Australian Hiker

The Hume and Hovell Track thru-hike that Gill and I commenced on Saturday 31 August has come to a premature end due to a physical injury. On the morning of Friday the 13th (I just noticed the date), and after much soul searching, we walked off the track. We recently released a post on Calling it Quits on a Hike and in all honesty, I never thought this would be a consideration I would ever need to make with my body always managing to respond to whatever I have asked of it previously.

Those who have known me for a number of years will know I have an obsessive personality and am one of those people that puts in 110% effort, finding that extra bit of something from seemingly from nowhere to get through just about any situation. For a number of days I had been having an issue with my right knee whereby I could spend the first few hours of the day averaging around 4.5km per hour walking speed (depending on the terrain) but at around the 2-3 hour mark, my knee had swollen considerably. The pain would get to the point whereby my walking speed was at around 2 km per hour on flat easy ground and while I was managing to walk anywhere up to 26 km per day I was doing so on regular applications of Voltaren and doses of ibuprofen. The masked pain was leaving me with a hot sweaty nauseated feeling that impacted my focus – not good from a safety perspective or enjoying the walk.

The decision to stop was days in the making and an extremely hard one to make. I mean, how could I manage to walk over 1000 km last year with no physical pain or for that matter no real effort, but this year struggle with a walk less than half the length and at a reduced daily rate? Eventually I came to the decision, with some not so subtle prompting from Gill, that the correct choice was to end to hike and get the issue fixed.

So now our thru-hike has turned into a section hike having completed around 310 km of this 426 km walk. I will complete this walk and am already making plans for Autumn 2020 to finish off the last 116 km.

Both Gill and I would like to thank everyone for their support throughout this hike. We have one more podcast left to release on this stage of this walk in the upcoming week whereby we will discuss the final few days, talk about our opinions and recommendations on this walk, as well as go into more detail on the issues that occurred.

Thankyou!