16

TESTING MY LIMITS

It’s 3 am. I’m on a bush track somewhere between the Hawkesbury River and Manly, in Sydney. I’m flat on my face, having just tripped over a tree root, and am swearing more loudly and more obscenely than I have for at least six months.

‘Bloody stupid shit of a tree root!’

I’m not happy.

We’re about nineteen hours into the Oxfam trail walk – a 100-kilometre fundraiser in which teams walk all day and through the night on an unlit, barely maintained bush track. Whoever came up with the idea is clearly a sadist. There’s nothing good about it at all. I’ve done some extreme sporting events in my time – and on paper a 100-kilometre walk doesn’t seem all that challenging – but as I pull myself back to my feet, wipe the mud from my hands, arms and clothes and adjust my head-torch, I start to silently curse the day I ever agreed to do this.

My head is down, my eyes trying to make out in the pitch black exactly which part of the uneven terrain in front of me I will place my foot next. Images of my bed flash in my mind – my beautiful, big, soft, king-size bed at home in Mollymook – and I want to cry.

My feet are in agony. At the last checkpoint, Michael removed my shoes and spent a meticulous fifteen minutes popping all of the blisters. Now I can feel liquid from the open wounds seeping into my socks – making my every step feel wet and uncomfortable. It’s got to the point where I can feel blisters form as I walk, then burst under the constant rubbing and pressure – forcing me to walk through ten minutes of agony before the searing pain subsides and the process starts all over again on another part of my foot.

And then we come to steep rock face. The only way is to go over it. The rest of my team scramble up on all fours as I stand at the base, holding back tears. I’m done. As if the walk hasn’t been hard enough, here now is the ultimate indignity: a rock face I cannot possibly get up because I DON’T HAVE THE FUCKING FINGERS FOR IT!

I start to cry and, despite the flurry of physical activity around me, I suddenly feel alone and vulnerable.

‘Turia!’ I hear a voice from above. ‘Turia, up here!’

I look up and through my tears, I see a hand. And it looks not dissimilar to my own. Mottled, scarred, the tell-tale signs of a burns injury.

‘Turia, give me your hand.’

It’s my friend Kate. She’s lying on her stomach, her arm outstretched towards me.

‘Come on. Give me your hand.’

Seven hours later, I stumble across the finish line in Manly – delirious with pain and exhaustion. The walk has taken twenty-nine hours, five pairs of socks and every ounce of fortitude I have. I collapse into Michael’s arms and let him carry me to the car. He takes me back to our hotel, lays me on the bed and leaves me to sleep – in the same clothes I have walked in, with my shoes still on – for the next fourteen hours.

 

About two years after the fire, when I was starting to regain my fitness and my public profile was beginning to take off (thanks largely to my 60 Minutes stories and a subsequent flurry of media interest), the trickle of requests I had received up to that point from charities asking me to help them out started to become more of a flow.

One of the first requests came from Variety – an organisation that does great stuff for under-privileged kids all over the country. They were staging a fundraising bike ride from Sydney to Uluru – a distance of 3000 kilometres – and invited me to take part, as one of several ‘celebrity’ bike riders. At the time, it sounded like a good idea. It was the first major sporting event I had signed up for post-fire, and I didn’t feel ready for it at all. But I know that no one ever feels ready, and sometimes you just need to take a leap of faith. It was a ‘softer’ sporting event as well, in that a bus followed the group, and I knew that if I ever got tired or sore, I could get on the bus. I had never ridden a road bike before the fire, but thought this was a great ‘stretch’ goal, right in the sweet spot of the sort of extreme sporting challenges I had always loved to do. Two years’ worth of physio and weights and cardio training had left me feeling strong and ready to get back among it.

So I donned my Lycra and helmet and joined the thirty other racers at the start line one overcast morning on the outskirts of Sydney. For the next three weeks, I cycled an average of 100 kilometres a day, through outback New South Wales, across the top of South Australia. Up hills, down dales, along long, lonely, featureless stretches of highway through long, boring patches of nothing. Michael rode alongside me the whole way. Not exactly a romantic getaway, but special in its own way.

I was saddle sore as I had never been before. Each night, we would pull into a small town and invade a motel where I would collapse and wonder how I was going to muster the energy to wake up the next day and do it all over again.

