It begins at the historic Yarrawonga Weir with a blast from a Crimean War blunderbuss, a great puff of screeching sulphur-crested cockatoos, a churn of white water, and intense barracking from flocks of private school kids who intone their weird, obscure chants, as diverse as bird calls, and send them scudding across the Murray river: “Awoo! oo-oo-oo!; aaaarrrrgggghhh!” It ends four-hundred kilometres up the Murray River at Swan Hill. Every day at a different spot along the way, the contestants and their large retinues descend upon unsuspecting campers. At night, they camp on football grounds, and the next morning, by six o’clock, it’s as though they were never there.

For the Murray River towns themselves – Yarrawonga, Tocumwal, Echuca, Cohuna, Swan Hill – their arrival is a real event, and local sporting clubs, Lions Clubs and other service organisations help out wherever they can.

The Murray River Marathon is one of those great participation events Australia is capable of staging at the place where charity meets sport. This year’s event has added significance for the organiser, Red Cross. The day before it began, as we all arrived in Tocumwal, the Indian Ocean tsunamis hit. Many organisers were forced to return to Melbourne.

The event’s relationship with the Red Cross goes back to its beginnings, in 1969, when a sole paddler, Mark Thornthwaite, raised 250 dollars for kayaking 250 miles (400 km) in order to qualify as a Red Cross “Trendsetter”. This is still the official distance of the race. This year, more than three hundred boats have entered, dragging a wandering population of around eight hundred competitors, plus support teams and cheer squads – 3,500 people in all – from one town to another.

As is the case with many of these sorts of events, you’d have to look hard to find names you know. Clint Robertson has competed before, as have Grant Kenny and Trevor Hendy. Adrian Powell, four times Olympian, set records in single and double kayak. But participation for the average person is still what sport is about in Australia.

One entire category, the men’s TK4 kayaks, consists of a red, blue and green team, all sponsored by BHP Billiton and Laminex. Each boat has a team of sixteen and they change crews at each checkpoint. The teams comprise a mixture of experienced kayakers and fit and willing amateurs who believe they’ll be better off for the gruelling experience. Each team member paid five hundred dollars for a spot. Erin Lynch, a committee member with BHP Billiton contacts and nine-Marathon veteran, is the driving force behind getting past competitors back into the race via the coloured teams. Competition seems to simmer beneath the surface, but, at times, you’ll see one crew swimming out to help haul in another team’s boat. Some need all the help they can get. The blue team fell into the river five times on the second leg of day three.

The Marathon has its own legends, many of whom back up year after year either as participants or organisers. Jonathan Mayne is one. Jon did the commentary for Network Ten at the L.A. Olympics. He won the event in 1970, and still holds several stage records. Now a fit whippet of sixty-something, Jon is a race institution, persistent as a Murray blowfly at insisting that timers, starters and various other race controllers get their facts straight. When one party or the other gets frustrated with that, he’s always got his van, bristling with loudspeakers, which he drives from town to town, checkpoint to checkpoint. He parks it a safe distance from the Race Controllers’ tent, walks around with his cordless microphone and, disregarding its ear-splitting distortion and head-thumping volume, ploughs on with his commentary as soon as he spots the first flash of sunlight from a paddle as the competitors round the bend.

Jon also ensures competitors arise in time for the day’s racing. His favourite among an array of sunrise shenanigans is the five a.m. drive through the camp blasting ‘Morning has Broken’ at Megadeath volume through his speakers, followed by a resounding farrago of self-indulgent banter and zany 1950s novelty rock ‘n’ roll. Five days of waking up to that on local football fields all along the Murray gives rise to a distinctly surreal Groundhog Day sensation. Jon loves the mischief of it.

Along with ground starter, David Rizzoli, an organising veteran who inexplicably adorns his big frame every morning with a variety of costumes ranging from Bozo the clown to the Pope, Jon is the corporate memory of the event.

The event itself is arduous at best, but the first two days feature the coldest blusters anyone can recall. Townsfolk along the Murray are all of the same opinion: Never seen it before. Must have been those tsunamis that upset the weather. On windy days, racers have to grip the paddles more firmly than they’re used to doing. Normally, the thumb is kept away from the shaft, and acts merely as leverage. The competitors suffer more blisters and wrist blowouts than the event has seen. In the K2 and K4 relay teams, there are a few paddlers with little experience, and some boats capsize as airborne paddles catch the strong winds like spinnakers.

The heavy winds alter tactics. More knowledgeable paddlers, especially those who have negotiated the serpentine Murray before, stop for food and drink only when they have a tail wind. The many bends make this trickier than it seems. Negotiating these curves presents its own challenges. A bad decision can mean half a kilometre in a matter of minutes, as some newcomers learn. Paddlers used to straight kayaking marvel at just how easy this river stuff is as they ride the current into a corner, sticking close like an F1 driver. Next moment the eddying currents around the corner have them floundering in sand and reeds as they watch the wider boats glide past on the jet stream and disappear around the next bend.

Paddlers with guts and strength know just how to turn a debilitating headwind into an advantage as others compound their mistakes.

