Somewhere before the finish line, the body starts to break down. Joanne Walker knows this well.
The pain begins in the feet, moves to the knees, and eventually makes it feel impossible to move the legs any further.
After 30 hours without sleep, running alone through the cold darkness of the Megalong Valley, the mind can break too.
Walker recalls swerving uncontrollably, unsure of where she was going. Yet she kept going, promising herself she would have the best hair on the trail.
Walker is one of over 8,000 runners across five events at Ultra-Trail Australia, the largest trail running event in the country.
She is tackling the "miler" — 100 miles, covering more than 163 kilometers with over 7,000 meters of elevation gain and loss.
Every runner has a different reason for taking on such suffering. Common themes emerge: nothingness, absence, freedom.
Many cite Haruki Murakami, who wrote that he runs to "acquire a void." Walker finds beauty in that simplicity, where everything returns to basics.
In the lead-up, she feels nervous, experiencing impostor syndrome when looking at the course map and elevation profile.
Those thoughts can creep back when exhaustion makes every step a herculean task.
The race begins before dawn on Friday at Scenic World in Katoomba. By Saturday at 11 a.
m. , she has been running for 30 hours.
Her GPS watch buzzes at the 117-kilometer mark, and an aid station awaits.
Her partner, Cam Pond, and children, Ben (14) and Sidney (11), have flown from New Zealand to support her.
Pond stays up at night checking her GPS.
At the Katoomba aquatic centre aid station, Ben lovingly puts drops in his mother's eyes, and Sidney wipes her face with baby wipes.
Ben prepares baked potatoes and chicken soup for her at different stations.
Walker looks like Rocky Balboa between rounds — weary, covered in sweat and dirt, but with fight left.
Guardian Australia joins her for the next 24 kilometers, from the aquatic centre to the Queen Victoria hospital aid station.
Just after the 120-kilometer mark, she descends 1,000 steps into the Grand Canyon track. Water trickles down the walls, ferns pop up from pools.
She calls it "flatlining" — a break from life's constant beeping, where only the next hill or aid station matters.
Wildflowers and waterfalls guide her through the landscape. As the last light fades, she crawls up stairs into the mountain mist.
Doubt creeps in. "I'm just having a bit of a pity party in my head," she says.
Her feet are so swollen that shoelaces cut into her skin. "My feet look like sausages."
She prefers climbs over descents to protect her knees. At times, the pain becomes so intense that her eyes cannot cope with any more stimulation.
She lies down on the trail, closes her eyes, and finds enough strength to move forward for another five or ten minutes.
Walker enters what she calls "the shuffle" — not quite a run, not quite a walk, but enough to cover ground.
Deep in anguish, she offers a revelation: "Maybe the suffering is the point. Maybe we create these suffer-fests because we have made our lives too easy for ourselves."
Family Support and the Final Climb
Though 82% of this year's miler runners are male, women are making strides in trail running. Rachel Entrekin recently beat all comers in the Cocodona 250.
Walker embraces that mantra: "Why not me?"
She started running because she didn't want to be a "fat bride," but now she celebrates what her body can do.
She talks with her daughter about strength and being comfortable in one's own skin.
Back on the trail, Walker runs through pure blackness with 140 kilometers behind her. The final aid station is meters away, where Cam, Ben, and Sidney wait.
She will run another 20 kilometers through the night to the finish line.
"If you took my family out of the equation, I am 99% certain I would not have finished," she says.
Just after midnight, after tackling 951 steps straight up, a medal is placed around her neck.
Her watch shows nearly 44 hours on the trail, with less than two hours of rest.
"I just grabbed my kids' hands and they ran over the finish line with me," she says.
"In the really dark moments, I had come to peace with not finishing, so to cross the finish line with my kids made it even sweeter."
