62, Two Knee Replacements, and Not One Anti-Inflammatory at Ningaloo

For women in their 60s managing joint pain, arthritis, and years of stop-start training, Jenny's story will feel familiar. At 62, with two knee replacements and significant arthritis throughout her body, she had all but accepted that her best hiking days were behind her.

Then she booked 12 days at Ningaloo Reef in Western Australia, signed up to Summit Strength with a six-week lead-in, and completed every single activity on her itinerary, including three grade four hikes, four swims with whale sharks, and getting herself back into a kayak from the open ocean for the first time in her life.
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In this episode of the Training For Trekking Podcast, Jenny joins Rowan to talk through her training, what surprised her on the trip, and how she managed it all without needing a single anti-inflammatory the entire time.

​Building Hiking Fitness With Arthritis

Episode Transcript:

Q: So to kick things off, do you just want to give us a little bit of background? Where are you from, who you are, what do you do, and what is your background in hiking?
I live on the Central Coast, which is about an hour north of Sydney, in New South Wales in Australia. I am retired now, which is lovely. I was an academic librarian, and previous to that I was a psychiatric nurse, but that is a long time ago.
In terms of hiking, I will go back a bit of a way. In my 20s and early 30s I was hiking regularly, but it was totally unplanned. I had the youth about me, so I would just put a backpack on and go. I was famous for taking cans of vegetables on the Overland Track. At the time I did not know any better.
Then around my mid-30s I started to get physical problems. The back went for about five years, and the knees have never been good. I have what doctors say is a lot more arthritis in my body than you would expect for somebody my age. I am 62 now. I had two knee replacements when I was 56 and 57, and a significant joint problem in my foot at 59, 60.
I have given that history because it gives an idea of what I have been dealing with in terms of hiking. Through all of it I kept hiking to what I could do, generally 7 to 10Ks. But following the knee replacements, the last five years has really been about recovering and losing all of my fitness. I have been scraping up to try and get to a 5 or 7K hike, and just been knocked back all the time by injuries occurring. Trying, stopped, trying, stopped. The injuries are all minor things, just an arthritic joint that has decided to play up.
I did meet my husband at 35, and he is a hiker. He would plan trips and talk about having a light pack, and I was all geared to do all that. And then that is when my back went. So now I feel like at 62 I am back to 35 and thinking, yes, I can do this and start from here.

Q: Before we started working together, what was your typical approach to training or physical preparation? What did that sort of look like for you?
Being a librarian, I am a very good researcher. So I would spend about a week trying to work out a program around what was happening at that particular time in my life. Looking back, that is a week when I am not actually doing anything, just trying to work something out.
I would then start the program. I have always done strength training, weightlifting, that kind of thing. I would incorporate walking, hikes to a certain extent depending on my fitness, swimming, pool walking, pool lap swimming. I have even tried Pilates, exercise bikes.
Inevitably I would start the training program, something would play up, and then I would be in the problem of do I stop, do I keep going? I usually stopped, rested, then started again. If you look over the last two or three years, it has been a start, stop, start, stop sort of pattern. Not getting the consistency, and not getting the progress.

Q: Before we got into contact, what was the adventure you had decided on? What did you have coming up, and what made you decide on this particular trip?
I have always continued to travel. If I could not do the hiking, I love being in the national parks and out in the wild, so I would go with my husband wherever we went and turn back when I knew I had done enough, which might be after a kilometre if things were particularly bad.
We planned Ningaloo. The Ningaloo Reef is a 600-kilometre fringing reef on the mid-west coast of Western Australia, and I had always wanted to go there. To swim with the whale sharks, to swim with the manta rays. And because it is open ocean, getting in and out of a boat, it requires a level of physicality. Kayaking over the reef, snorkelling, and then there are walks there too. I was really keen to do the walks.
We planned to go in June, which is the prime time, and to spend about 12 days there.

Q: What made you decide to reach out for extra help leading into this? What were the specific things you felt like you needed help with?
I have actually been following your podcast and your Skool app for probably about five years. I have looked at the Summit program a lot before, but always felt I could sort it out myself.
I had reached that point where I thought, I am not getting anywhere. I have been trying for one, two, three years, I have lost count, not really progressing anywhere and struggling. And I thought, if I really want to do this, I have to try something completely different. And this was the completely different.
I wanted to get rid of the noise. What do I do if there is a problem? How should the program be put together? I wanted to get rid of all that noise from my head so that all I had to concentrate on was just doing the session. Because it is not only putting the program together or troubleshooting when something goes wrong. If something plays up, you have got to put a couple of days into research to find out why that left foot is hurting and what you can do about it, and then how to change the programming. It is just a vicious cycle. I wanted to have somebody else deal with that, and all I had to concentrate on was just doing the workouts.
I think I had a six-week lead-in, and I thought that was a good lead-in. If I can make the walks at Ningaloo, it is a good goal to aim at. I knew I would not necessarily be able to do them, but I hoped to.

Q: Tell us a little bit about the training that you did through Summit Strength. What did your program look like? What types of things were you doing?
I had five sessions a week. Two strength sessions. I did one in the gym with weights because that is what I like to do, and one at home. The home one actually turned out to be a real highlight for me because it helped with mobility and flexibility, and it was surprising how much difference home workouts without the heavy weights made. The two complement each other, and it is quite good to have both.
Then there was the cardio side of things, which was different to what I was used to. Loaded pack walks, interval training. They were structured differently to what I had read about before, and as I did them they worked really well for me. I was impressed with the improvements I got from them. At no point did I come away thinking that was really hard, too hard. Nor did I come away aching and thinking I cannot go back, which is something I would get with my own training.
There was also a hike a week, and we changed how I thought about hiking. I used to base it on distance, and I now realise I was walking too fast. Basing it on time made a big difference because I was not thinking, I have got another kilometre to go, I must speed up. It was nice to flip it over and do it against time.
And recovery and mobility, which I will confess I do not think I have ever really done in my life. The shortest session, but the hardest one to fit in.

