Welcome to the Team Fibonacci training blog.  Team Fibonacci is competing in the Kokoda Challenge in July 2009.  The Kokoda Challenge is a 96km charity bush walk around the Gold Coast hinterland with a 39 hour time limit.  It is done in teams of 4 who can have a support crew that will meet them at 5 checkpoints along the way for food, water and encouragement.  Team Fibonacci’s vague plan is to jog the down hill sections during the day, walk through the night and hopefully break the 24 hour barrier.

Team Fibonacci is made up of a group of friends who meet at work a little over 8 years ago.  Back then we were all much more interested in drinking and fun than exercise and endurance events … ah, how times change …  Three of us completed the challenge last year as part of Team Insanity in a time of 26.5 hours, while our fearless leader finished in 30 hours the year before as part of Team Vodka with a couple of members of our support crew.

So who are the individuals…

Our support crew is backing up from doing a stellar job last year supporting Team Insanity last year and is composed of Dennis Mellican, Jenesse Valentine and Matthew Moores.

So it may have occurred to you that you need to be rather fit to cover 96kms on foot in under 24 hours.  You might also think that you’d probably need to start training more that 7 weeks out from the event.  Well, you’d be right.  In fact we’ve been training for the last 3 months – we’ve just been really slack when it comes to writing it up.  As a team we’ve done various sections of the actual course and wandered around Mt Coot-tha too many times.  On top of this we’ve all been running at lunch times, rock climbing and several other things to get the general fitness up.

Below is a brief summary of our team training sessions so far:

15th February – Nerang State Forest

Our first training session was a loop through the Nerang State Forest.  It’s about a 25km wander and it’s fairly flat.  There is only one serious hill, but it’s not very long.  All in all, a nice gentle (but fairly long) introduction to training.

22th February – Mt Coot-tha

Our first of many wanders around Mt Coot-tha.  We did a loop from Channel 9 out to Brisbane Forest Park, down to the Gap Creek Reserve and back to the cars via the Kokoda trail (which is the steepest hill on the mountain).

8th March – Mt Coot-tha

We skipped last weekend because Shane and Nicoles knees were playing up.  As it turned out Nicole was still out of action this weekend, so Stuart, Brock and Shane meet at the Silky Oak car park and wandered up Mt Coot-tha and then decided to follow the trails out to the Gap.  It was a fairly cruisy walk as there weren’t any steep hills to wander up.

15th & 22nd March – No Training

Not sure why we skipped these weekends … but for the sake of it we’ll call it general laziness.

29th March – Mt Nimmel Lodge to Pollys Kitchen

After a couple of lazy weekends we jumped back into training with a big weekend.  We introduced Stuart to a couple of the courses big hills by walking from checkpoint 2 (Mt Nimmel Lodge) to checkpoint 5 (Pollys Kitchen).  This was also the first time we’d started doing any running in training.  We discovered that there were some parts of the track that were just too steep or slippery to run down.  After both Shane and Nicole had almost fallen over on the same patch of ground Nicole suggested that we wait for Brock and Stuart to catch up, adding "I bet you any money they lose their footing there too".  They did, Shane and Nicole laughed, and Brock and Stuart "thanked" them for their concern.

Most of the walk was uneventful apart from some confusion about which way to go at a couple of intersections.  As none of us had brought maps and there were lots of "this doesn’t look right" comments, but in the end we stumbled apon the right track.  When we finally go to the road that has Pollys Kitchen on it, Nicole decided we should jog to the end.  It was a very slow and painful run … but that didn’t stop Shane and Brock going for the sprint finish.

We rewarded ourselves with lunch a Pollys Kitchen.  The all day breakfast went down very well.

5th April – Mt Coot-tha

Stuart was out this weekend.  Not much to report, it was just a 3hr wander around the mountain.

12th April – Easter

Surprisingly enough we had the weekend off.  Much more fun to go camping in the rain and get caught in flood waters …

19th April – Brisbane Forest Park

We had a 30km hit out into Brisbane Forest Park this week.  We left from Channel 9 bright and early as the sun was starting to rise.  We wandered through Brisbane Forest Park until we hit Mount Nebo Road around a loop and back again.  It didn’t go quite to plan.  We ended up on the wrong trail and took a little short cut.  Although, this was probably a good thing as Brock wasn’t feeling very well and was very quiet for the whole walk.  There were a couple of interesting creek crossings, but we all made it round without too much trouble.

