Embarking on a difficult quest

CHICAGO -- His arms burned with an ache like he never felt before.

His hands were chaffed with blisters from the rough concrete.

For a split second after climbing those 20 flights of stairs that November afternoon, Kurt Fearnley questioned what he was getting himself into. But that fleeting moment of doubt was hardly enough to squelch the indomitable will of a champion on a quest.

Last year, the nine-time Paralympic medalist and winner of 23 marathons over the last eight years decided that he wanted to complete the Kokoda Track, a 60-mile stretch through the jungle and mountains of Papua New Guinea steeped in history.

The trail is also among the most inaccessible and dangerous in the world, so arduous that earlier this month it claimed the lives of two able-bodied trekkers.

Fearnley, who lost the use of his legs due to a developmental disorder of the spine, plans to crawl Kokoda on his hands and knees six days after he competes in the ING New York City Marathon.

"Everyone says to me, ‘Have you gone mad? What are you thinking?'" the 28-year-old said a day before winning his third straight title at the Bank of America Chicago Marathon. "My job is to race for Australia, and the Track has a huge significance in Australian history. For me, I think it's going to be a bit about figuring out who we are. It is also a chance for me and my family and friends to experience something positive and challenging."

Fearnley is crawling Kokoda to raise money for the charity Movember, which supports awareness of men's health issues in Australia, particularly depression and prostate cancer. In this aim, his ties to Kokoda are personal.

"I lost my cousin, Peter Smith, to depression," Fearnley said. "Blokes in our country find it hard to talk to other blokes about what's affecting them. We fellas need to need to learn that we can talk to other fellas and when we ask for help it is often received with nothing but good will. If you can turn to your friend, or your brother, or your cousin, and can ask for help, so much more can be accomplished. Even a guy in a wheelchair can feel confident enough to crawl the Kokoda Track."

HISTORY BEHIND THE HIKE

The Kokoda Track is a single-file foot trail that starts just outside Port Moresby and runs 60 miles through the Owen Stanley Range in Papua New Guinea. The trail crosses rugged and isolated terrain, and reaches a height of 7,185 feet as it passes around the peak of Mount Bellamy.

The trail was first used by European gold miners in the 1890s. During the Pacific War of World War II a series of battles, afterwards called the Kokoda Track Campaign, were fought from July 1942 to January 1943 between Japanese and Australian forces.

Japanese forces had originally hoped to take Port Moresby, on New Guinea's southeastern shore, by sea. However, having been repulsed by the United States Navy in the Battle of the Coral Sea in May and again in the Battle of Midway in June, the Japanese resorted to a land invasion. Landing at Buna on New Guinea's northeastern shore, Japanese soldiers advanced the Kokoda Trail toward Port Moresby.

The Australian forces were both outnumbered and inexperienced, particularly at jungle warfare. After they were initially unable to stop the Japanese, U.S. General Douglas MacArthur reinforced the Australians with more seasoned Allied troops and in November 1942, they had retaken Kokoda. By January 1943, Japanese forces were pushed off the island.

Kokoda was the first time Australians fought and died repelling an invader on Australian soil without the material presence or support of the United Kingdom.

"It's the only track where a battle has been fought in the direct defense of Australia," Fearnley said. "We've never had a war in Australia. The closest we got was New Guinea, where Australian soldiers fought in defense of our country as the Japanese were moving toward Australia. That's where our ties became tighter with the U.S. because that was the time when we turned to General MacArthur and the U.S. because the English weren't there to help us."

Fearnley said he has been particularly inspired by the story of Corporal John Metson, who was serving in Papua New Guinea during in August 1942 when he was shot in the ankle. Metson refused to burden his comrades with the task of carrying him on a stretcher. Bandaging his knees and hands, he crawled Kokoda for three weeks until he was finally killed in a Japanese ambush.

"People crawled down there with legs missing, with limbs missing, with bullets shooting at them, with dysentery, with malaria, with an army on their heels," Fearnley said. "There are going to be no bullets flying at us, no one chasing us, no one trying to stop us. No matter how tough we seem to be having it, people have had it far worse. Along that track, there isn't a thing you could do that could even compare to what people went through in the past. That's why it's very doable."

