Climb every mountain

African climb: Naomi Steer with Somali refugee women

Clinging to the side of Mount Kenya, 5000 feet (1524 metres) above sea level, Naomi Steer, chief executive of the Australian branch of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, was having serious doubts about her ability to make the last 30 metres to the mountain’s peak.

Just as she was about to give in, a memory came to her of a 14 kilometre training trek she’d taken around the Sydney basin, edging her way along escarpments, terrified and sore, but determined to make it.

She’d decided to do the trek a year earlier as a way to raise the profile of the plight of refugee women in Somalia.

“I wanted to do something personal, and climbing a peak in Africa seemed the right challenge,” Steer says. “The peak was just around the corner, I just needed to go a little bit longer but I was tired and sore and I wasn’t sure I would get off the mountain at all.”

Having decided to make the trek, Steer started training with the unique Wild Women on Top walking group.

Sydneysiders may have already spotted them emerging from the scrubby bushland in and around the city.

After a day’s climb up and down the sandstone escarpments that border the suburbs, miners lamps on their heads, walking sticks in their hands, the walkers from Wild Women on Top will appear wandering along Balmain’s Darling Street, or Coogee’s Arden Street.

They make a dishevelled and dusty group among the evening’s revellers but are riding an endorphin high that will carry on well into the evening.

Former physical education teacher and radio producer Di Westaway started Wild Women on Top in 2001 after failing to climb to the peak of Argentina’s Aconcagua mountain the previous year. “I came back with a tremendous sense of failure and a desire to get fit,” she says.

So it was that Westaway married her determination for training herself and others for trekking with her work. She started the trekking group to train would-be adventurers for arduous walks close to home.

“We tried a few different names,” she says. “We started off as Fit for Adventure training people for treks but where I really saw the opportunity was in creating a group for women to get together and challenge themselves, so we were Mums Kick Arse for a while and finally we settled with Wild Women on Top.

“It captures everything we’re about – getting out into the bush, setting goals and feeling on top of the world.”

The group is unapologetically aimed at women in their middle years. Westaway says there are few opportunities for this demographic to develop their fitness and gain confidence in their physical abilities.

The number of women participating in Wild Women on Top has grown steadily since the group’s inception, swelling in the past 12 months with the introduction of a 100 kilometre coast trek that the group intends to run annually as a fund raiser for the Fred Hollows Foundation.

“The original motivation was all about health and fitness but the happy byproduct is an incredible sense of achievement, teamwork and wellbeing,” Westaway says.

“There’s a lot of lifestyle coaching and motivational messages which are built into the way we operate.

“We focus on getting people out of their comfort zone to discover what they are capable of achieving.”

It was this kind of memory, of having faced and overcome a dangerous climb, that kicked in at a crucial moment in Steer’s Mount Kenya climb.

“We’d go running through the bush, up and down hills, crawling up the side of a cliff, all in the darkness, it’s kind of mad and exhilarating and leaves you totally invigorated,” Steer says.

“If it hadn’t been for the training I’d done with Wild Women on Top, I would not have had the mental strength or the physical stamina to make it up the mountain.”

Steer says the physical challenges of Wild Women on Top and her ascent of Mount Kenya have provided her with a new-found enthusiasm and confidence, which she carries out of the bush and back into the office.

“On the longest days or the worst walks, I know I can make it because I’ve done the preparation,” she says.

“It forces you to learn and to grow because it forces you to do things you wouldn’t normally attempt under any circumstances and it’s a lot more interesting than going to the gym.”

BRW

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