Training To Thru-Hike Te Araroa: Interview With Sonia

In this episode, I interview Summit Strength client Sonia, who is three-quarters through a training journey to prepare to thru-hike Te Araroa in New Zealand. 

Inside, she shares some great insights on how she is training for this challenging long-distance trail, and the challenges she has faced along the way.

How To Train For Te Araroa

"I'm not capable yet, but I'm capable of making myself capable."

At 57, this solo hiker is training to thru-hike the entire length of New Zealand, all 3,000km of it, on Te Araroa.
It was great to have Sonia on the Training For Trekking Podcast to talk about her prep (so far) for this iconic thru-hike.

Inside we chat about:
​

• Why someone who already "knew a fair bit about the body" still decided to bring in outside help for this adventure
• How she worked through the fear of a steep, windy scree slope with 30+ lbs on her back on a recent training hike
• What 9 months of specific, progressive training has done for her strength and confidence heading into the biggest hike of her life

Episode Transcript:

Q: So I guess to kick things off, if you just want to give us a little bit of background about yourself and just let us know who you are, where you're from, what do you do and what is your background in hiking?

I'm Sonia and I am an Aussie. I'm from Sydney, but I actually live in a really cool little mountain town in Idaho, just surrounded by wilderness. I'm a structural integration practitioner, that's my work. But I'm getting more and more into hiking, probably because of where I live. I didn't grow up hiking, I didn't really get into it till I moved here. I'm surrounded by people in this town who just get out into the wilderness and do really cool things.
I think for me hiking started when I first moved to town and I went on this Middle Fork of the Salmon River week-long trip with 18 women. It was a bachelorette women's trip run by these rad outdoors women who I didn't know, and I'd never done anything like that before, I'd never set up a tent, I didn't know where you were supposed to go to the toilet, I didn't know anything about rivers and hiking. We did all this really cool stuff, and by the end of that trip I think my hiking wilderness self was born, because I just couldn't believe that you could go into these amazing places and be in the wilderness for a week and live. I think I was in my late 20s, and that's how I really got into loving the outdoors and hiking, and how I can spend as much time out there as possible.

Q: And then I guess before we started working, and we'll talk about that in a minute, what was your typical approach to
exercise and training, whether that was outdoor related or just for your general life, or whatever it may be?
I was not training at all. I was just trying to feel fit and healthy. I'd walk to work a lot, fortunately my office is close to home, and just walking and doing a bit of core strength and stretching at home, and getting out hiking, but I wasn't actually training. I've done training in the past, a long time ago I used to do triathlons and stuff like that, but it had been decades since I'd done any proper training. So it was pretty haphazard, to be honest.

Q: And then what was the big goal that you'd set for yourself, and what was the inspiration and instigator behind this particular goal?

It's a big goal, still a bit daunting. I'm going to walk the entire length of New Zealand on the Te Araroa route, which is about 3,000 kilometres.

Why? I don't know, really. There's sort of just always been this urge inside to do a really long walk, I don't know where it comes from, maybe it's genetic. I've just wanted to do something like this for about a decade, and my daughter just graduated from university, there are things happening with my work that are shifting, and I just thought this is the time to do it.

Q: And then with this in your sights, what made you decide to reach out for a little bit of extra help with your preparation, and what were the things you kind of knew you needed a bit of help with specifically?

I knew it was a lofty goal and that I just did not have all the knowledge I need to have a successful walk. I know a fair bit about the body because of my work, I know a bit about nutrition, but I knew what I didn't know. I always hire an expert if I need to achieve something beyond my skill level. I was listening to you being interviewed by someone, I think a bunch of Aussie guys, and I went, oh, this guy knows what he's talking about, because he was saying things I had never heard before. That's when I decided to reach out and chat with you and see if you could help me.

Q: And then tell us a little bit about the training you've done so far with Summit Strength. What does the program look like, what types of things have you been doing? Talk us through that.

It's been fantastic, so doable. I do a couple of days of strength training just at home with equipment I've got, which I like because I can do it whenever I want to. And then there's pack walk training with a heavy pack, which has been progressing. I started in January, so I've had a good long nine months or so of training, and it's been increasing.

Hill climbs, which I love to hate, I'm so happy I've done them because they're so effective, but yeah, hill climbs, oh, those were so rough. And just heaps of other really nuanced things I'd never done before, I forgot about balance work, so it was interesting to realise my balance wasn't that great, and to be doing balance work. It's just very doable, very specific, effective training, so that right now, nine or ten months in, I feel really strong and capable.

Q: So when it comes down to any type of training journey, obviously no training journey is ever linear, there's always a million and one things that come up along the way, good, bad, and whatever. So as you've been going through so far, what have been some roadblocks that have come across, that you've come across along the way so far, and how did you go about overcoming them?

