wouldn’t answer the phone, but the point is when they rung it made me feel like someone cares that I’m out here and made me feel better. They’re the ones I’d like to be there.’
As he approached Taree a young bloke hopped out of a car and screamed, ‘Are you Cad?’
‘Yeah, mate,’ Andrew replied.
‘I know you – you’re famous!’
It turned out he was a good mate of Redmond and Leon Stephens, among Cad’s best friends. Jack asked Cad back to his house to sleep but Andrew was determined to make it to Taree, and that that would not happen until early the next morning. Jack said he’d still be awake and remarkably picked him up at 2 am and dropped him back to the highway at 10 am next morning, after getting bags of ice for Cad to have an ice bath to try to ease the pain in his left knee. Andrew had a profound discussion about fate with Jack, who had had a fascinating life and once lived on the street, and recorded: ‘A year ago I believed everything was planned out for us, but it makes more sense what Jack said – sure there’s fate but fate puts forks in the road in front of you and you chose your own path, and you have to make your own decisions. I think deciding to do the walk was a fork in the road for me. I don’t want to get too deep but there’s something there.’
Later that day Cad decided he was doing his ‘Triple Marathon Madness’ – walking the equivalent of three marathons, in one hit, in an effort to create a spurt of donations. He hit Facebook seeking pledges for donations and several responded with promises of $1 per kilometre, while others committed to doing celebrity walks with him along the marathon route. The most special commitment came from Steve and Jessica Browne, his friends who he was going to join in Karratha for work after his walk; they offered ten cents for every kilometre he walked from Day 1 to the finish – over $1500! And they came good – an exceptional gesture from a couple who supported Cad all the way.
Josh Simpson was heading up the coast to Forster for a birthday party and arranged to walk part of the leg with Cad – his goal to do 100 kilometres. Billy Holloway, back living on the east coast, completed the reunion of the crew from Western Australia, and Cad’s mate Kaine Dobbs and uncle Ken, in Newcastle for Ken’s cousin Gary’s fiftieth birthday that weekend, also joined in for some part.
Before that he had a family celebrity walk session from a rest area 10 kilometres south of Bulahdelah, which he reached at 2 am on Day 530, with his aunty and uncle, Alison and Wayne Woodward, and their daughters, Kylie and Megan, and Megan’s partner, Matt, who had worked with Andrew as a carpenter for a while, all joining hm. That night Matt Delaney and his son Lincoln were to camp overnight with Cad at Karuah, from where he was to start his Triple Marathon Madness effort.
Andrew woke at 9 am in a bad way, very fatigued and his knee extremely sore, but didn’t want to let on to his fellow walkers who had made such an effort to join him. With Wayne driving behind, the others walked with him until 3 pm, although having some breaks (except Matt, who walked the whole way with Cad). Kylie eventually rode a pushbike with him until her husband, Scott, picked her up. Cad limped in alone to Karuah with Matt Delaney picking him up at the nominated spot which was 128.2 kilometres from the Kariong turnoff of the F3 motorway, starting point for the triple-marathon distance set for the next day. At that stage Cad still thought he could walk the motorway, only to find, quite dramatically, that he couldn’t. It appears he calculated the distance incorrectly – a marathon is 42.195 kilometres; three times that is 126.6 kilometres.
At the end of the day Andrew could feel he was almost home with all the sudden company. Andrew, Matt and Lincoln slept in Matt’s tent, Lincoln in fits of laughter at how quickly Cad slipped into a megaphone-like drawn-out snoring routine. A potential good night’s sleep was further complicated by the air mattress Matt brought going dead flat, despite Cad trying to inflate it before daybreak. Let’s just say he hadn’t had a particularly appropriate preparation for a sixteen-hour, 128-kilometre slog when he woke at 6 am!
DAYS 532–533, 10–11 JUNE 2012
TRIPLE MARATHON MADNESS: KARUAH TO OURIMBAH (127.4 KM)
It was Sunday morning, 10 June, on the Queen’s Birthday holiday weekend 2012. After bacon, eggs, sausages and spaghetti with the Delaneys, Cad ditched his tent, mattress and whatever was not needed in the pram for Matt to take to the Central Coast as this had been his last night of camping out. The ‘marathon madness’ started at 8am. After doing a phone interview with the Newcastle Herald and posing for a photograph, Cad walked for five hours by himself in brilliant sunshine until he was joined by Josh and Billy, well equipped with wet-weather gear.