At the end of days one and two, the medical tent teems with competitors. Masseurs busily grind groaning greenhorns. By the end of day four as the characteristic sunshine returns and temperatures soar beyond thirty-eight degrees, they’re treating different injuries: dehydration, and blisters due to sweat-softened skin.

The race doesn’t need elite competitors to have stories. Many are in it for the fun. Others are fiercely driven. One year, two brothers knocked themselves out against each other for the entire race. At the end of each day, one brother was a second in front. At the end of the fifth, the other crossed three seconds in front to lose the entire race by a solitary second.

Others come along for the society of the thing as much as the challenge. One Victorian K2 team, “Cheetah”, consists of two attractive Amazons, one of whom is here specifically, she says, to look for a boyfriend. Only the biggest and strongest would measure up, I imagine.

David Rodesky entered to impress his girlfriend. Steve Hill and Ross Fraser go around the world competing only in the most severe multi-sport events. Staying in the kayak all day must seem like Christmas holidays. Celia Burke is seventy-two – not the oldest competitor in the race – and competed at the Helsinki and Melbourne Olympics.

The Mayes family and associated clan number eight TK2 competitors. Gayle, tall and athletic, with a bricky’s handshake, competed at Barcelona. Her uncle did the Marathon on his own in 2000, and the family were his land crew. “It was like an Everest for him” she said. “He was sixty-one. This is a spiritual journey as well as a physical one. It’s a tribute to him.”

Even the Country Women’s Association has entered a team in the relay section. Mary Horton, from Dookie, says, “We just want to show that we’re not all tea and scones.” For the purposes of the race, CWA stands for “Chicks With Attitude”. Their symbol is an ironic scone on a stick.

Certain private schools and the displaced tennis parents who trail along with them provide the competitive spite that brings the event into the Century With Attitude. Little irony there. Though the schools lend fantastic atmosphere and much-needed funds to the event, the rivalry in the schools’ TK2 becomes intense and sometimes physical. Often, as one glides past another, the abuse reports across the river and onto the shores, where clutches of parents glare over at each other.

One teacher grits his teeth exasperatedly as his school’s boat capsizes in the changeover traffic: “It’s clear. If you fall out of your boat, you either hit them with your paddle, or you grab onto their boat and take them with you so they get no advantage from it.” Camberwell Grammar show how it’s done, Beaconhills how it is not. On day three, at checkpoint Charlie, not far out of Echuca, the two get in each other’s way. Their enmity has been simmering for days – years for all I know. Camberwell plough straight through the Beaconhills boat as they get the change first, capsizing it. The next Beaconhills team get in their boat and pursue them heatedly. Parents and teachers on both sides seethe. At another changeover, a parent steadying a boat for the kids to embark catches a following kayak between his legs just long enough to buy his team a few seconds. Experience counts for a lot.

By the time they get to the next checkpoint, the atmosphere is charged with all manner of disagreement. It’s a beautiful stretch of the river: broad, lined with gums, willows and elms. Houseboats sit at anchor, minding their business. A paddle steamer, the Pevensey, lets out a Little Golden Book toot. On the shore, where the crowd waits, it stinks. A monstrous dead cod, propped upright against a ridge along the shore, looking like a victim of auto-asphyxiation, bulging eyes and gaping maw fixed skyward, fills the air with the relentless stench of a fresh-laid monster dog dropping. The Grammar schools arrive and the atmosphere turns carnival at first, then carnal, as crews wade in bitterly complaining of the insults they get out on the water. I imagine them to be a little more vitriolic than “our boat shed’s bigger than yours.” More like, “You’re only as good as your postcode, mate.” Those socio-economic barbs must really hurt.

Every night, the three K4 teams sponsored by BHP Billiton socialise on the recreation ground. There seems such little enmity among them, they could probably swap team members for the relay. Sitting quietly among them is Mark Thornthwaite, the man who began the event. Unlike other key figures of the Murray Marathon, Thornthwaite has not been coming back year after year. In fact, this is only his third. Apart from his first in 1969, he competed in 1993. These long spans of absence have allowed him to observe the evolution of his one-man odyssey into an unparalleled fundraising event and an enormous management feat, which the spectre of public liability forever threatens – of course. Back in those days, the race was unsponsored, and the paddlers unencouraged. “We’d paddle into a town and they didn’t even know we’d been.” Those were the days when a competitor would down three kilograms of steak the night before a race and grab a snag sanger at one of the checkpoints. They’d wear floppy hats, shorts, sunglasses if their eyes were a bit on the sensitive side, and zinc cream if their skin was.

The Murray River Marathon is a great cultural event. Its status as the world’s longest flat-water race could make it a great sporting event. Probably the main fault with its multi-class and sectional format is that almost everyone goes home with a medal of some sort, which dilutes the significance of winning. There are eighty-nine classes and thirty-nine of them have only one competitor. This is Jon Mayne’s lament. But the slight differences between his purist approach and the fundraising focus of the race organisers typify charity sports events. Red Cross are hoping that every category will have eight or nine competitors in a few years.

For the record, K1 paddler Simon Stenhouse got line-honours every day and took out the overall race. Red Cross raised $220,000. Everyone went home having satisfied whatever it was that drove them there in the first place. Long live popular participation.

Published in Inside Sport, February 2005