There's always going to be roadblocks. I've been so grateful that I can just reach out to you whenever I hit one and you can give me a workaround, which seems to always work.
The first one was that I changed shoes because I wanted to wear trail runners on my walk, and it took a while for my feet to get used to them. I had a fair bit of heel pain in my right foot, which I'd never had before, I've got really good feet, so this was new for me. I think with the increase in mileage and carrying a heavy pack, particularly on pavement when it was still snowy and that's all I had to walk, my foot was really sore and I was worried. You just said, oh yeah, you've just got to do this quarter heel lift, calf raise thing several times. And it worked, and it got rid of it, so that was amazing.
Then, well, the hill climbs, as I mentioned, the hills I had available to me are straight up, and there's sagebrush right alongside, so it's really hard to use your poles, and I just hated them. I felt really sick, nauseous. Because I'm really determined I just would do them, but I found them really challenging, and you shared with me that that's absolutely normal, that it's common for people to get nauseous on hills, and adjusted things. So I stuck with it, and I have to say I'm so glad I did, because it's really made a big difference to my actual backpacking hill climbs.
And then, really, the roadblock of doing these really long backpacking training walks, I think they're up to six hours or something now, but when I only had roads available, I'm lucky, I live in the mountains now, there's endless places, I was just walking roads for five or six hours, and it was boring. I don't listen to music or anything, I like to just be where I am, but I had to come up with ways to make it interesting because it was a bit repetitive. I really feel for people who are trying to train in the city, I reckon that would be quite a challenge. But anyway, moved through all that, and I'm not feeling any roadblocks anymore.

Q: So from that, two things I'd love to dive into just a little bit. We'll go back to the hills to start, so when you were, because this is, as you said, a pretty common thing a lot of people run into, whether they're hiking or whether they're doing hill training, where they do begin to feel a bit gross as they're going through, can you remember specifically what you adjusted to kind of help that feel a bit more manageable?

I went slower than I thought I needed to, because the way you had me doing it was three minutes hard, three minutes easy nose breathing, three minutes hard, like that, and on and on it went. I adjusted my hard to be a lot easier than I thought, even though I was still puffing, it was easier than I originally went out. That really helped. Also taking a bit more of a rest in between those three-minute cycles really helped, so really just pace, and a little bit of rest, like only maybe not even a minute rest, made a big difference.

Q: And then when you were talking about the longer walks, in particular the road walks, and you get a little bit bored and you're not a big fan of music, what did you do specifically to help you mentally get through those?

It was quite a fun exercise, actually, I'm like, how could I make this interesting? So I'd take my paints, and I think one time when I had a little break for food, I'd sit and just do a little painting or something, that was kind of interesting. I obviously tried to pick different routes every time if I could.
And then I went, oh, maybe I'll walk at night, or start at 3am or something and walk under the moon, and that was really cool actually, because I might have to do that a couple of times on the TA, just if there's tides or rivers or something that has a timing factor, and I really enjoyed that. It was so novel, it would be halfway through and then the sun would be coming up and the birds would be singing and there's no one around. So I just kind of tried to create novelty, and it really helped.

Q: So obviously, now that we're talking, we are not quite at the big trip yet, still a little ways to go, and you haven't done it yet. But the reason I wanted to get you on is because you've recently come back from, well, I guess, a couple of cool adventures, so tell us about them, what did you do, how did they go, give us a sort of story there.

It's great to be able to actually do backpacking as my backpacking training, because that's the best training there is, and I can go out my door and have this amazing wilderness. So I've done a couple of trips. The most recent one, we just got back from last night actually, was four days in the White Clouds Wilderness area, about an hour and a half north of where I live. It was really such an incredible training experience on so many levels, because there were things I either hadn't ever done before or were a bit out of my comfort zone, quite out of my comfort zone.
We were regularly above 10,000 feet, so there was a lot of altitude, of course you feel a bit of altitude, but not that high, so we used the nose breathing method, which is always in my head, that you've taught me: you want to be breathing through your nose, otherwise it's not sustainable. Going up really high, one of the peaks we crossed was 10,800 feet, and I was really conscious of going really slowly so that I didn't get out of breath at all. So it was handy for altitude management.
There was some technical, not quite climbing but scrambling, we went up this peak called Patterson Peak that ends up being sort of a knife edge where there's just room for your feet, and we hadn't really researched it well enough to understand how technical it was, so we were both out of our comfort zones and just had to talk each other through it, are you okay, yes I'm okay. It was such a learning experience in really understanding the route a bit better. We went up and were on this little peak, incredible views, and then the other side was 40 to 50 degree, really loose scree, so every step slid, for a couple of hours. That was really challenging for me, just from a psychological standpoint of, am I going to fall and die, because it's one thing to do that without a pack, but when you've got 30-plus pounds on your back, and it's a bit windy, your pack can just throw you off balance. So it was such a good lesson in managing where my pack was and how I walked, so that it was never going to pull me down the mountain.
It brought up an issue I'd never had before, which was, because we were making these big steps down such a slippery slope for so long, I ended up having quite bad pain in the balls of my feet, I think because of how I was landing repeatedly, so I had to manage that foot pain. It didn't become blisters, I think it just was an impact issue, really. So I went, well, I need socks with a bit more padding and need to adjust my walking technique. And then we put our feet in the creek whenever we could, just to ice them, and that helped.
We spent a lot of time off trail, finding our own routes using maps we'd made ourselves, topo maps, and reading the landscape to pick our route, and crossing creeks, some of which were covered with wood, and thorny brush where you really have to reach over and step carefully every step to find where to cross. That's where I was really thinking, I'm so grateful I've done all that balance work I was talking about, because I could do those manoeuvres with my pack and my poles and not feel like I was going to fall over. That was really, really helpful.
In the end, it was just an absolutely stunning trip, four days, up and over these different passes, camped at beautiful lakes, incredible. We didn't see tons of people, there were a couple of days where we were completely alone. Long, tiring days, I think we did about ten miles a day, but technical, with lots of climbing in altitude.
I loved it. I feel like I've come out of that trip just feeling so much stronger and more capable, because there will be some of that on the Te Araroa, I know there's some technical stuff and certainly a lot of river crossings and route finding. So I feel like I'll be able to do it, or I'll be able to take the time to make good decisions along the way.