This, I discovered, was a whole new discipline. Multi-day events that require you to back up and repeat the following day whatever amazing physical feat you had achieved the previous day are hard. One-day events require you to put in one massive effort – after which you can curl up in the foetal position and take as long as you need to recover. But once you get into the realm of a physical challenge that interrupts your sleeping and eating patterns, you are in a whole other world of pain. I soon realised that I wasn’t at the fitness level required to ride 250 kilometres day after day, so I decided to ride fifty a day instead.

Looking back, it was easily as remarkable an achievement as any I have ever undertaken. Only two-and-a-half years previously, I had been lying in a coma in hospital. My body, though well on the road to returning to full strength, was still fragile. You know how you sometimes look back on things you’ve done and wonder what you were thinking and how you ever managed to do it? This was one of those.

At the end of each day, I was sore and exhausted – but exhilarated. And there were plenty of moments when I wanted to give up. But whenever I did, I only had to summon the memory of that doctor back in my early days of rehab telling me to manage my expectations and come to terms with the fact I might never run again, and the fire in my belly would be reignited. I had resolved back then that I would complete an Ironman. This bike ride was just the start. A taster.

Barely three weeks after the ride, I found myself on a plane to Darwin. The annual Lake Argyle relay challenge was taking place and we had formed a team and entered. Me, Kate, Hully, Hal Benson: four mates whose friendship had been forged in the most unusual of circumstances. The Lake Argyle swim takes place each year on the large, man-made lake adjacent to the Argyle diamond mine, where I had worked when Michael and I lived in Kununurra. It’s a 20-kilometre swim completed by teams swimming in a relay. Our team was a rag-tag bunch of fire survivors. We were there to finish more than we were there to win.

I can’t speak for the others, but the thought of returning to the Kimberley for the first time since the fire filled me with no small amount of anxiety. I’m generally not the sort of person who spends too much time overthinking stuff. Life, for the most part, is just a series of one day after the other. The mind is an instrument you can train to deal with pretty much anything. Melodrama is not my thing. And yet, as the plane banked and the red earth appeared below us, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel a small knot in my stomach. Senses, I realised, can be powerful invokers of dormant feelings. In the same way a whiff of a certain aftershave or the smell of a certain meal can bring back memories, here I suddenly was, surrounded by red earth and those unmistakeable sights, sounds and smells of sun-baked northern Australian scenery, and that day started to come flooding back. I remember looking at Michael and saying I wasn’t sure this was such a good idea. He just pulled me into him, gave me a squeeze and said, ‘You’ll be right, darl.’

Because it was the first time any of us had returned to the Kimberley since the fire, and because I had allowed myself to be talked into another 60 Minutes story, we were ghosted on our trip by a camera crew.

We did the swim, and though we came last, it didn’t matter. We’d all had a laugh together, and we all knew how significant it was for each of us. No words were exchanged on the subject, because none had to be.

Afterwards, 60 Minutes invited us all to take a helicopter ride back to the gorge – back to the scene of the fire. I knew it was coming. It had been mentioned in phone calls and conversations I’d had with the producers prior to the trip, and I had always remained non-committal on the subject. I had done enough media at that point to know it was the pivotal scene of the story they were shooting. The burns victim returns for the first time to the scene of the bushfire. But I was determined not to do anything I thought was going to make me uncomfortable.

I remember looking at Michael and saying, ‘I’ll go if you want to go.’

On the plane from Sydney, I had thought about how hard the past two years had been for Michael. How his entire life had been put on hold by this freak fire in a gorge in the outback. How his entire existence for two years had been defined by this place. Maybe I owed it to him to visit it.

Michael looked at me as if I were crazy. ‘I don’t want to go,’ he said. ‘Why would I want to go there? We’ve worked so hard and come so far. Why go back?’

And with that, my mind was settled. I felt a huge weight lift from my shoulders. He was right. Nothing was going to be served by going back there. I had spent two years rebuilding the life that had almost been snatched away completely by that gorge: why would I want to be there again? People talk about closure – and the importance of facing your demons. But going back to that place was only going to bring to the surface a whole lot of negative emotions I had worked hard to process and eliminate.

Still, the others took up the offer of a chopper flight. Hully, Hal and Kate hopped aboard the helicopter and apparently had a wild old time, joking and laughing their way through the entire enterprise; I’m not sure they gave the 60 Minutes crew the poignant, tear-jerking footage they were hoping for.

