It’s 11 weeks out from the 2008 Kokoda Challenge and Team Insanity has finally had a training session with all four members present!

Our plan for the Labour Day Monday was to walk to Border Track between Lamington National Park and Binna Burra in the morning, then proceed over to the KC course to tackle the hill between Polly’s Kitchen and the Environmental Centre (otherwise known as Section 5).  We met up before dawn and headed south to switch cars with some of our support crew volunteers (who were also keen to walk the Border Track).  After a slight delay (apparently our support crew slept in? ) Team Insanity and our plus-one for the day, Stuart, headed out towards Lamington.

We started walking the Border Track just before 8am, and seemed to be walking quickly courtesy of Stuart leading at a rocketing pace.  Around 45 minutes later he cheeked his portable GPS to check how far we’d walked only to announce "you’re not going to like this".  Apparently the GPS thought we’d travelled about 1.5 km!  Thankfully a sign a little further along the trail indicated that we’d walked around 5 km (which felt more realistic)!

Our conversation topics varied greatly and included existing and proposed uses for the Nintendo Wii, how to leverage existing technology to improve and streamline the travel industry (it’s worth noting here that we all work in IT so it’s a perfectly normal topic to us) and the lack of flavour in energy bars.

A little before 10am we stopped to grab some snacks from our respective backpacks and while we were discussing the merits stopping to eat or continuing until we crossed paths with our Support Crew (who were walking in the opposite direction) they appeared around the next bend.  We exchanged car keys, chatted and ate for around 5-10 minutes before heading on our way.

We shortly encountered the Mt Merino turnoff, and a sign indicating we had 9.9km to go and later when the path diverged once more we selected one of the trails figuring that it was probably the right one, and even it it wasn’t it would still lead us to Binna Burra eventually.  Our path followed a creek, crossing it many times over the next few kilometres and prompting some of our group to ponder how many times we’d have to cross it.  Things to note for next time: it’s just as important to watch for head-high branches as it is for tree roots, and shoes dry out remarkably quickly after being dunked in a creek.  Along the way there were some excellent waterfall photo opportunities, but when we reached a lookout on the edge of the valley we checked the map only to find out that we were at the Coomera Falls lookout and that we probably had at least another hour to walk before we made it to the end of the trail.

We continued on.  The trail was at little muddier that we’d seen at the Lamington end, but perhaps this was partly due to it being closer to midday than 8am and that there were more people out on the walks.  But eventually we made it back to the carpark, sore knees, blistered feet and all.  We weren’t able to work out a complete distance that we walked, but we figure it was around 25km rather than the expected 21.1km of the Border Track and taking 4hrs 50min, it was a decent training session.

We discussed plans for the afternoon over lunch.  Wayne had been having knee trouble for the last hour or two so we changed from our original plan of walking the Polly’s Kitchen hill (which required two cars) to walking the Waterfall Creek loop so that he could head home.

So on to Numinbah Valley we went.  If you ignore the roads, it’s only a short jump to where we wanted to be, however there’s only one road into Binna Burra, so it took us an hour to reach our destination of the Numinbah Environmental Centre (although we did get to drive past parts of the KC2008 course).

We set out on the Waterfall Creek loop (otherwise known as Section 6) a little before 2pm, and despite changing into dry socks and semi-dry shoes it only took me one one creek crossing to end up with wet feet again.  This section of the KC course is known for it’s creek crossings – 8 in total, despite the course notes indicating that there are 7, but for the first five or so kilometres it’s otherwise fairly straightforward.

At the far end of the loop is a nasty hill – not the worst hill on the KC course, but bad nonetheless.  Brock, continuing to display a concerning amount of enthusiasm despite insisting that he needs more practice to get "fitter", bounded up the hill, while Stuart, Shane and I plodded our way to the top.  By this point Shane was experiencing knee pain and was finding downhill sections tough – unfortunate seeing as the modified loop for this year’s course contained quite a few steep downhills through the next few kilometres that lead us to the Numinbah Hall (the new major checkpoint).   The last few kilometres leading to the Hall are part of the new Gold Coast Great Walk so it’s fairly easy to just follow the arrows.  We arrived at the Hall at around 4.05pm which left us a little over an hour until sunset so despite being fairly worn out by this point we decided to keep going and rest when we made it back to the car (which was probably around 5km by road, and a little more than that following the KC course map.

The remaining 6 or so kilometres of the loop can be described as flat-ish (up to and including Chesters Rd), a long uphill (to the top of the ridgeline), flat-ish (along the ridgeline), and downhill (back to road level).  The notes say that there’s a trail from the edge of the ridge that leads back to the right of the ridge, and I remember something to this effect from walking it last year.  The only problem is that it’s one of those trails which are hard to spot and we couldn’t find it.  It probably also didn’t help that I didn’t know where it was to begin with – last year we were lead down from the ridge by one of our "added" team members.  The main trail does lead down off the ridge to the left, however, and even though it deposited us on the road just south of where we wanted to be, at least we knew where we were – a good thing considering it was just before sunset so we were already losing light fairly quickly.

Once we hit the bitumen Brock and Stuart started jogging towards the car.  Shane and I did what anyone else would have done: we walked, arriving back at the car at 5.10pm, making our time for the 13km Waterfall Creek loop 2 hrs 45 mins.

Complete training session stats: 38km, 7hrs 35mins.