Otherwise known as: “The never ending pain that wouldn’t end but then suddenly ended leaving me in pain” .

Note: Gallery of ouchiness is down the bottom.

We did it! We finished the Oxfam Trailwalker! 100 kilometers in 29 hours and 45 minutes. Not a bad effort if I say so myself. We’ll have to make sure that we beat that next year when we do it again……….

Ahahahahahaha! Sorry! Did I say “do it again”? Sorry, I mean’t to say “NEVER DO IT AGAIN EVEN IF PAID LOTS OF MONEY BECAUSE IT WAS LITERALLY HELL ON EARTH!” Yeah that is what I meant. Sorry about that slip up there.

This morning, after I woke up at 08:00 after falling asleep on sat at 17:30, I started to think about how I could properly communicate to you the experience that is doing Oxfam Trailwalker. It was difficult to think properly because my knee joints and other parts of my body had fused together into solid lumps. These lumps, apart from practically guaranteeing me a role in any movie or theatre production requiring the authentic portrayal of Cro-Magnon Man, also had the annoying tendancy to transmit oversized packets of, what we in the endurance walking game call, “ouchy pain pain” to my brain unit whenever I attempted to hobble anywhere. Funnily enough it was this pain that ended being the very thing that helped me explain the event to you… Spooky!

Five easy ways to reproduce the authentic Oxfam Trailwalker experience in the comfort of your own home:

1) Become old and infirm

Getting severe 8th stage arthritis in your knees and other joints is the only way to simulate the whole ‘knees-fused-into-a-giant-pain-ball’ thing I am talking about. If is what Daniel Johns felt like when he had is crazy random arthritis issues a couple of years ago then, shit, that would have sucked.

2) Rub various tender parts of your body with coarse grade sandpaper. For a couple of hours.

The human body is an amazing thing. The problem is that it wasn’t designed to do anything for 29+ hours straight. To recreate the amazing feeling of walking for 100kms you need to reproduce the effects of pants, socks, shirts, etc. rubbing all over your bits for that amounts of time.

Women, rub between your thighs and buttocks. Men, rub thighs, buttocks and the seam of your balls. Yeah you know what I am talking about. Who the f**k puts a seam there anyway? It’s not like I can unzip my ball sack and take them out or anything (although of course that would be awesome).

3) Smash a glass into pieces. Then put the broken pieces of glass in your socks, put your shoes on and walk around all day.

Going for a light jog after putting the glass in your socks will add that extra smidgeon of realism but it’s up to you really.

Seriously, my little toes started hurting 5kms in. Which was annoying because I had walked 35 kms a couple of weeks before with no issues. By Checkpoint 4 it like walking around with buckets of acid attached to my feet. After getting my blisters popped by the podiatrists and bandaged it was like walking around with buckets of glass on my feet… that someone had poured acid into because they were using all of the other recepticles in their mad scientist laboritory to store Skittles. I don’t know why they would do that but I am sure it has happened somewhere. That didn’t make sense really but you can see what I mean.

Anyway by Checkpoint 7 I was fine. The other awesome thing about the human body is that if you damage all your nerves enough your brain just interprets the pain as a sort of tingling instead. I had a lot of tingling going on interpersed with the most pain I have ever felt. For about 12 hours.

4) Get a meat tenderiser and smash your feet with it.

Just do it. It makes it more ‘authentic’.

5) Stay up for 29 hours and 45 minutes while doing all of the above.

I was actually fairly ok with staying up all night because I am an internet addict that stays up past 12 every night reading the crappy comments on the crappy articles on crappy social news sites. Also I drank a constant supply of V and the exercise kept me pumped. Not to mention the constant pain signals eminating from every part of my body below my neck.

The main issue for me was stopping at the checkpoints. I knew that as soon as my pain level dropped below 400 or I lay down I would pass out within about 5 seconds. Luckily it was fairly easy to do a quick series of star jumps whenever I felt tired to renew the pain and keep me alert.

So there you go. An easy way to reproduce the Oxfam Trailwalker in the comfort of your own home! Please feel free to follow these steps to run your own min Trailwalker event but if you do remember to donate at least a grand to Oxfam to faithfully reproduce the fundraising aspect.

Think about it. Somewhere in the world some poor child is currently performing their own Trailwalker. But not for the kudos of finishing it and not with the training or support/equipment we had, probably just to get water for their family. That is why we did it! And that is why you should donate!

A massive thanks to those who donated to Team Viper. Also thanks heaps to Steve and Suze for their awesome support through the day and night. We couldn’t have done it without you guys!

Last but not least enormous respect and thanks to all the other members of Team Viper - John, Megan and Rox. You guys rock! Whooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!! (at last I don’t need to train on Sundays!)

LOL.toTheMax()