Imagine if you were on vacation in an extremely remote area and you suddenly became ill or were seriously injured. How would you get back to civilization? Would medical personnel be able to reach you? How would you be transported to safety or to a hospital?

In Australia, solving problems such as these are the job of the Royal Flying Doctors Service (RFDS). (Yes, you read that correctly!) Founded in 1928, the RFDS bills itself as 'one of the largest and most comprehensive aeromedical organizations in the world.' Boasting a 'waiting room of 7.13 million square kilometers,' RFDS is the primary means of medical transport for much of the Australian continent, providing 24-hour emergency services to remote areas throughout the country.

A non-profit medical organization, RFDS relies on charitable donations to deliver patients to and from medical emergencies to safety. This past September, Sydney based Systems Engineer Martin Solms participated in a week-long annual fundraiser-the Simpson Desert Bike Challenge -to help raise donations for RFDS. A 300-mile, five-day bike ride across the sand dunes of Australia's Simpson Desert, the challenge has been raising funds for RFDS since 1987.

A Personal Connection

Martin says he first became interested in the Royal Flying Doctors when an elderly couple he knows needed to use the service while on vacation. The couple had taken a cruise around Australia and were on a day trip in a remote area of the country. While on their excursion, the wife fell and shattered the lower part of her leg. Because the cruise ship had only rudimentary medical facilities, they had to bring in RFDS to take her to the hospital.

'They were so remote,' Martin says, 'the Royal Flying Doctors needed three aircraft in a relay system to get to them, the last one being a seaplane. They picked her up in the seaplane, then took her to a small airport and she had to be transferred to two larger aircraft' to get to an appropriate medical facility.

'That sparked my interest in the Royal Flying Doctor Service as an organization,' he says.

After beginning work at NetApp just over a year ago, Martin was inspired to look into ways he could give back. 'It's been championed in the office to do charity and team events,' Martin says. In fact, one colleague, he says, has spent time in Vietnam helping at a school and another participated in the Mystery Box challenge, a motorcar road trip that raises funds for various charities. An avid cyclist, Martin started to look for ways to combine his love of cycling with a way to give back. He found the Simpson Desert Challenge through a friend who had done the ride a few years ago, he says, and they decided to do it together.

An Iconic Ride

One of the reasons the work of the RFDS is so important is because a large part of the Australian continent contains areas that are extremely remote. Although it's roughly the same size as North America, most of Australia is uninhabited. Because most Australians live on the east or west coasts, there are many areas of the country that simply have no medical services. As such, the RFDS is responsible for servicing all of Australia's rural towns and clinics, using approximately 70 aircraft to fly patients in and out of isolated areas.

'Australia's a big continent,' Martin says. 'To put it in perspective, there are 23 million people on a continent the size of North America. The U.S. population is 320 million. If you were to look at a map, from Kentucky to Calgary, there's nothing around that whole part of our country. It's all open, so the Royal Flying Doctors have a critical part to play.'

Located near the middle of Australia, the Simpson Desert is Australia's fourth largest desert and the world's largest sand dune desert, containing 1,200 of the world's longest parallel sand dunes. According to Martin, the climate is a bit like Texas, with a lot of shrubs, but the desert barely gets any rain. Crossing the Simpson Desert is an iconic symbol of Australian culture, Martin says.

However, crossing the desert isn't easy. There are no paved roads, Martin says, only a few tracks designed for 4-wheel drive vehicles. Although many people go 4-wheeling across the desert and some have been known to walk it, the Desert Challenge took a unique approach 30 years ago and choose the bicycle, Martin says. Bicycles with big, fat tires that can navigate the soft sand of the dunes, aptly referred to as Fat Bikes. Part of the challenge in the Desert Challenge is that the bicyclists must navigate those dunes for 300 miles.

'You follow the 4-wheel drive track for the most part but there are lots of dunes. You often walk your bike up them and then fly down the other side-and you do that for 300 miles, up and down, up and down. It literally becomes quite challenging because of the distance you need to cover each day and a combination of fitness level and conditions-the heat, flies and this year we even had some wet weather. It does challenge you to keep mentally focused,' Martin says.

(For those of you NetAppers who are cyclists, Martin choose a Specialized Fuse 6Fattie Plus bike for the challenge. The bike rolled on 27.5×3.0' wheels and tires and proved to be a good choice for the conditions compared to a standard mountain bike, Martin says.)

Knowing he had an extreme physical and mental challenge ahead of him, Martin spent about six months training for the ride. He says one of the primary ways he trained was to commute to work by bike-12 miles each way every day. 'It was quicker than public transport to get to the office,' Martin says.

Because Sydney is a very hilly city it provided Martin the training he needed. Even the commute took 'a bit of mental perseverance,' he says, because each ride to work was comprised of about 10 hills to climb. In addition, he would do long rides on Sundays, sometime getting up as early as 5 a.m to do a long ride.

'I related the rides to our work some days,' Martin says. 'You may want to procrastinate on getting a certain task done but if you just knuckle down and do it, it's not that bad.'

Martin says his bicycle commuting has also inspired other NetAppers in the Sydney office.

'I think I've inspired a few people in the office to look at cycle commuting as a way to get to the office. We've got great changing facilities in the office, so you can get into the office, get a good shower and there's an iron now so you can have a crisp work shirt rather than pull something out of a bag.'

