How to Motivate Yourself and Find the Strength for a Difficult Climb to the Peak

Nobody tells you that the hardest part of a big climb isn’t the gradient or the weather — it’s the moment around two-thirds up when your legs feel like wet concrete and your brain starts doing maths on how long it would take to just turn around. That moment is the real climb. Everything before it is just walking.

If you want the short answer: you find the strength by shrinking the problem. Stop looking at the summit. Pick a rock twenty metres ahead and walk to that. Repeat. It sounds almost embarrassingly simple, but it’s the technique that gets experienced alpine hikers through routes like the Tongariro Alpine Crossing summit push or the final grunt up to Key Summit in Fiordland — and it works because it’s honest about how the mind actually operates under physical stress.

Why the Summit Feels So Far Away (and Why That’s Normal)

There’s a reason the peak looks closer on the map than it feels on your feet. Elevation gain is brutal in a way that flat distance isn’t, and the New Zealand South Island doesn’t do subtle — Fiordland in particular has a habit of throwing 800-metre climbs at you before lunch. Your cardiovascular system is working at a level it rarely hits in daily life, and your brain interprets that physical distress as danger.

The urge to quit isn’t weakness. It’s your nervous system doing its job, trying to protect you from what it reads as threat. Knowing that doesn’t make the burning stop, but it does make it easier to not take the signal too seriously. You’re not broken. You’re just climbing.

One thing experienced trampers rarely admit: even people who’ve done the Kepler Track or the Routeburn multiple times still hit that wall. The difference isn’t that it disappears — it’s that they’ve stopped being surprised by it.

How Do You Actually Push Through When Your Body Wants to Stop?

Break the climb into sections you can see

This is the most practical piece of advice and also the most underused. When you’re grinding up the track toward Ben Lomond above Queenstown, the summit is often invisible, hidden behind false ridgelines. If you’re tracking toward something you can’t see, your brain has nothing to hold onto. So give it something smaller — the next trail marker, the next bend, the patch of tussock where the track levels briefly.

DOC markers on New Zealand tracks are spaced reasonably well for this. Use them. Count them. Turn the climb into a sequence of small wins instead of one enormous ask.

Control your breathing before your pace

Most people slow their legs when they get breathless, but the more useful fix is slowing your breathing first. Inhale for three steps, exhale for three steps. It sounds like something you’d see on a wellness app, but the rhythm genuinely regulates your heart rate and stops the panic spiral that turns tiredness into total shutdown.

If you’re gasping, you’ve gone too fast too early. This is especially easy to do on tracks like the Hooker Valley approaches where the first section feels flat and forgiving before the terrain suddenly changes character.

Eat something before you think you need to

Bonking — the sudden, demoralising energy crash that hits when your glycogen runs out — is responsible for more abandoned climbs than bad weather. The fix is simple but people keep forgetting it: eat before you feel hungry, not after. Thirty grams of carbohydrate every 45 minutes is a rough guide that works for most people on multi-hour ascents.

On a practical level, this means actual food in your pockets, not buried in your pack. A handful of Pic’s peanut butter sachets, some Countdown-branded trail mix, a muesli bar you don’t hate — anything you can grab without stopping.

The Mental Game: What Experienced Climbers Actually Think About

Motivation is overrated as a concept. By the time you’re halfway up a brutal climb, whatever inspired you to start — the Instagram photo, the bucket list, the friendly dare from someone who wasn’t there — is completely irrelevant. What carries you to the top is something quieter and more mechanical than motivation.

Some climbers use a mantra. Not an inspirational one — something almost boring, like “feet moving, keep moving” or just counting steps in groups of ten. The point isn’t to feel inspired. It’s to give your conscious mind something small to do while your body does the hard work on autopilot.

Others use a technique borrowed from endurance sport: disassociation. Instead of monitoring how you feel, you focus outward — on the texture of the rock, the sound of a stream below, the way the light hits the ridge. For people exploring New Zealand trails, this is genuinely easy to practise because the scenery is relentlessly distracting in the best way. Let it be. You can also find further ideas about building mental resilience for outdoor challenges through resources like wildfortune, which covers the psychology of adventure in useful depth.

What Gear Actually Helps (and What Doesn’t)

Trekking poles are probably the single most underrated piece of gear for a hard climb. On ascent, they redistribute effort to your upper body and help enormously with balance on loose scree — which you’ll encounter above the bush line on tracks like Avalanche Peak in Arthur’s Pass or the approach to Mueller Hut. On descent, they protect your knees in a way that no amount of quad strength fully replaces.