They walked uninterrupted for two hours down the F3, joined by Ken and Dobbsy. By dark Bill was limping badly, and sipping beer through a tube was unable to temper his pain. Two policemen pulled over and questioned whether it was safe for so many of them walking on the freeway because they weren’t visible in the dark, which resulted in some ‘attitude’ from the boys as Cad was wearing a high-vis vest and had reflectors and torchlights. After driving off and allowing the boys to continue, the police returned ten minutes later, and the least sympathetic one relayed that his sergeant had told him to order them off the freeway immediately. Despite Cad pleading for them to be allowed to walk 2 kilometres to the next exit (Freemans Drive), the cop refused to accommodate them and told them to backtrack to the previous exit (Palmers Road), adding an extra 8 kilometres to walk. That fired everyone up, but after continuing for a couple of hours along the dark Freemans Drive their spirits improved, thanks to Billy entertaining the others with his funny stories.
By 2 am Billy was done and called his partner to rescue him; he’d walked just under 60 kilometres (59.2, but there was no way Cad would not let him claim a 60-club membership). Ken, who showed enormous resilience for a fifty-year-old, was next to drop off, at Morisset, so it was down to Josh, Dobbsy and Cad. It started to pour rain and, as Cad recorded, ‘things started to get a bit solemn’. ‘Josh was struggling but he wouldn’t pack it in. I said to him, “You have done 70 kilometres, mate, that’s an awesome effort, it took me a long while to get up to 70 kilometres. How about you pack it in?” He told me, “Don’t start blowing smoke up my arse, I’m doing 100.”’
After reaching Wyee (via Wyee Road), Dobbsy told Cad he didn’t have many more steps in him so he called Lucy to pick him up, and Josh reluctantly made the call to also quit; it was 16 kilometres to Wyong and they didn’t know what was in between. They were in awe that Andrew was able to keep going, considering he had started about 28 kilometres before them.
‘I was surprised they lasted so long,’ Cad said. ‘I said, “Thanks, boys, and goodbye,” and pretty quickly put my game face on – this is the mental bit. It was pissing down and I had to get focused. I’d done around 100 kilometres by this time, and was getting a bit sore but wasn’t too bad. I walked into the pitch black and thought I knew where I was going. It was nearly 5 am.
‘By this stage I was soaked through, I was cold and I could feel my singlet, shirt and flanno sticking to my skin. It was too wet to get the iPod out so here I was left with my own thoughts, no music and no one to talk to. I was digging deep. It wasn’t my legs killing me, I was just exhausted. My eyelids were getting really heavy. At times I was
walking through ankle-deep torrents of water, I could feel it splashing up my legs, and water was running over my feet and my shoes were squelching. Dawn started to break and I hit the wall big time, almost falling asleep while walking. I could feel my eyes closing and my head would drop and I’d snap and wake myself up, just like when you’re on the lounge watching TV at bedtime or on a plane. I kept thinking, “I’m going to wake up on the ground with a smashed face in the gravel.”
‘I’d yell top of my voice – “C’mon … yaaah … keep going … c’mon!” I kept doing it every thirty seconds. Sleep deprivation was setting in, I thought I was seeing people and hearing dogs and cars but there was nothing there; I was wigging out pretty hard. I stopped and had three No-Doze tablets but they didn’t help much. I just kept trudging along, slapping myself in my face, but I was struggling to stay awake.’
