There is a particular kind of confidence that comes from years of hard miles. Not arrogance exactly, more a quiet trust. A belief, built step by step across ridgelines and high passes, that you understand what your body is capable of. That you know its limits and how to push them. That when you lace your boots and shoulder your pack, you and your body are working from the same plan.
I have spent more than a decade building that trust. Walking has been my sanctuary, my reset, my way of making sense of a life that can otherwise feel relentless. The mountains don’t ask anything of you except presence and effort. In return they offer perspective, the kind that only comes from standing somewhere vast and feeling genuinely small.
I have walked to Everest Base Camp. I have traversed the Western Arthur Range in Tasmania, crossed the Swiss Alps on the Walkers Haute Route, and spent fourteen days moving through some of the most breathtaking alpine country on earth. Each of those trips deepened the trust. Each one confirmed what I wanted to believe, that I had found something in the mountains that worked for me, and that as long as I kept showing up, the mountains would keep giving it back.
What I didn’t account for was the possibility that my body might have other ideas.
2016. Boxing Day. Dove Lake, Tasmania.
I had resisted the Overland Track for years. Not because it didn’t interest me, it interested me enormously, but because everyone did it. I have a complicated relationship with popular things. When a destination starts appearing everywhere, I quietly move it to the bottom of the list. What draws me to wild places is the sense of insignificance they produce, the feeling of being genuinely small against something vast and indifferent. The thought of sharing a trail with busloads of tourists made it feel like something else entirely.
But one day we simply decided to stop waiting for a better reason not to go. If we were going to do it, we would do it on our own terms, eight days instead of the standard five, with time to leave the main trail and explore the side trips that most people skip. We would find the solitude inside the experience even if we couldn’t have the trail to ourselves.
Julie and I had walked the Cradle Mountain region before, so we skipped the traditional start at Ronny Creek and began instead at Dove Lake, partly to save time, partly because standing at the foot of Cradle Mountain with the lake spread out before us felt like the right way to begin something that had been a long time coming.
What I didn’t know, what I wouldn’t know for another eight days, was that something was wrong with me.
In the weeks before the trip, I had noticed it during training. Steep ascents in direct sun, sustained effort, my heart would begin hammering in a way that felt wrong. Not the familiar burn of exertion but something more urgent and disorganised. I would have to stop, wait for it to settle, then continue. I had no explanation for it. I was fit. I had spent months preparing. I had hiked to Everest Base Camp earlier that year without difficulty. My fitness wasn’t the question. Whatever this was, I pushed it to the back of my mind and kept packing.
Day one confirmed it wasn’t going away.
From Dove Lake we moved through familiar country, past Lake Lilla, Wombat Pool, through the first stretches of ancient temperate rainforest, up to Marion’s Lookout with its sweeping view back over Cradle Mountain and the lake below. That section felt manageable. Then we turned toward Barn Bluff.
Barn Bluff is Tasmania’s fourth highest mountain. It rises in isolation above the plateau, its nearest neighbours distant enough that the summit offers a 360-degree panorama that belongs among the finest views in the state. For two fit hikers it should take twenty minutes, thirty at most.
It took me the better part of an hour.
Every steep pitch forced me to stop. My heart was hammering so hard I could feel it in my throat. I would stand with my hands on my knees, waiting for it to settle, watching Julie move ahead and then pause to wait for me. I couldn’t explain it. I couldn’t push through it. I just had to stop, rest, and go again.
The summit offered everything it had promised, an uninterrupted panorama across the plateau, the sky immense above us. I stood there and tried to feel the awe I knew I should be feeling. Somewhere underneath the confusion and the concern, it was there.
We descended from Barn Bluff and pushed on to Waterfall Valley as the light began to fail. We pitched the tent. I crawled inside with heavy legs and a mind that wouldn’t settle. The rain started as I lay there, drumming steadily on the fly.
Seven more days. I had no idea what my body was doing. I hoped, quietly and without saying it out loud, that I would make it.
The seven days that followed had their own rhythm. The Overland Track winds south through some of Tasmania’s most extraordinary country — past glacial lakes and dolerite peaks, through moss-carpeted rainforest and open buttongrass plains, with side trips that take you high above the main trail into places most people never reach.
We summited Mount Ossa, Tasmania’s highest peak, in cloud that broke just long enough at the top to reveal the plateau below. We descended into Pine Valley and climbed to the Acropolis, where the 360-degree view across the Du Cane Range stopped us both completely. We found our own campsites off the beaten track, away from the huts and the crowds, and ate dinner in the kind of silence that only comes from being genuinely far from everything.
By any measure, it was a remarkable trip.
And yet I carried something through every one of those days that I couldn’t name. On the flat sections, in the shade, on the descents, I felt like myself. But every sustained climb in direct sun brought the same hammering in my chest, the same forced stops, the same quiet bewilderment. Julie never asked. I never explained. I managed it the only way I knew how — one step at a time, one rest at a time, one day at a time.
On the eighth day we walked out to Narcissus Bay, caught the ferry down Lake St Clair, and signed out at Cynthia Bay. Eight days. Done. I was relieved and proud and genuinely uncertain about what had just happened inside my own body.
I boarded the flight home not knowing I was about to find out.
I don’t remember which magazine it was. I was flicking through it the way you do on a flight home from somewhere that mattered, not really reading, just letting the pages turn.
Then one stopped me.
It was bright pink. Hard to miss. At the top was a question — something along the lines of are you experiencing any of these? — above a checklist of around ten items. I don’t remember every item on that list. But I remember reading through them one by one, and I remember the feeling that settled over me as I reached the bottom.
I had ticked every single one.