NOT A WALK IN THE PARK

Australian casualties in the war have been estimated at more than 2,100 while it is believed that 12,000 of the 18,000 Japanese troops who fought in New Guinea died. The challenges that those troops faced 67 years ago - hot, humid days, intensely cold nights, torrential rainfall, risk of endemic tropical diseases - are the same that trekkers face today.

Since 2001, the steep, slippery terrain of Kokoda has claimed the lives of six people who have attempted to walk it, including four this year alone.

Imagine then pulling yourself, hand over hand, through the mud and over the debris and across the streams the cut through the wilderness like Fearnley will.

For almost two weeks straight.

"It's going to be 12 days of crawling through jungle," Fearnley said. "It's hard on your body. It's a tough, just-brutal thing to put your body through. It's going to be tougher than even I can imagine."
But Fearnley has prepared himself the best that he can.

His physical preparation began almost a year ago, but kicked into high gear in May following the Sydney Marathon. His workouts have consisted of crawling up and down flights of stairs and through the bush near his home in Newcastle. In early October, accompanied by his dog Alby, he climbed the 1,504 stairs of the Centrepoint Tower in Sydney on his hands and knees, making it to the top in 20 minutes.

"It's ‘Planet of the Apes' material," he said. "I've been crawling through mud. I've been crawling up and down the steepest descents I can find. I've been crawling between 10 and 20 kilometers a week, and then I'm doing as many stairs as I can do, between 50 and 100 flights of stairs a day.

"There's stairs just outside my house and I just go up and back, up and back, up and back. Now, I can knock out 60 stairs in half an hour if I put my head down. My first training session was terrible. I did 20 flights of stairs and I was just shattered, full of blisters and all that sort of stuff. I hadn't gotten the gloves. I hadn't gotten any of the equipment really sorted out."

EQUIPPED FOR THE CHALLENGE

After that initial workout, Fearnley worked on coming up with gear to protect his extremities from the elements and friction of the crawl.

To keep his skin dry, and thus firmer and more resistant to tearing, he will wear a neoprene wetsuit, similar to what surfers or divers might wear. The wetsuit will be adorned with rubber and treading to protect his shins, knees, and elbows. His shoes will be capped with steel. For support, he will also wear a steel wrist brace covered with rubber. Fearnley said all of his gear is custom designed.

"Me and my cobbler, my boot maker, kind of put our heads together and came up with it so it's all made from scratch," he said. "It took a long time to develop it but I'm finally happy with what we've got. I think we've done good."

Fearnley laughed off the threat of "creepy crawlers, snakes and wombats," but admitted to being far more concerned with the threat of malaria, a parasitic disease most often transmitted through mosquito bites but one that can also be water-borne.

Fearnley said he will begin taking preventative medication the week before the crawl and then again for two weeks afterward. During the expedition, he said immediate treatment of the slightest injury will be paramount to survival.

"You need to make sure that you're on top of every single cut, anything that can get a bit of bacteria or disease into your bloodstream," Fearnley said. "Every injury has to be treated with respect. It's 96 kilometers and every meter can be the one that gets you. It's the most inaccessible place on the planet. You're crawling over mossy logs and there is something like 15 river crossings. Every step can be the one that you need to get flown home for. I've been racing marathons for about 10 years now and I wouldn't mind doing it for another five or 10 so I'm going to take every precaution possible."

Fearnley said he is not sure how crawling the Kokoda Track will impact him or his marathon racing. He expects that his life will be different afterward.

"This is about as far removed from my comfort zone as I have ever been," he said. "Marathons for me are more about finesse. They're about technique and being as technically perfect as you can time and time again for an hour and a half. Crawling is being brute-strong dragging yourself for hours and hours and hours.

"After going through something like this mentally, I will probably see things differently. All I can be sure of is that I'm doing it for the right reasons and that I think I'm in the right place right now to be able to give it a crack."