Later that day, we came together for a barbecue. The idea was for all the locals who had either been involved in the race or in our rescue to gather for us to talk to them and offer up the thanks we’d never had a chance to properly express. I was psyched about meeting up with Paul Cripps – the helicopter pilot who’d risked life and limb to rescue Kate and me from the side of the gorge. And in person he was just as kind and humble as I had expected. The 60 Minutes cameras were there to capture the reunion, which made things slightly more awkward than they might otherwise have been. With the cameras rolling, I felt a bit restrained: not wanting to make a public spectacle of myself, self-conscious enough in the first place to be seeing all of these people again (or meeting some of them for the first time) and hyper-aware of how the presence of the TV cameras was making everyone feel. It was almost as if the more acutely aware I became of the reaction the TV cameras wanted, the more determined I was not to give it.

Even so, the reunion was a lump-in-the-throat moment. When Paul, so shy, so unassuming, so quiet, shuffled over and said hello, at first we made small talk. But it was never going to be about the words. He came in for a hug and it was all I could do not to break down. Two-and-a-half years of rehabilitation seemed to melt away, and suddenly I was back in that chopper, drifting in and out of consciousness, my life in the hands of this quiet, stoic man.

The ambulance officer, Bonny, who had been first on the scene after the fire and who – despite us having been friends and volunteer ambos together – had not recognised me as she administered first aid, was invited to come along too. I scanned the crowd hopefully, sipping my beer, but I couldn’t see her anywhere. I learned later she had wanted to come, and had wrestled for days with the prospect, before finally deciding it was going to be too much for her to handle.

It was a reaction I would encounter again some twelve months later at a speaking engagement in Perth. A couple of girls who had taken part in the ultramarathon and not been caught in the fire had sat up the back of the room as I delivered my talk but had not been able to bring themselves down to speak to me afterwards. They spoke to Michael and told him they had wanted to meet me but weren’t sure what to say – how they had been so profoundly affected by my story and struggled for a while afterwards to come to terms with how close they had come to possibly suffering a similar fate. And it left me feeling frustrated. I remember thinking: What am I supposed to do with that? How is what I have been through even remotely about you? And why is it up to me to make you feel comfortable?

I get it. People react to things in their own way. I can’t begin to know how deeply someone has been affected by something or what impact an event like that fire has ultimately had on their life. But what I do know – only too well – is the effect it’s had on my life. And that, in order to make the recovery I have made, I’ve had to be selfish. Sometimes, just sometimes, it’s had to be about me, and what’s best for me. So my reaction can sometimes be a bit extreme.

 

Ever since I cycled across Cambodia with Briggsy when I was back in uni, I had seen the transformative power of charity fundraising. The small efforts that people like me make can have an enormous and sometimes lasting impact on the lives of people who, simply by an accident of birth, live lives much harder and more poverty-stricken than my own.

I’ve always had a strong social conscience, so when I started to think about how I might most effectively use the profile I was starting to build, the obvious choice was to give back by way of charity work.

Briggsy, as it happened, was working at the time for a tour company that specialised in organising charity fundraiser group tours. So the plan was hatched to organise a rolling series of Turia’s Challenges. The Inca Trail had always been on my bucket list, and it seemed like the perfect combination of physical challenge and cultural exposure. The idea was for Briggsy to put together a tour and advertise it to the general public with me as the drawcard. The problem was, with the World Cup unfurling in Brazil, flights to South America were prohibitively expensive, so we decided to look elsewhere on the map.

The Great Wall of China seemed like a good idea. An iconic wonder of the ancient world, a country steeped in history, and all the beef-and-black-bean a girl could eat. So Turia’s Great Wall of China Challenge was launched.

Within a month it had sold out. We were a group of twenty-three. And, in what would prove to become a trend, not only was the group all women (my story seems to resonate most powerfully with women), but because this was the first charity event I’d organised, heaps of locals in Ulladulla came, and heaps of my good mates.

Decked out in all our hiking gear, we arrived in Beijing, and almost immediately I was out of my comfort zone. Different concepts of what is socially acceptable, plus what I believe is a general lack of exposure to anyone who might look a little different, meant that the Chinese were not averse to having a good old stare. Some locals even thought it was okay to come up next to me and pose for photos. It made me realise how comfortable I had become in my new skin back in Australia. How nurturing, generally, Australia is. And how much I had come to rely on Ulladulla as my little cocoon: the place I could go to and feel utterly protected.