Q: And you mentioned a few challenges you kind of ran into there, a few things that were like, you know, had to be pretty intentional. Were there any other challenges that you kind of ran into on these adventures that maybe you hadn't expected, or you just kind of had to deal with?

One of mine, this is a boring challenge but other people might have this: I've got really sensitive skin, I'm allergic to tons of things, one of them being rubber, which, I mean, you're sleeping on a rubber mat, there's a lot of rubber involved in hiking. So that's a real challenge I still haven't figured out. On our previous backpack we were eaten alive by mosquitoes and black flies and even ticks, and my skin just goes into a whole body rash, and it's not fun, I had a bit of that on this trip as well, I think because we were sweating and there was a lot of friction, and bugs again, so skin care is a challenge I have yet to figure out. One thing I do is I've got a silk liner that I put on my sleeping pad, because silk is really good for my skin, and it's a bit of a luxury, it's this tiny little thing, weighs practically nothing, and when I have my silk liner on I feel like I'm in luxury, and it helps my skin out. So that's kind of an expected, boring challenge that I have on these long hikes.

Q: And then coming out of the back of this, so obviously big trips still ahead, and these were kind of shakedown trips, and obviously adventures in their own right to go out and enjoy yourself, but coming off the back of these adventures, is there anything you feel like, okay, now in this final lead-up I need to kind of hone in a little bit more, or I need to change, or I need to deal with, or whatever it may be, for your preparations for the TA?

There's a couple of things. I do feel pretty well prepared, which I'm amazed at, because I didn't know I would feel this way.
There's two things I can think of. One is, I forgot to mention that I have issues with my right leg, I was in a bad car accident 20 years ago, and I have osteoarthritis in my hip and my knee, and my whole right leg is just a bit wonky. It doesn't bother me when I'm hiking, but at night when I'm lying down sleeping it can really ache, and I can't find a comfortable position, so you've given me some stretches and mobility stuff to do, and that really helps. Sometimes it's hard when you get into camp and it's dark and you're just setting up and going straight in, but that's something I still have to dial in, figuring out how I can get my leg to not ache at night, because it's really uncomfortable. I think that the stretches, and really getting that into a routine and a habit every single night at camp, even if I do it inside my tent once it's all set up, away from the mosquitoes, will really help.
The other thing is continuing to hone route-finding skills and river crossing skills, because there's a lot of river, I think there's more than 200 river crossings on the TA, and a bit of route finding. It's mostly mapped out, but not always. I'm actually booked into a class in New Zealand a few days before I start walking that will help me with that. I've got a fair bit of river experience because I'm a kayaker, but you don't walk across rivers in a kayak, the goal is to not be in the river, so that's a skill I'm going to get a bit more training on for safety, and also understanding New Zealand weather patterns, because they're very extreme, I think a bit like Tassie, they can change at any moment, so I want to be really confident that I can make good decisions based on weather, terrain, and looking ahead, to make sure I don't end up stuck in really bad weather. So those are the things that really come to mind, otherwise I feel pretty on track to start walking.

Q: And then for the listeners' reference, we are recording this end of July, probably will be released in two or three weeks or so, when are you actually heading off on the venture?
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I'm going to go via Sydney to see my family and friends on the way, and then I aim to start at the beginning of October, somewhere between the 1st and the 3rd. I'll be walking for maybe five months, I don't know how long it's going to take, but yeah, starting soon.

Q: Before I do wrap up, was there anything else that I didn't get a chance to cover or ask you which you think might be useful for any of the listeners leading into something like this?

I think that I'd like to point out that I'm a pretty just regular person. I don't have special skills, like I said, I didn't grow up hiking. I'm 57, so that presents its own physiological challenges. There's a phrase that I love to consider that might be helpful: when I thought about doing this walk and it became real, I said to myself, well, am I capable? And I thought, I'm not capable yet, but I'm capable of making myself capable. And I think that's been really valuable, and I think training with you has helped me feel like I'm capable and ready. So just to put it out there that if someone wants to do something like this, you probably can, so just have a go.

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