Every July in Australia, a wave of first-timers books a big walk for spring or summer, and then as they prepare, they email me the same question. Some version of "I've booked it. Now what do I actually do?"

I got one a couple of weeks ago from a friend who has booked the Overland Track for November. They’ve never done a multi-day hike before and wanted to know how to prepare for all of it.

I am going to use the Overland Track here as the example, because that is the walk in front of him. But the gap I am about to describe sits under any big multi-day you have not done before. Larapinta, Bibbulmun, South Coast Track, Milford, a section of the PCT. Different track, same 90 days lead up.

For the Overland, the trip is 65 kilometres minimum. Normally six days, and Tasmania in November can hand you sun, snow and horizontal rain in the same afternoon. But the mistake most first-timers make is not on the track. It is right now, in the 90 days before they leave, when they treat prep as one thing.

Prep is not one thing. It is six things, and the ones people focus on are almost never the ones that trip them up.

Most people I hear from open with fitness. Can I do this? Am I fit enough? So they walk. They train. They read gear reviews and buy new boots.

Fitness matters. Gear matters. But when I ran the numbers across 1,400 hikers (via my multi-day readiness quiz), fitness was the most-named worry and one of the lowest actual points of failure. People do the training. They rarely arrive underdone.

Where they arrive underdone is somewhere else entirely.

When I score people across the six areas of prep, food and water intake is the weakest one, week after week. Almost nobody flags it as a worry. Then they lose too much weight on day four, or run their bottle dry between huts, and the trip stops being fun.

Route is the next one that quietly hurts. Not because people cannot read a map, but because they plan in flat kilometres from the couch instead of hours in real conditions, and day two arrives with a thousand metres of climbing and a pack that got heavier overnight.

Safety is the third. It is the one that scores lowest of all, and the one people raise last, because you cannot worry about a gap you do not know is there.

None of these three shows up on a training plan. They show up on the walk.

Ninety days is enough time to close every gap you actually have. It is not enough time to close every gap you might have. So the first move is not to buy anything or train harder. It is to find out where your gaps actually are.

That is what the readiness quiz is for. About two minutes, and it scores you across the six pillars that matter: Training, Route, Appropriate Gear, Intake, Logistics, Safety. I call it the TRAILS framework. You come out the other side with an honest read on where you stand and where the work is.

Most people who take it are surprised. The pillar they thought was their weakness usually is not. The one they never think about usually is.

Then you know what to spend your 90 days on.

And if you have booked the Overland Track for next summer, then I’ve just put together a new guide for you. It’s free and you can download it here.

THAT’S ALL FOR THIS WEEK

Thanks for reading Mowser’s Musings. I hope this helps you hike further and happier.

Until next week, keep exploring.

Mowser

Discover more. Hike further.

P.S. If you have already booked a big walk this spring or summer, the free Multi-Day Readiness Quiz is where I would start. It takes about two minutes and scores you across the six pillars of prep, so you know exactly where to spend your 90 days.