Then there was the noise, and the crowds, and the smog and the traffic and the constant bustle of waves and waves of people. By the time we got to the Wall, I was relieved to have left Beijing behind us.

We walked 70 kilometres in just over ten days – and raised about $200,000 for Interplast in the process. It certainly wasn’t the most arduous physical feat I had ever taken on – even if on day one there was a moment when I wondered if I would make it at all. On our first day we had to climb over a section of the wall in order to start trekking. It was a steep, wide section, and as I looked at it I thought, I don’t think I can climb that. I just didn’t have the grip to get any purchase as I scrambled up. I got to the top, thinking, If I can’t do this one simple climb at the very start of the challenge, how am I going to get through the next seven days? As it happened, there was little climbing to be done thereafter and I managed just fine. I think perhaps I was jetlagged after arriving in China and a bit rattled at being stared at so openly.

The rest of the walk was just as I expected: equal parts stunning and dramatic. The scenery is beautiful: a series of undulating hills and mountains, over which crawls this most awesome human construction. There were moments during the walk where I would pause, look up from the path in front of me and stare out across the landscape. It bowled me over how even in the most populous country in the world, there were still pockets of sublime serenity.

For a lot of the women on the trek, there was a real sense of purpose, and we shared a camaraderie, a feeling of girl power. Everyone had their own story, their own personal mission. There was a girl who had suffered extreme emotional trauma as a child, and a woman who was really scared of heights. As I got to know each member of the crew and started to hear their stories I began to understand something of their motivations. I suppose it was the first time I started to understand that by virtue of what I had been through, I had become a lightning rod for people determined to change their lives. It was too early for me to properly grasp the significance of that.

 

A year later I signed on to do another charity walk. In July 2015 I found myself on a plane bound for Peru, en route to the Inca Trail challenge we had had to postpone twelve months earlier. Once again I had a crew of charity fundraisers in tow – a team of some twenty-six this time, with a couple of blokes thrown in for good measure. After a flight that felt like it was never going to end, we arrived in Cuzco and almost immediately the altitude sickness kicked in. A dull, persistent headache and a slight feeling of drowsiness; it wasn’t pleasant. Not only that, but Cuzco left me cold: a really touristy place with not much to see. So it was a relief to get to the start of the Inca Trail.

The Inca Trail is one of those iconic tourist treks that attracts thousands of pairs of hiking boots every year. Winding through a tiny stretch of the Andes, it takes in some of South America’s most stunning scenery – along an ancient route that leads, ultimately, to the ancient Inca city of Machu Picchu. The Incas were an ancient, scientifically advanced society that built their cities in harmony with the sun and its movements. To enter Machu Picchu by the so-called Sun Gate, just as dawn is breaking, is supposed to be one of those adventure bucket-list things. So it was with no small amount of excitement that we set off.

The trail itself is only 40 kilometres in length – stretched out over four days, it was an easily manageable 10 kilometres a day. That said, stretches of the trail are really tough: steep ascents that, when combined with the altitude, made for hard going. Often I would find myself gasping – taking short, shallow breaths in air that was thinner than my lungs were used to. The altitude took its toll on the team, too, knocking one or two of them for six. But we started as a team and we were determined to finish as a team.

Of course, it would be an out-and-out lie to pretend we were roughing it. Yes, we were camping, and no, the meals we had at the end of each day weren’t exactly gourmet, but the fact we each had a waiki – or porter – to carry our rucksacks and to run ahead each afternoon and set up camp so that all we had to do was tumble into our tents, certainly made things much, much easier.

As with China, the group comprised a collection of people who had each been motivated to tackle the Inca Trail for a different reason. Once again, it was clear I was a rallying point for people who had overcome adversity. One of the team was walking to deal with the grief of having recently lost a grandchild. One had been a victim of domestic violence. Another couple of women were struggling with not being able to have children. Each of the stories were gradually revealed to me as we walked. Not that I ever had to probe. Most times, all I had to do was ask one or two questions of people and their story would pour out. It’s amazing how infrequently we ask questions and really, properly listen to the answers. But everyone has a story to tell.

By the end of four days’ trekking – and sharing the experience of spectacular mountain vistas and tumbling mountain streams cutting through lush meadows – we felt like a little unit. A walking, talking, self-healing, mountain-climbing unit.

