Cath Wallis is an expert in long distances.
She's hiked 160km across a frozen Lake Khovsgol in Mongolia and 170km of the Simpson Desert. A regular weekend for Wallis sees her taking a 60km hike somewhere around Canberra.
So, when she was asked to be the ambassador for the new Simpson Desert Ultra, the Canberra mum jumped at the chance. But rather than making the trek by herself, this time Wallis decided to help other women get out of their comfort zones.
Wallis is the woman behind the Instagram page@cath.wallis and the blog Find Your Adventure. The two platforms not only showcase her own adventures but aim to break the myth that adventure travel is only for certain types of people.
Naturally, Wallis wanted her team to be an extension of that mentality so when she put the opportunity out to her social media following, there were only two criteria: the idea of hiking across the Simpson Desert had to be terrifying and they had to be willing to follow a training schedule.
"We had people with mental health conditions who put their hand up, and people who were survivors of family violence," Wallis says.
"Others had spent their whole life devoted to their children and then their kids had left home and they'd gone, 'Now what am I going to do?'.
"One person, Taryn Dickens, has cone-rod dystrophy, which means she's going blind. She entered this event as a fundraiser to raise money for cone-rod dystrophy research.
"Because she is going blind, that means she doesn't have very good depth perception and if you could imagine trying to cross the desert where there's no formed trail, this was a massive personal challenge for her."
The course begins in Birdsville in Queensland, with participants choosing between 25km, 50km, 75km or 100km. Being an ultramarathon event, participants complete the distance in one go, with checkpoints every 12km.
"People were out there all night. The event started at two o'clock on a Saturday afternoon and the last member of our team completed their event at five o'clock in the afternoon, the next day," Wallis says.
"The way the event turned out, the longer the distance, the lower the finishing rate. They actually had only 25 per cent of the 100km entrants finish, across the board. There was a 100 per cent finishing rate in the 25km, but as you went up a distance, and it got harder."
But for many, finishing the course wasn't the point, and instead, they gained a sense of satisfaction from the journey itself and the lessons learnt. Dickens, for example, had a fall at 10kms and broke her glasses without which she has no depth perception.
"Falling over in the dark early on I had a number of realisations," she says.
"One of which was that it was a certainty that without my glasses I wouldn't be completing the 100km. The desert gave me a really good lesson at embracing change which I actually needed as an athlete with deteriorating vision, which I generally choose to ignore. Don't ignore change, it is coming whether you like it or not. Feel the fear, then continue on. Don't stop, just choose a better path."