I sat with that for a moment. Then I read the article beneath the checklist. It was about the hidden dangers of an overactive thyroid.
I didn’t say anything to Julie. I just closed the magazine and looked out the window, somewhere over Bass Strait, and thought about the eight days I had just spent stopping on every climb, waiting for my heart to slow down, not knowing why.
Now I had an idea.
The next morning. The doctor. The phone call.
The blood results came back faster than expected. Three hours after I left the clinic, my phone rang. The doctor told me to come back immediately.
Apparently the results indicated I was in immediate danger. He put me on a high dose of medication that same day and referred me to a specialist. The diagnosis was Graves’ Disease, an autoimmune condition that causes the thyroid to produce far more hormone than the body needs. My resting heart rate had been sitting at 115 beats per minute. Not on the climbs. At rest.
I thought about Barn Bluff. The hour it took to reach a summit that should have taken twenty minutes. The stops on every ascent. The hammering in my chest on the slopes of every mountain we climbed that week.
My body hadn’t been failing me. It had been fighting something I didn’t know was there.
Eighteen months of treatment followed. Bloodwork, medication, monitoring, adjustments. Gradually the numbers came back into range. Gradually the heart rate settled. Gradually I started to feel like myself again on the trail — the version of myself I recognised, the one who could push hard and trust the response.
In 2019, I went into remission.
I laced my boots and went back to the mountains, and the mountains gave me back what I had missed.
The years that followed were good ones.
I returned to the mountains with something I hadn’t fully appreciated before — gratitude for a body that worked the way it was supposed to. The Western Arthur Range traverse in Tasmania. The Walkers Haute Route across the Swiss Alps, fourteen days that moved me to tears more than once, the kind of beauty that doesn’t leave you. The Huayhuash Circuit Trek in Peru. The Trip after trip, summit after summit, the trust rebuilt one hard day at a time.
I trained consistently. I ate well. I paid attention. I felt strong, motivated and connected to every step. The trail remained what it had always been for me — sanctuary, reset, the place where the noise of running a business and carrying the weight of a busy life fell away and something simpler took over.
I was not indestructible. I knew that. But I felt like I understood the terms of the agreement between me and my body. I showed up, I prepared, I worked hard. In return, the mountains were mine.
That’s what I believed, anyway.
2026. The Lerderderg State Park, Victoria.
We had hiked the same spur the weekend before. I felt extremely fit that day — strong legs, steady breathing, the kind of effortless rhythm that tells you the training is working. Italy was weeks away. The Alta Via 2, high in the Dolomites for most of the trek. I was ready.
But that day was different.
We were carrying heavily loaded packs, the kind of weight you train with when you’re preparing for something serious. The spur climbed steeply through the bush, familiar ground, nothing we hadn’t done before. And then, somewhere on that climb, I turned to Julie and said the words I hadn’t said in nearly a decade.
My heart is beating out of my chest. I can’t go on.
She didn’t say much. She offered to continue without me if I wanted to turn back. That’s Julie — practical, steady, capable. I know that. It wasn’t unkindness. It was just who she is on a trail. But standing there on that spur, unable to explain what was happening, I didn’t say what I was thinking.
I knew that feeling. I had felt it before. On every climb of every day of eight days on the Overland Track in 2016.
We paused. Then we continued. I didn’t name it out loud. Naming it would have made it real, and I wasn’t ready for it to be real. Not yet. Not with the Dolomites on the calendar and months of training behind me.
But I booked the doctor’s appointment the next day.
The results came back on a Saturday.
I already knew what they would say. Not because I’m a doctor, but because I had felt it on that spur in the Lerderderg, in the way my heart had hammered in a register I recognised from a long time ago. The pathology confirmed it. My thyroid function was significantly outside normal range. Consistent with thyrotoxicosis. Consistent with a history of Graves’ Disease.
Consistent with something I thought I had left behind in 2019.
I sat with that for a while. Not in panic, not in despair, but in the particular quiet of someone who has just had a suspicion confirmed. I had been here before. I knew the road. Eighteen months of treatment, bloodwork, medication, monitoring, adjustments. I had walked it once and come out the other side stronger than before.
What I felt most, if I’m honest, was disappointment.
Not in the diagnosis itself, but in what it represented. I had trained hard for the Dolomites. Consistently, seriously, with intention. I had shown up. I had done the work. I had kept my end of the agreement. And here was my body, again, deciding unilaterally to change the terms.
That’s the thing about Graves’ Disease. It doesn’t care how fit you are. It doesn’t care how many summits you’ve stood on or how many hard miles you’ve logged. It is an autoimmune condition, which means the body is essentially attacking itself, and no amount of training or discipline or preparation can negotiate with it. You can do everything right and still find yourself standing on a spur in the Lerderderg, unable to go on, wondering what went wrong.
I see the doctor in two days. There will be a plan — there always is — and I will follow it. I have no intention of cancelling the Dolomites. The Alta Via 2 is still on the calendar, and I intend to be on it. Whether that means starting treatment immediately, adjusting the approach, or simply monitoring closely in the weeks ahead, I don’t yet know. That conversation is still to come.
What I do know is this.
The mountains have given me more than I can account for. Perspective when I had lost it. Stillness when the noise became too much. A place to feel genuinely small, and to find in that smallness something that felt like clarity. I have built a significant part of who I am around the ability to walk into wild places and come out the other side changed for the better.
Graves’ Disease took that from me once, briefly, without my knowledge. It took eight days on the Overland Track before I even knew it was there.
This time I know. This time I am not confused, not searching for explanations, not lying in a tent at Waterfall Valley hoping I’ll make it through the week. This time I am walking into it with both eyes open.
The Dolomites are waiting. So is whatever comes next.
I intend to meet both.