That’s when a car pulled over: it was Wayne and Kim Simpson, with Dobbsy and Josh in the back. Kaine hopped out to see how Cad was but Josh wasn’t capable of moving. ‘Kim came up to me and said, “Gee you’re a strong man.” I was delusional by then; I was laughing to myself over nothing. They gave me a pie and coffee. My hands were frozen. I had wet gloves on; I put them on after the boys had left. I found Josh’s glove in the back of the pram; he thought he’d lost it when he’d had a piss. All I could say to Wayne was, “Tell Josh I’ve got his glove,” and I kept laughing and just repeated it again and again. Wayne gave me another coffee. Dobbsy said, “I thought you were going Sparks Road?” I said “Yeah, I am,” but he said, “Well, you’ve missed it, man.”’ Cad had stayed on Hue Hue Road, west of the motorway, instead of joining the old Pacific Highway to the east.
Wayne pointed Cad to the freeway, where he was going to run the gauntlet for about 3 kilometres from the Wyong Road turn-off to Ourimbah, probably halving the distance compared to sticking to the back roads, but Cad was so disorientated he kept walking over the freeway along Wyong Road, past Westfields Shoppingtown, to Tuggerah and had to walk down the old highway to Ourimbah. Being forced to take the non-freeway route since the night before had at least seen him cover enough extra distance to achieve his desired kilometres in Ourimbah, although he had no idea how far he’d walked until he stopped at McDonald’s at Tuggerah.
With no phone battery left, he searched for a payphone and I can only guess at his frustration when the first he found was out of order. The second phone gave him no dial tone, but it accepted his money and he called me, hoping I might be able to hear him while he couldn’t hear me. Fortunately, I could and he said that if I could hear his voice could I pick him up at the Mobil service station at Ourimbah. His words were: ‘Dad, I don’t know if you can hear me but I’m really fucked. Can you meet me at Ourimbah? I’m wet and cold and need some dry clothes.’ I hitched the trailer onto the car and headed for Ourimbah.
About the same time, my sister Alison, who lived nearby, had decided to look for him and she was trailing him in her four-wheel drive when I arrived. Alan Shaw (we were staying with the Shaws after selling our place) came too, and dropped me off to walk the last couple of kilometres with Cad; I was thinking it would help lift his spirits and get him to the finish line. I was wrong; he was in no mood for any conversation, and certainly told me so. He was on the edge and it gave me my first real-life taste of the condition he must have often been in many times, and it was confronting. At 10.15 am his triple dose of madness came to an end, after twenty-six hours of nonstop walking.
Just after I took him to my mother’s place, where he was about to hop into the shower, an NBN Television reporter called saying he was on the F3 looking for Andrew; they’d gone on the Newcastle Herald report that he would arrive on the coast mid-morning. They were insistent that they get an interview and vision of him walking with the pram, so he relented and had to get back into his saturated clothes and walk along the main road, Brisbane Water Drive, several times. ‘I was surprised I made any sense at all after how I felt earlier in the morning.’
All Andrew wanted to do was have a shower and then a sleep, but when he went back inside my mother’s place my sister Robyn was there and had run herself a bath and – can you believe it? – the hot water had run out! (My mother has a habit of turning the hot water switch off if she’s away for any length of time.) Andrew called me to pick him up and take him back to the Shaws at nearby Koolewong. He enjoyed a long hot shower and a snack, then went back to my mother’s and staggered into bed. What a day … make that a day and a half.
DAY 534, 12 JUNE 2012
FILLING THE GAP IN SYDNEY: BLAKEHURST TO THE BRIDGE (21 KM)
By next day the media interest had stepped up and Andrew was looking to join a panel on the late-night Channel Ten news, hours after finishing his walk, but decided it was too late to keep going. Channel Seven’s breakfast show Sunrise also wanted him to go on the program the morning after he made the finish line and they were happy to provide accommodation the night before, so he elected to do that as it allowed him more rest (Channel Ten still covered him crossing the finish line).
Mid-morning I dropped him back to Blakehurst on the Princes Highway in southern Sydney, the spot where it all began 534 days earlier, from where he back-tracked to the harbour bridge where he wanted to finish the walk in glory; this leg necessary so he would cover every metre from where he’d started almost eighteen months earlier.
When we arrived I said to him, ‘I remember this spot like it was yesterday.’
Andrew replied, ‘Me too, and I was stressing out.’
‘I certainly remember that too, Cad, don’t worry,’ I smiled.