The Five-Day Trek

In addition to training physically for the Simpson Desert Challenge, Martin and his riding partner also had to prepare the vehicle and equipment needed for desert travel. In places like the Simpson Desert that are extremely remote, there are no services to be had-no gas stations, no restaurants, not even camping facilities. As such, each rider must have a 4-wheel drive support vehicle for the trip and they must bring in-and take out-everything they need while in the desert. This means everything from food and water to medical supplies and even spare bike parts. Just to get to the place where the race (which actually travels from west to east) started was a 2,000-mile drive, Martin says.

'In one day we had a 500-mile drive-and saw only five other cars that day,' Martin says.

Martin says all fundraising dollars for the challenge go directly to RFDS so all the equipment and supplies needed for the race must be self-funded. For six days his team had to carry 300 liters of water and easy to prepare food that provided both carbs and protein, such as pasta, thinly sliced rump steaks and energy bars. They also took along a small portable refrigerator that ran on the car battery of his 4-wheel drive vehicle.

'There's no opportunity to pop out to the shops to get anything-the logistics are very detailed,' Martin says. 'Some teams came with two fridges-some had freezers and ice cream. We didn't have space for those luxuries.'

As for the ride itself, each day consisted of two stages. With a daily, car-horn wake-up call at 4:30 a.m., support vehicles headed out at 5:30 a.m., followed by the bicyclists at 6:00. Each morning stage covered approximately 50 miles, taking advantage of the cooler, more mild, morning desert temperatures. Martin says the support vehicle convoy would drop water bottles along the route so that the bikers could top off their supply throughout the race. At lunchtime, the crews would try to find some shade where everyone could stop, rest and refuel tired bodies. The second stage of each day's race would start around 2 p.m. with the riders finishing another 30 miles or so for the day.

'The afternoon stages become pretty hot,' Martin says. The temperatures in the desert hit about 30°C (86°F), which was lower than previous years when the temperatures have actually hit 45°C (113°F), he says.

A strange benefit of the challenge was that there was no mobile service or internet in the desert, Martin says. As such, the event buzzed with conversation as people got talking to one another, Martin says. After a while people tended to fall into groups based on their fitness levels and how fast they were able to ride up and down the dunes. Martin says he fell into a group of six other riders, including two eye specialists, the CEO of an Australian company and another systems engineer.

Overnight accommodations were rustic to say the least. Martin says on the first night, one of the support drivers was banished from his fellow team members for snoring too loudly. After he set up his tent close to a shrub, he quickly came back to join the group-because he'd encountered a King Brown snake, one of the most deadly and aggressive snakes around.

'It just looks like an evil, bad snake,' Martin says. 'We took photographs-it's a scary looking snake. If that snake had bitten someone, even the Royal Flying Doctors would not have been able to get there in time-they're that venomous.'

Martin says he also encountered a dingo, an Australian wild dog, during the challenge as well as wild camels.

Because water is scarce in the Simpson Desert there was very little showering over the five-day trek as well. Martin says after a couple of days of rationing their water they were able to leave a solar shower (a bag of water) in the sun to warm up so that they could wash up a bit. And with no toilets, riders had to bury their business and even burn their toilet paper because the conditions in the desert are so dry that nothing decomposes there. 'Toilet paper in the desert can take up to 10 years to decompose-even if it's biodegradable,' Martin says. 'There's just no moisture and even biodegradable products need moisture to break down.'

Accomplishing Goals

Martin says one of the things he's taken away from doing the Simpson Desert Challenge is the sense of accomplishment he feels from taking on a difficult physical challenge, working toward it and achieving it. Focusing on that goal also helped to get him through the five-day race, giving him the wherewithal to avoid mental highs and lows and negative thoughts during the course of the race, he says.

'Working toward a goal and achieving it-that has given me a real confidence boost in general. I know I've got the energy to work toward something and achieve it-that's great,' he says.

Martin says the experience of raising funds for charity has taught him some lessons that he's been able to bring into the work place. He realized that when raising funds, he really had to make a case to potential donors-much like what he has to do with partners and customers.

'When I'm meeting with customers and I'm saying 'I've got a great solution for you and it involves some NetApp products,' my customers potentially don't buy into it right away. I usually need to convince my customers that NetApp has the right solution for their requirements. From a work perspective, I really do need to lobby hard around products, and it's the same thing when lobbying from a charity perspective.'

He's also grateful for the support he received from his colleagues in the Sydney office. The race happened to coincide with the dates for Insight Las Vegas but Martin's managers were able to arrange for him and a few other colleagues to attend Insight Berlin instead.

'I was very thankful to management that we had the opportunity to continue the skills development and achieve the charity event,' he says. 'You hear about NetApp, the people and the culture and great place to work. That's always been a focus since I joined the company and it rang so true. This is an excellent example-it is a bit of a selfish thing to do a charity event but management were able to facilitate me achieving a personal goal and attending NetApp Insight-it was really great.'

In reflection, Martin says the confidence he gained in achieving the goal and raising funds for RFDS has boosted him both mentally and physically such that he now believes that planning and achieving goals should be a yearly occurrence.

To see more about Martin's Simpson Desert Challenge trek, check out his video.

NetApp Inc. published this content on 27 July 2017 and is solely responsible for the information contained herein.
Distributed by Public, unedited and unaltered, on 31 July 2017 10:39:22 UTC.

Original documenthttps://newsroom.netapp.com/blogs/australian-desert-trek-combines-love-of-cycling-giving-back/

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