On May 19, I did the Great Ocean Road 60 kilometre ultramarathon from Lorne to Apollo Bay in Victoria.
It’s said that nothing worth doing is easy. That wasn’t easy. But for the stunning scenery, shared joy and new lessons forged in pain, it sure was worth it.
There was a brutal headwind and horizontal rain almost the whole way. For the first 33 kilometres of winding coastline, the rolling swell and steady drumbeat of runners’ feet slapping wet asphalt set a race rhythm. Then the first big turn came in the ultra. We left the marathoners behind for a 300-metre climb over five unrelenting kilometres inland up Sunnyside Road.
The descent offered temporary relief, but 47km in there was another detour. Only this time it was up a much steeper 3km hill on rocky mud. I was totally alone now. The next woman was about 20 minutes behind. By 50km I was physically spent. All I could do was try to make it home. At 56km I threw up, but giving up wasn’t an option.
People often ask me if I have always been a runner. The short answer is no. I have lived many different lives – in different worlds – that are antithetical to an athlete’s. At one point I was
a drug addict. Today, I am sober; I haven’t had a drink since December 2022. I run as many as 80km a week. My diet is clean, and I’m typically in bed before 9pm.
Less than a decade ago, it was a different story. It was cigarettes for breakfast and lukewarm pea soup for lunch straight out of the can because it was all I could afford. It was going to strip clubs, sleeping out of my car and couch surfing. It was working for $8 an hour, losing jobs, week-long benders, insomnia and one-night stands with strangers. Such was the backdrop of my early twenties working as an artist in Los Angeles.
“You would disappear for days at a time,” recalls my mother. “I wouldn’t be able to reach you, and I knew you were off taking drugs somewhere. I just had to hope that you’d come back somewhere.”
As a child I loved to run, and I was pretty good at it. I always placed in cross-country and made the inter-school team every year until grade 10. But like many children whose paths have been disrupted and derailed by complex trauma, especially that which is entangled with every facet of their lives, I lost touch with myself – and with almost everything and everyone I loved – in the aftermath.
I was in my sports uniform when I lost my virginity via rape on the day of our high school athletics carnival, in August 2010. Mr Bester instructed me to meet him in his office after the event. Everyone else had gone straight home from the track.
It might seem pointless and painful to extract this memory, but it is in deep dark spells that the marathon spirit takes root. Besides, I am numb to it and many other incidents like it, no matter how clear each bleak vision remains. His crooked teeth and ageing skin.
His cold, clipped, arrogant speech. He was laughing, saying he couldn’t believe how much cellulite he could see on the legs of my classmates when they raced. I was lying on my back, on the floor. I had still had my rugby jumper on. My shorts were around my ankles.
These are the kinds of horrors that paralyse you in the moment – partly out of disbelief – and from which you completely detach in the long term to survive. Between 2010 and early 2018, the only running I did was during a few months at the end of grade 12 when I used the treadmill at the gym to punish myself.
Then school finished, I turned 18, and drinking alcohol became a legal, accessible, fashionable, faster escape route. Six months later I moved to California, lured by illusions of anonymity and the broken American dream. Almost five years passed before I ran again. I wanted to be a different person with a different past. This response is not uncommon.
Relearning or indeed learning to regulate healthily takes distance, patience and community. It takes a long, messy process of trial and error.
When I returned to running in early 2018, the #LetHerSpeak campaign had no yet launched publicly, but the wheels had been in motion for at least a year. [The campaign, created by journalist and sexual assault survivor advocate Nina Funnell, seeks to overturn state laws that prohibit sexual assault victims from telling their stories.]
Previously dormant trauma resurfaced. I’d just left a violent relationship and was sleeping on my friend’s futon in San Fernando Valley.
On the one hand, running helped me rediscover the myriad benefits of exercise. I was drinking less and no longer using drugs. On the other hand, running fed into all the unresolved traumas I was revisiting. It reignited and masked anorexia, fuelled not by a desire to be thin but an unconscious longing to re-inhabit my childhood body that had not been violated.
In December 2018, I briefly returned to Australia. As #LetHerSpeak coverage ramped up during that period, so did the desperation to escape. I ate less and ran more.
By November 2019 I was gone again, in search of cover and calm. I moved back to a share house in California. Nine months before I was named 2021 Australian of the Year, I was working for minimum wage at a retail store in Santa Barbara, struggling to make ends meet.
When many of you saw me for the first time, on the evening of January 25, 2021, I was wearing a nice dress and spoke well. I was also 45 kilograms, running more than 100km a week and hadn’t menstruated in two years. My fiancé, Max, and I were sleeping on a mattress on the floor of his share house.
The next morning, I was broadcast into living rooms across the nation at 6am. It mightn’t have been obvious that I had not slept, or that just two hours before I was sitting in a hotel room reading a letter from another of Mr Bester’s victims, detailing their battle with lasting shame.
My nonlinear relationship with running is a reflection of my nonlinear relationship with healing, and with myself. Peace rests somewhere on the road between inertia and restless obsession. It’s an ongoing battle to maintain the balance.
In May 2021 I fractured my pelvis and was sidelined for 12 weeks. By December I was back training, but broke my foot a week before Christmas.
I turned to cycling as an alternative, but also took that to the extreme, riding 300km a week. In February I came off my bike going 40km/h around a bend and broke my collarbone.
The following 18 months were a whirlwind of public pressures and private pain. I turned to prescription medication, and plunged headfirst into past traumas to write a 90,000-word memoir in three months. I was a husk of a human by the end of it, unable to leave the house for weeks.
It was only in July 2023 that I was able to take up regular training again. Over the past year, I’ve raced three ultramarathons, and won two. On the Great Ocean Road in May, I finished in tears, aching all over, sopping and muddy. The roaring crowd got me over the line.
For the first time I broke the winner’s tape, and dropped to my knees. Then I saw Dad, and sprang back up. Dad travelled from Tasmania to be my support crew.
Twenty-one years ago, when I was eight, he saw me win my first cross-country race, and he was there with me on Sunday. So were my friends Marcus and this year’s 44km female champion, Meriem Daoui.
Ultramarathons in particular mirror life itself, with all its raw, indiscriminate suffering and beauty. Before beginning you make a pact with nature that whatever will be will be. What follows is a spiritual negotiation in the elements. If you resist, the rain feels heavier and the wind sounds louder. The only way to master this kind of beast is to understand that there’s nothing to master. You – we – are one and the same.
I did not cry because I was in pain or even because I won. I cried because after all these years I came back.
Recently, I was at the Woolies self-service checkout next to a woman and her young son, who was dressed as Spiderman. As I humoured him, I heard his mother ask, “Do you know who that lady is?” In the split second before she continued, I wondered how she might explain abuse survivor advocacy to her child. “She’s a really good runner,” she said, and I was taken aback – not by her compliment, but by her recognition of a whole human being.
