A Dangerous Business

On the 3rd of March 2024, I descended Bluff Hill to Stirling Point, being greeted by dozens of my fellow hiking brethren as I touched the signpost to signify my journey on Te Araroa was at its end. That was 6 months ago (hence the super creative title of this post). How on Earth has it already been half a year since I finished the TA??? To be fair, it’s not like I had a good grasp on accurately perceiving time on trail, so why would that change once I got back to Australia?

As one might expect, over the first few weeks of being back I was greeted by a sea of friendly faces who bombarded me with a barrage of questions. Most of them were fairly surface-level, like “what was your favourite part”, “were there other people”, that sort of thing. But there were some deeper ones like “how did you grow on the trail?” Regrettably I couldn’t give great answers for those as I hadn’t had the chance to properly reflect on those past 4.5 months.

First things first… I need to stop being so anxious about everything! I’ve lost count of the time where I would spend upwards of a week growing in concern over an upcoming trail section only to reach it and traverse it without any trouble at all. Guess it’s no wonder every summit or pass was met with a thought of “how did I get here?” With that said, it’s not like I was doing these sections alone, a lot of credit has to go to my friends and all of the encouragement they gave me.

Spending all that time with Matt, Melly and Oli also taught me a whole lot of humility. I went to New Zealand with a thoroughly put together spreadsheet, yet my final schedule looked nothing like it. A big reason for that was wanting to stick with the group, meaning I had to – sometimes reluctantly- he willing to change my schedule. The Richmond’s are probably the clearest example of that. If I was solo I would have never considered going from Rocks to Slaty Hut in one day. But Melly had been looking at the weather forecast and – smartly – concluded it would be best to get over Mt Rintoul before the rain came. I really didn’t want to, but I’m glad I did heed her advice.

There’s more I could discuss, but these were the two main lessons I took away from the TA. Now onto everything that’s happened since I got back to Australia. One thing I definitely would’ve changed about my return is giving myself more time to breathe and resettle into “normal” life. When it became clear that there was a pretty good chance I’d be given a job offer as a graduate engineer and notified the company that I was going on this adventure, I asked to start the first Monday after I expected to finish. I was already asking to start late and I didn’t want to push their boundaries more than was needed. Of course, once you factor in my little epilogue in Queenstown and Christchurch, it meant that I had a grand total of one weekend in between returning to Brisbane and entering my office for the first time. Oh, and did I mention I had a friend’s wedding on one of those days?

So yeah, I had zero time to mentally prepare for the job, and whilst the rest of the grads starting at the company had been given a 2 week induction program to help them get settled in, I was basically thrown straight at my team (along with a swathe of IT issues) and had to just get on with it. Thankfully, my role as a graduate engineer is basically to be a knowledge sponge, to learn as much as I can in the short time I have with the team before moving onto the next one. It took a couple weeks to get settled into this new rhythm, but I got there in the end and over time I was given more complex (and interesting) projects to work on.

Now, when I say “settled in”, I mean that I physically got used to my new routines; when to wake up, what train to catch, when to have lunch, that sort of thing. Mentally, I was still on the TA. I had gone from hiking 8 hours a day over mountains and through sloppy mud to sitting in a chair for 8 hours a day doing a job that for some periods was slow, monotonous, and didn’t challenge me in the slightest. Plus, I was now doing the exact thing that motivated me to go on a through-hike in the first place: giving up basically my entire day to do mundane work. And yes, I do mean my entire day, because although I am only in the office for 8 hours, I’m usually so tired by the end of it that I have no interest in staying out longer than I need to. I just want to go home, eat dinner, play some games, and go to bed.

With all of that said, I’m happy to report that things have gotten better over time. No longer being able to spontaneously do stuff with my friends meant that I had to be more intentional with reaching out to them and planning stuff to do. I’m still not great at it mind you, but I’m working on it. Furthermore, I quickly realised that by sitting in a chair all day, my physical fitness was going to tank. That annoyed me a lot, because once I found my trail legs I was really happy with how I felt physically (ignoring how underweight I was). I knew I needed to do something to maintain a decent level of fitness (can’t exactly commit to doing regular multi-day hikes now), so I started doing parkruns on Saturday mornings. To briefly summarise what a parkrun is, it’s an organised (free) 5 km fun run held in public parks (very creative name, I know). Upon finishing your run, you are given a token with your position on it, which you then give to one of the awesome volunteers running the event. They will then scan your token along with your own personal barcode and are then given an official time. Call me a massive nerd, but it’s this last part that convinced me to start doing them. What can I say, I love analysing data. I’d certainly like to do more exercise throughout my week, but I had to start somewhere, so doing parkrun each week is a good place to start from.

Being dissatisfied with one’s current situation is far from being a niche struggle that only I’m facing. In fact I’d be confident in arguing that it’s incredibly common amongst our species living in the developed world. That gets further exacerbated when large-scale changes happen to our daily lives, and you can end up feeling dangerously nostalgic, blinding ourselves to the opportunities these changes offer. Since I came home, I’ve consistent wished to be back on trail, back studying at uni (clearly forgetting all of the late night-induced trauma it gave me), back working as a tennis coach at my local club and playing the sport 4 days a week on top of that. The hard reality is those chapters of my life have finished. My tennis friends have all moved on (as have all of the coaches I worked with), my uni friends have all graduated, and frankly as nice as it was being able to hang out with them every day as we trauma bonded over final exams and painful group projects, having my labour being rewarded with money instead of grades and HECS debt is rather nice.

So what can I do? Well… I could always go on another hike. Nothing like the magnitude of the TA, but certainly a decently long multi-day trail. Spoiler alert: I may or may not have already found one that I may or may not be doing later this year. Friend-wise, I’ll have to be more intentional in catching up with them in the little free time I have, making opportunities to do stuff together instead of just waiting for them to come to me. Sport-wise, I’m in a conundrum of wanting to pick up my racquet again but now living a fair ways away from my childhood club whilst also not wanting to separate myself from them by going to one more local. I’ll need to do some more thinking through that one.

So just to summarise, although life has changed a lot and isn’t as exciting as it used to be, life is still good and I’m learning to make the most of it. Also you should watch my videos (via the YouTube icon at the bottom of the page). I’m making one video per section of New Zealand I walked through, which by the end will total 9 videos (I’m combining Marlborough and Tasman into a single video). As of writing I’ve published the first 3 – Northland, Auckland, Waikato – and I think they’re pretty good. Anyway, that’s all from me. Until next time!