In this first‑person narrative, the speaker recounts an ill‑prepared five‑day trek on Tasmania’s Overland Track, which includes the challenging Cradle Mountain section. He entered the hike with plantar fasciitis, inadequate gear, and little backpacking experience, quickly realizing his lack of preparation as he endured cold, wet huts, sleet, and physical pain. A guide’s advice and the high cost of a helicopter rescue forced him to summon deep resilience. He adopted a step‑by‑step mental strategy, repeating a mantra (“My legs are as strong as an ox…”) and focusing on the next obvious action—whether reaching a hut, a lunch spot, or simply a breath. This focus, he argues, creates reality, allowing him to progress despite hardship. Along the way he observes the kindness of fellow walkers, the stark beauty of ancient trees, and reflects on past personal adversities (illness, loss, trauma) as evidence of his inner strength. The talk concludes with a lesson: by engaging the present mind, defining a clear end goal, and taking the next obvious step, one can navigate extreme stress without needing exhaustive plans.
Chapters
I had a situation arise a few years ago where a girlfriend said to me, hey, I'm going on the Tasmanian Overland Track. And I was like, oh yeah, cool, I'll go with you. You know, she does tricks and she seems to have nice photos. I like taking photos. I was like, let's do that. And I remember about a month beforehand I was talking to someone and I said, I need to get some boots, I'm going on the Overland Track. And they said, oh, is that the, the really hard Cradle Mountain, 5-day walk. I went, oh no, no, it's just the Overland Track. Little did I know they're the same thing, right? And I knew I was in trouble. I really knew I was in trouble when about a week beforehand I was like, I'd had for about a month this plantar fasciitis. It was painful to put my foot on the ground. I'm thinking, ah, how hard can it really be? You know, it's just bushwalking in Tasmania. Now you're talking to someone who's never worn a backpack, who hadn't done anything other than being in Melbourne lockdown, maybe 1 to 2 hours of walking a day and I was like gonna be taping on these mountains, still completely oblivious to this situation. And in the very first hour I realized that I was stuffed. So Maureen had just come back from Kilimanjaro. She'd done base camp. Other people have done Machu Picchu. They've done all of these, all of these treks. And, and this one lady's like, oh look, you know, we really haven't trekked for a few years, but we have spent the last 6 weeks carrying 20 kilos on our backs for 5 hours a a day trekking over the weekends. And I was like, oh my God, I, I'm really in trouble. And then the sleep started. Now these people made the assumption that I knew how to tie, do up a coat and how to wear waders and stuff. I had no idea. So I was soaked by our first stop, which they said was going to be the hut, which I assumed was going to be like, oh, to be honest, just a school cafe. So I was expecting, you know, hot chocolate, a few buns, and The first hut seriously was built like 150 years ago, possum catchers or something, and it was falling down and it was freezing and there's wind coming through the wood and there's like 20 people in their shibori. And I was just like, I'm soaking wet. I have absolutely no decorum at this stage. I'm ripping clothes off, trying to get more clothes on, thinking I don't care who sees me in my wet underwear. And by that stage they took a bit of pity on me and showed me how not to get wet, but then everyone took off. So we're in a group of 8 people and they all took off to the next hut, which turned out to be an igloo with a plastic floor that could fit 4 people in there. And I walked for 4 hours thinking, oh my God, I can't wait to get to the next hut. Obviously this one wasn't right. And by this stage, the sleet came in. There was no visibility. God knows how far ahead most people were from me, but one of the guides stayed back with me and I was just like, this is it. I cannot go on. This is the worst thing ever. And I said to him, how do I get out of here? And he said, well, you can't go back down the mountain and it's only 4 days forward. That's That's it. That's your option. And so I had this realization that I was stuffed, like I couldn't get out. I checked in. They said, I said to him, how much do you think it would've cost to get a helicopter in? He said about $8,000, which I decided probably wasn't worth it. And I really had to draw deep on resilience. And so the only way I could do that was I could focus on what I wanted to do. And the focus was I wanted to get to the end so I could get out of this hellhole, but I had to take it one step at a time. Literally. But I had to get just to the camp that night, and to get to that camp was just one step, and it was just the next obvious step. And for 5 days, all I said— and I had this mantra going for like 6 to 8 hours a day— which is, "My legs are as strong as an ox. My heart is as strong as a lion. I can do this, and with God's help, I can definitely do this." It was just one step at a time, being focused on the end result and knowing, you know, on day 2, there's trap that you could really get out of. It hurts, it hurt really, really hard, and it really gave me the opportunity to kick myself for not being prepared and doing the research. But also it gave me the opportunity to step up, and I knew it was a mental game. And although there was physical pain, it was a mental game. And every single step, I just reminded myself that I had everything within me to take the next step. What I, I want us to take from this is the fact that your focus does create your reality. My focus was to get to the end. My focus was to get to the hut that night. My focus was to get to the lunch spot. My focus was to get to the morning tea spot. My focus was to take one step at a time. So there's an awareness piece where we recognize we're in these situations that are incredible stress on us. But then there's a second piece which then says, I've never done this before. What is it that I wanna create? I wanna get to the end. How am I gonna do it? I don't really know because I I now am very aware of the fact that physically I am not up to this, but what's the next obvious step? And for me, it was just an obvious step. But in those situations, what we do is we're, we're so focused here in the present. We're not in the future, we're not in the past. All we can do is focus on taking a breath, pulling in whatever you need to make it happen. And for me, there was this, the most beautiful moments of seeing humanity play out, where the walkers that I was with, just amazingly incredible. But there was also these incredible, beautiful opportunities to see nature that most people never see. And I had the opportunity to stop and to just go, I'm standing next to a tree here that is just a tree, and it's been here for thousands of years. It hasn't worried about bushfires in the future. It doesn't worry about the fact that it's had bushfires in the past. It is just is. This is all it does. And it really gave me, I guess, a great sense of the fact that when we dig in deep, we have the ability to do things. And I had to, at that stage, go back to past experiences and go, like, I've got through some pretty tough times, and I haven't had near as many horrific situations as most people have had, and ordeals that people have gone through with sickness and losing children and, and terrible childhoods and horrific accidents and loss of loved ones and relationships and all of those terrible things. I haven't had to fight that type of adversity, but I have had challenging times where I didn't know if I was going to be able to get through. And what I thought of at that time was, I can. I have the ability to look back into the past and know that I have had these circumstances, but I'm now in the present and I just have to take the next obvious step. And so when we look at this awareness piece and we go, okay, take a moment, engage the prefrontal cortex, whatever it is to get yourself out of that emotional flight, fight, or freeze, and then have the ability to go, what is the end result that I would like here? Not looking at the catastrophe, looking at what is the ideal end result that I want. Where am I now? Let's be really, really conscious of the fact that this is not where I want to be, where I am right now. And what's the bridge? And the obvious next step will come up. You don't have orchestrated. You don't have to have the plan. You don't have to have the 2,000 bits of information that you've had from the past, the sieve, to be able to understand how it's going to happen. You open up to the 400 billion pieces of information you have, and you take the next obvious step. And that is the way that you start moving forward.