26th April -Environment Centre to Finish

Someone let Stuart plan this training session – crazy idea.  Basically we walked the last 40kms of the course from section 9 onwards.  We started before sun up, which wouldn’t have been an issue, except that Shane forgot his head torch.  So we were walking along the edge of the Hinze dam and for some reason Shane ended up in the lead, blindly leading those with the torches when Nicole screams.  One of the many toads had jumped menacingly towards her.  So Brock and Shane start kicking the toads out the way, but each toad tries to escape by jump straight at Nicole, which brings more screaming and encourages Brock and Shane to give a few more toads a nudge.  But soon enough we leave the edge of the dam and head up the cow trail.

The cow trail was not fun last year.  It’s a single file track that goes up, and down, and up, and down, and up again.  It’s probably the most uneven section of track on the whole course.  It wasn’t too bad with fresh legs, but we could tell why it hurt so much last year after walking 50 odd kms. 

We stopped from a break at Syd Duncan Park and admired the view before heading off to tackle the Hell Fire Pass and Mt Nathan.  We had some fun crawling under a rickety old gate at the end of one of the trails, but other than that it was pretty uneventful.  We stopped for another break at the start of Nerang State Forest.  During this time Shane mentioned he wasn’t sure about the girly running socks he was wearing.  Brock said he was a fan of the girly socks but thought they’d work better with Stuart’s bright girly trail shoes.  Stuart replied he needed them to go with his girly compression tights.  And Nicole, well, she was the only one who didn’t seem offended at being called a girl! 

The trek though Nerang State Forest was pretty boring.  Although towards the end Stuart and Brock decided to run back to the car.  Shane and Nicole jogged bits and pieces but just couldn’t be bothered trying to keep up with the other two.

When we reached the end we’d covered 40kms in 7.5 hours.  Looks like the training is well on track.

3rd to 17th May – No Training

After the long hit out we decided to have a weekend off.  Then due to Stuart being on holidays and a couple of injuries, we had the next couple of weekends off as well.

24th May – Mt Coot-tha

We got back into training with a 4.5 hour wander around Mt Coot-tha.  Our original plan was to go down the coast and do Pollys hill, the waterfall loop and back again, however after torrential rain all week we decided it wasn’t worth risking coming across an impassable creek on the waterfall loop.  We pretty much did our standard loop backwards with a couple of little detours.  We walked the majority of it just to get used to being on our feet for a long period of time.  Given the amount of rain the tracks were actually in very good condition, with the exception of a couple of creek crossings.  Brock struggled around with a knee that was very unhappy, and had to put up with the rest of us lecturing him about going to see a physio.

31st May – Mt Coot-tha

Brock succumbed to his dodgy knee and missed this week, so Stuart, Nicole and Shane meet at the Silky Oak car park just before sunrise.  We noticed a sign saying parking was $5 – no doubt for the Mt Coot-tha hill climb event, but we figured we probably be back pretty early so we headed off.  It was also the first morning we’ve needed jumpers on the first part of the walk.  We ended up walking almost all the way to Mount Nebo Road before Nicole noticed that she’d lost her head torch somewhere on the jog down the previous hill, so we turned around and headed back.  As it turns out the head torch was almost at the top of hill – it must have fallen off in the first few steps of the run.

Somewhere around this time Stuart started going on about how poorly made little girls nickers are and how they just aren’t up to the job like little boys undies.  Nicole came out with the line of the day by saying, "You know Stuart, you aren’t suppose to wear them!" 

We trundled back via the Gap Creek reserve car park, up the Kokoda Track and finally back to the cars.  All in all it was a 4hr 45min hit out where we jogged down most of the hills, which is pretty much our plan for the big day.

So that’s it for now.  We are finally up to date.  It looks like next weekend will be another rest weekend as people are away for the long weekend, but the weekend after that is the mini kokoda, so check back for another update on that.