Mt Gravatt Humbled Me. And I Needed It.

The Plan

A friend of mine is doing the Annapurna Circuit with me in October. He's not a first-timer: he's done Mustang Valley and a handful of other serious treks. He knows what he's doing. When he suggested Mt Gravatt as a training hike, I thought: yeah, easy. I climb Mangere Mountain back home in Auckland. That's 105 metres. How different could 200 metres be?

Very different, as it turns out.

The Reality

We went off the main path about twenty minutes in. Old bush trail, uneven ground, roots, loose dirt, the kind of surface where your brain has to constantly negotiate with your feet about where to land. My friend's son (who joined us) was moving through it like it was flat pavement.

I stumbled. More than once.

At some point he handed me a stick.

Now, I'm a physiotherapist. I spend my working days telling people to use walking aids without shame, that there's no ego in supporting your body, that the stick is a tool not a verdict. I believe every word of that: for my patients.

For myself, standing on a bush trail in Brisbane at 4:30pm? My ego kicked in hard. I used the stick to clear spider webs. That's it. I told myself that was its purpose.

(By the end of the trail, I'd started finding my feet again. The body adapts, even within a single session. But the first twenty minutes were genuinely humbling.)

The Knee

My patellofemoral pain showed up early. Within the first twenty minutes, on the high steps — the kind where you're lifting your knee significantly to get up or down a rock ledge — I felt it.

Sharp. Familiar. Unwelcome.

And my immediate thought wasn't this hurts. It was: I've only been walking for twenty minutes. What happens at hour four on the Thorong La approach?

That's the honest physio brain kicking in. I know exactly what patellofemoral pain is, I know its triggers, I know it tends to worsen with sustained loading and elevation change. I wasn't panicking: but I was calculating.

What I did: I started recruiting my hips more consciously. Less quad dominance, more glute engagement through the step. It's a gait modification I'd prescribe to any patient with anterior knee pain on incline. It helped. The sharp pain settled into manageable discomfort and I finished the hike without any significant issue.

The knees were a little tender afterwards. Nothing that concerned me. But the signal was clear.

The Reassurance

Here's where it got interesting.

On the way down, my friend showed me the pace we'd be walking on the Annapurna Circuit. Slow. Genuinely slow. The Nepalese approach: a certain number of steps, then stop, breathe, recover. Repeat. It's not a power hike. It's a rhythm.

We had been walking considerably faster than that today.

That landed well. Not as an excuse — the fitness still needs to improve significantly — but as useful context. The Annapurna Circuit is not a race. The altitude will force a pace that, on flat sea-level ground, would feel almost laughably easy. The challenge isn't speed. It's sustained output over consecutive days at elevation.

That reframe matters for how I train.

The Koala

I should mention the koala.

I'm a New Zealander. We don't have koalas. What I had been told, approximately thirty seconds before spotting one, was that koalas like to drop from trees onto people's heads and claw them, and that they kill a measurable number of Australians per year.

I don't know if that's true. I didn't verify it. I was too busy looking up.

This was also my first bush walk in Australia, and I'd spent the entire time nervously watching the ground for snakes and spiders. You try maintaining good hiking posture when you're scanning for things that can kill you at every elevation simultaneously.

The koala was asleep. As koalas apparently always are. It was spectacular anyway.

What I Actually Learned

I've been a physio for long enough to know the difference between I'm tired and I'm deconditioned. Yesterday was the latter.

Two years since I've done anything with serious elevation. And it showed: not just in the breathlessness, which I expected, but in the coordination. The body's proprioceptive confidence on uneven terrain. The ability to move without thinking about every footfall.

That used to be automatic. Yesterday it required concentration.

I'm not catastrophising. Six months is a long time to build fitness. But I left Mt Gravatt with a clear priority list, and it starts at the bottom. Literally.

Lower limb strength is the gap. Quads, glutes, calves. The foundation of everything on a mountain. I can build cardiovascular fitness relatively quickly. Neuromuscular coordination takes longer. Tendon capacity takes longer still.

If I'm going to cross Thorong La Pass at 5,416 metres in October, the work starts now. Not next month. Not after the school holidays. Now.

Mt Gravatt is 200 metres.

Thorong La is 5,416.

The gap between where I am and where I need to be is large enough to be motivating and small enough to be achievable.

That's exactly where you want to be in April.