Day four of the trek was my birthday. I remember waking on a mountain top and watching the sun inch its way up into the sky. And I felt happy. So very happy. I thought about how far I had come, the pain I had been through to be sitting there, in that tent, on a mountain top in Peru.

Happy birthday to me.

At the end of the day, we walked through the Sun Gate, and the emotion of my birthday, the physical exhaustion I felt and the sheer beauty of the place moved me to tears.

Later that evening, the guides who had led us across the mountains made me a cake. A relatively basic cake – but a cake nevertheless. I was so grateful. One of our guides in particular copped a lot of attention. A hot Inca. And he seemed to know – or at least pretend to know – a lot about the way of the spirits and the land. We called him Mr Jungle Man. He was a really lovely man. He would often make us stop and look at a tree and give us a mini lecture on the flora and fauna of the local area. ‘Look,’ he would say, pointing skywards. ‘That is a condor. You know, in Quechuan history …’

We never really listened to what came next – we were too busy swooning.

It was a pleasant relief to find myself in a country where I wasn’t stared at. My experience in China had rattled me so much, I had been apprehensive arriving in Peru, but the locals could not have been warmer or more welcoming.

I almost forgot I looked different – until we visited a local school. On most of these trips, we try to spend at least a bit of time interacting with the communities we visit: so a visit to a school was organised. The kids are always shy at first – who wouldn’t be with a swarm of loud foreigners descending on them – but they eventually warm up. The teachers had arranged for us to do a traditional dance all together: to break the ice and encourage, oh, I don’t know, five seconds’ worth of cultural interaction. So the kids were all told to pick one of us from the trekking group to be their dance partner. I stood and watched as, one by one, my fellow trekkers were all taken as partners, leaving me standing alone, and feeling conspicuous. It felt like school all over again. Eventually, a timid little girl came over. I put my hands out for her to take and she screamed and ran away. I tried to laugh it off and pretend it didn’t matter – but in that moment, I was devastated. I felt small. I felt different. And it hurt.

But another little girl had seen me standing there and rushed over. She saw I was adrift, and held out her hand. It was a perfect illustration of humanity.

The morning after the Oxfam Walk, I wake up and almost instantly everything hurts. It takes me a while to register where I am, and why every cell in my body is in protest. I’m in the hotel room in Manly – and it all comes flooding back. That bloody torturous 100-kilometre test of endurance that almost broke me. I have no idea what time it is. The room is blacked out. Night? Day? It’s impossible to know.

I lie there and let my mind wander. It keeps coming back to Kate – and especially how hardcore she is. She has basically done this trek on one foot – half her left foot was amputated after the fire. There had been a moment at dusk on the track as the light was fading and it was hard to make out the trail when everyone in our team turned on our headlamps – everyone except Kate. A smile creeps at the corners of my mouth as I recall how she had compiled a hit-list of teams that were pissing us off on the track. How she wrote their team number down and kept track of them throughout the walk, and rejoiced when we overtook them, and how that list got longer the further we walked. And then at the end, how she was determined to check the race stats and triumphantly text me that we had beaten everyone on her hit-list.

Of the all-female teams, we finished in twenty-nine hours and came tenth. A reasonable effort, all things considered. Before the fire, Kate did the same walk in thirteen hours and came third. And I know how much of a letdown that will have been for her. I know, also, that I was probably a drag on the team at the end. My legs had stopped working. I couldn’t climb stairs – at one point I had to drag myself up a set of stairs by my arms alone.

Kate and I don’t see each other all that regularly, but when we do, we talk about the fire. We don’t sit around deconstructing the day or anything. But we do talk a lot about how it has changed our lives. Sometimes we wonder, if we could, would we go back? I say, Well, I can’t change what happened. So I can either dwell on the what-ifs or I can channel that energy into something positive. We talk about body acceptance, too. I probably have more than her – I wear midriff tops and don’t try to hide my scars. But it’s not like I jumped from wearing long sleeves and jeans to running around in a bikini, I’ve done it bit by bit over the last five years. Kate was a jeans kind of girl before the fire, and she still feels more comfortable in clothes that cover her up, which is her prerogative. That’s the sort of stuff we discuss. Stuff that only we can understand. Even Michael doesn’t really get it sometimes. No one else is able to relate the way she can.

The day after Oxfam, Kate sent me an email asking if I was keen to join her on the Brisbane Oxfam walk. Um, no. Not so much.