He walked, without the pram and thus without the stares, to halfway along the Sydney Harbour Bridge, where he made a red line with electrical tape that would be his finish mark two days later. Then he jumped on a train at Wynyard and headed back north to continue from where he’d left off. He was planning to walk 11 kilometres from Hornsby to Berowra, the northern point of Sydney’s sprawling suburbs, in order to fill in another gap and make the next day shorter, but was far too tired. After waking on the train with the driest mouth, he was sure he’d snored all the way to Woy Woy.
DAY 535, 13 JUNE 2012
OURIMBAH TO HORNSBY (69 KM)
I picked Cad up at 6 am and took him Ourimbah, where he’d finished his Triple Marathon Madness. From there he had 91 kilometres to the finish line overlooking Sydney’s glorious harbour. This was to be his last long day, but he could at least do it without pushing Redge once he cleared West Gosford; he thought he’d have it with him, for show only, until then to attract some donations. He did an interview on local radio station Star FM, which prompted a few donations along the way.
After offloading the pram to me and climbing the hill from West Gosford to Kariong, it was back to the old Pacific Highway through Mount White, Cowan and Berowra to Hornsby. On the northern outskirts of Sydney he called Thai Airlines to check flights and prices after finally deciding that he’d definitely head to Thailand the following Monday – four days after finishing his walk – to rest and convert his diaries into book form.
He caught the train back to Koolewong and had dinner with Chris and me and the Shaws, and I took him to Point Clare, where he stayed at his grandmother’s retirement villa (she was still in hospital) to prepare, alone, for the 452nd day en route around the vast continent of Australia. (It would actually be Day 536 of walking, but he’d also had eighty-four days away from the trek: in Thailand, in Fiji and back on the Central Coast for the Dobbs’ wedding and Simmo’s fundraiser.)
DAY 536, 14 JUNE 2012
THE FINISH: HORNSBY TO SYDNEY HARBOUR BRIDGE (22 KM)
Cad was entitled to be absolutely exhausted. He had been wanting this day to come for so long. As it drew near, the distress and weariness caused by the torturous journey had largely subsided and was overtaken by pride, satisfaction and exhilaration at what he had achieved. Only he truly knew what an achievement this was – to be facing his final few kilometres almost eighteen months after he’d taken his
first steps.
He’d endured the army of flies near the Victorian border, terrible shin pain in Tasmania, the isolation and endless horizon of the Nullarbor, where his mind first started to show more frailty than his body, the bitter cold and rain of southern Western Australia, the months when he had the company of old mates and new to give him enjoyment in Perth and further north, the detours to Fiji and Thailand either side of the arduous and life-sapping Kimberley, the near misses with speeding road trains, and the single-minded sprint home from Darwin.
The stats of his three and a half month ‘get home quick’ journey from Darwin provide compelling evidence of a super-human effort. He walked 2493 kilometres from Darwin to Townsville in fifty-five days, averaging a tick under 49 kilometres a day with only four days off; he increased that to 54.3 kilometres a day for the twenty-five days it took him to travel the 1359 kilometres from Townsville to Brisbane (with only one day off), and then somehow managed an epic 62.4 kilometres a day from Brisbane to Sydney (999 kilometres) over fifteen days without a day off (except for an afternoon sleep after completing the Triple Marathon Madness). That was the equivalent of a marathon and a half a day!
I think it was Josh Simpson who drove him to Hornsby, where he met Kim and Wayne Simpson, his cousin Matt Ruff, Redmond Stephens, Kaine Dobbs, Adam Martin and Tristan Norris. Along the way to the bridge, they were been joined by Chris and me, and later by Matt Delaney. A few others who wanted to join him couldn’t get out of work.
Of those who were there, Josh held a special place. For all the people who had said they were in awe of what Cad was doing and pledged that they would try to join him en route for days or weeks, his father included, Josh was the only one who had actually followed through. He’d walked over 500 kilometres by Cad’s side, first crossing the country to do so on the west coast and now for the second time on the east coast, right by his side at the emotional ending. He was the only one had witnessed what it took for Andrew to get to the finish line. Cad understood, respected and appreciated Josh’s commitment; I know this because he told me.
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