Q: Throughout the process, were there any roadblocks that came up along the way? And if so, how did you go about overcoming them?
It did exactly what I wanted. Whenever I hit anything physical, and for me that can be just a joint starting to ache, which is nothing in the moment, but if I do not address it quickly it can become something I cannot walk on in a month's time. Anything like that, I just hit it straight back to you, and you would alter the program accordingly to what was needed. That was just fantastic.
A really simple example was calf raises. I have done calf raises for years, and it was playing up my foot. And you said, well, don't do 10, do seven. In all this time I have never thought of just cutting off a few calf raises. It is such a simple solution, but I had never done it. That is really where it paid off.
And then things like the lack of motivation, or life gets interrupted. Having it all pre-programmed and laid out for me gave me a different mindset. Just go and do that. It is an hour. Just go and do that, then you can lie on the settee. Because I did not have all the other noise associated with it, I could just focus on doing the workout.
The accountability matters too. Somebody else to report to changes that focus a little bit. And I will say the money. You pay for something, you are going to do it.

Q: How did the trip go? Give us the rundown.
The trip was just fantastic, absolutely fantastic. The main reason being that I was able to maintain the activities with a reasonable level of fitness and achieve what I wanted to do.
I did the swimming with the manta rays, two different trips with manta rays and whale sharks, which I have to say was the most awesome thing. Swimming with these creatures is just beautiful. Silence in the ocean is just wonderful. Whereas I had gone thinking if I get one swim that is great, I got four swims with whale sharks, which is a lot, so I was really pleased.
Kayaking, I actually physically managed to get myself back into a kayak from the ocean, which I have never, ever been able to do before. I had a very good guide who talked me through the techniques, but it was the physicality that made it possible.
Then lastly the three walks. We had four walks planned, but sadly the biggest one, which would have been six kilometres, was closed because of cyclone damage. The other three were two to three kilometres each but took two hours because of very short, steep sections up and down. Grade four. They were a challenge for me, but I am pretty certain I would not have done them if I had not done the six weeks of training. I was able to do the walk, feel confident going up and down, and then feel confident to go on to the next one. Twelve days of very, very active, and the walks were just so lovely.

Q: Were there any major challenges you faced on the trip? Anything that came up along the way that you had to overcome?
The steep sections were an issue for me because I do not do stairs a lot given where I live, everything is single storey and flat. So the steep sections were something I was quite hesitant about, particularly going down. I just concentrated on the techniques, using poles, taking small steps, thinking about the muscles I had available to do that particular thing.
One thing I did not mention is that I did not take any anti-inflammatories. In every single trip I have ever been on, I normally start on anti-inflammatories within a day or two and take them for the entire trip, and that is without doing the physical activity I did on this trip. So taking into account that I have got quite a lot of arthritis happening, and yet I was managing to do all that, it is for me quite significant that I managed to do it all without needing any anti-inflammatories. That was excellent.

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Q: Coming out the other end of this successful adventure, what is next? What is the plan?

In August I am going to what they call the Red Centre. Alice Springs, then travelling down to Kings Canyon and to Uluru. There are multiple short walks across several days back to back, and the biggest is about six or seven kilometres. The Rim Walk at Kings Canyon, which everybody who hikes in Australia knows. The getting up to the rim is apparently very steep, and that is what I am hoping to do.
And what you do not know yet, Rowan, is that we are on the cusp of finalising a booking for Flinders Island, which is north of Tasmania, with several walks I really want to do.
Longer term I am looking at Iceland and Antarctica. Iceland I would like to get out into the remoter areas, not just be in the city. And ultimately, longer hikes and maybe multi-day hikes. Just progressing onwards and upwards. There is always somewhere to walk that needs to be walked.

Q: If anyone was listening to this today who was in a similar situation to you, wanting to do similar types of adventures or challenges, what advice would you personally give them?

I would say give it a go. Sign up to Summit Strength. The consistency has been fantastic and the support has been fantastic. I have tried so many things and not really got there. Over this period of time, what has really struck me is how important the consistency of the workout is, and then managing the load versus my capability. That is really what has nailed it.
It is not just the types of training. It is multiple things working together. But for me personally, what I could never nail on my own was what sort of load I should be doing for my own personal capabilities. And when you are in pain, it is really difficult to think about anything else but the pain.
I have a way of thinking about the money too. If somebody said to me, give me X amount and in six weeks you can walk, I would say, here is the money. And when you compare it to what you spend on physio, chiro, all of it adding up, and I have not had to see anybody. I try to think of it in terms of what it has saved me in visits to health professionals, in anti-inflammatories, and what I am willing to pay in order to improve my health and do what I want to do in life.

It has just been so rewarding to be able to get out and actually do what I want to do in life, which is hike, instead of not being able to hike.
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Q: [On final thoughts...]
For people out there who are like me, 62, carrying a bit of extra weight, got lots of arthritis and lots of aches and pains, I would say just keep trying. You will not get anywhere unless you just keep trying. And every little thing that you do is a positive. Even if it is just getting up and going out for a 30-minute walk down the road, whatever you can manage, it is a positive and it is leading you in the right direction. It is that steady increase, that steady slope upwards towards achieving what you want to achieve.

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