Decent footwear matters more than most beginners expect. Not expensive — just appropriate. Merrell Moab 2 GTX boots or similar mid-ankle trail shoes with actual grip will stop you burning energy compensating for a slipping foot every second step. You can rent or buy gear second-hand from local outfitters in Queenstown and Te Anau for less than you’d expect.

What doesn’t help: headphones on a challenging climb. You need to hear your breathing, you need to hear weather changing, and you need to stay aware of the trail. Save the podcast for the flat sections.

How to Keep Going When the Weather Turns or the Trail Gets Harder Than Expected

New Zealand weather has a specific talent for making a manageable climb feel suddenly hostile. Fiordland gets over 7,000mm of rain per year in some valleys — more than almost anywhere else in the world. Conditions that were benign at the carpark can be genuinely unpleasant on exposed ridgelines an hour later.

This is where the mental strength conversation gets real. If conditions are genuinely dangerous — sheet rain on exposed rock, wind strong enough to affect your balance, zero visibility — turning back is not failure. It’s the right call. DOC publishes track conditions and closures at doc.govt.nz, and checking these before you leave is just basic sense, not overcaution.

If conditions are merely uncomfortable rather than dangerous — cold, wet, annoying — then the calculus is different. You’re dressed for it, you have food, you know the track. Discomfort passes. Wet socks dry. The summit view in clearing weather after a rough push is a different category of experience than the same view on a bluebird day.

Step-by-Step: What to Do When You Hit the Wall Mid-Climb

1. Stop for two minutes, not twenty. Sit, eat something, drink water. Don’t let the break stretch into a decision point.
2. Look at where you’ve come from, not where you’re going. The distance already covered is real. The summit is still abstract.
3. Reset your target. Pick the nearest visible landmark — a cairn, a pole, a distinctive rock — and commit only to that.
4. Slow your pace, not your resolve. Half the speed gets you there just as surely. A slower summit is still a summit.
5. Talk to your hiking partner if you have one. Not about how hard it is — about something else entirely. Distraction is a legitimate tool.
6. Check the weather and time against your turnaround point. If you’ve set a firm turnaround time before you left — say, 1pm on a Fiordland summer day — trust that decision. You made it when you were thinking clearly.

Why the Hardest Climbs Leave the Deepest Impressions

There’s something honest about a climb that genuinely tests you. The easy day walks — and New Zealand has plenty of excellent ones — are enjoyable, but they don’t stay with you the same way. The grunt up to Luxmore Summit on the Kepler in foul weather, the last 45 minutes to the Red Crater on Tongariro — those are the ones people still talk about five years later, not because they were pleasant in the moment but because finishing them meant something.

In te ao Māori, the mountains of Aotearoa carry deep spiritual weight — Tongariro, Ruapehu, and Ngāuruhoe as tupuna, as ancestors, entities of immense mana. The idea that these places demand something from you — effort, respect, presence — isn’t sentimental. It’s a useful frame for why difficult climbs feel different to easy ones. You’re not just exercising. You’re in relationship with the landscape.

That doesn’t mean you need to suffer to earn a view. But it does mean that the hard days have their own kind of value, and pushing through them — carefully, sensibly, with proper gear and a realistic turnaround plan — is worth doing.

FAQ: Finding Strength for a Difficult Climb

How do I motivate myself to keep climbing when I feel like giving up?

Shift from thinking about the summit to thinking about the next ten steps. Motivation as a feeling is unreliable — mechanical small goals are more useful. Eat something, slow your pace, and commit only to the nearest visible point on the trail.

What’s the best way to build mental toughness for hard climbs?

Exposure is the main thing — do harder walks progressively, not all at once. Familiarity with discomfort makes it easier to sit with it. Multi-day tracks like the Kepler or Routeburn, which involve sustained effort over consecutive days, build this faster than a single big peak.

How do I know when I should turn back versus push through?

Discomfort is usually fine to push through. Pain, worsening weather, visibility issues, or a compromised turnaround time are reasons to head back. Set a firm turnaround time before you start and commit to it — most people make bad decisions about this in the moment.

Does fitness level matter a lot for managing hard climbs mentally?

Yes, but not in the way people expect. Better fitness means less physical distress, which means your brain spends less time interpreting the climb as danger. You don’t need to be extremely fit — just fit enough that the effort doesn’t max you out in the first hour.

What should I eat during a long, difficult climb in New Zealand?

Carbohydrates that are easy to eat without stopping — muesli bars, dried fruit, Pic’s peanut butter sachets, gels if you’ve practised with them before. Aim to eat something every 45 minutes regardless of hunger. Hydration matters equally; dehydration significantly affects mental clarity and perceived effort.