How fit do you need to be

The honest answer to "how fit do I need to be" is that I was not fit enough, and the route made me fit. That is not a recommendation. It cost me the first three weeks. I had no trekking experience at all when I started. Not less than I needed — none. What that actually looked like. On day three we were at the top of a pass out of breath and stopping every few minutes. Day 26 was a descent I felt in my knees for the rest of the evening. And every single morning for the first month my body woke up seized; it takes walking to warm it up, and only after that does it get better. Somewhere around day 19 I first wrote that we had maybe got fit. By day 56 it was not a maybe. I was doing thousand-metre climbs in one go without stopping, resting once or twice in a whole day, and walking three to four hours straight between meals. By day 58 I had lost perspective completely. I met a group and assumed they would walk faster than me, and had to remind myself that most people do not climb 1,200 metres without a break. So: about three weeks to stop suffering, about eight to be genuinely strong. The pack is most of the difficulty, and it is the part you control. I started at 23 kg without food and water. I weigh about 92 kg, so that is a quarter of my body weight on my back before a single litre. General guidance puts a comfortable load a long way below that. I got it down to 18 kg during the route by sending things home — which is the practical fix nobody tells you about. You are going to be wrong about what you need. Plan on posting things back rather than on packing perfectly. Fitness does not stop the trip breaking you. By day 67 the fatigue had caught up: two straight weeks of at least 40 km a day with at least 2,500 m of climbing. On the last day my body was wrecked. Being fit changed how fast I could walk. It did not make 69 days free. What I would do differently. Train with the pack, not without it. Everything that hurt in the first weeks — knees on descents, the seized mornings, the shoulders — is load, not cardio. Standard advice is to start eight weeks out and build to long walks carrying most of your intended weight, and having done it the other way round, that is the part I would actually follow. One thing that surprised me. The body settles into it. By the last stretch I was waking on my own at half past six without an alarm, and the days that would have destroyed me in week one had become the normal shape of a day. Sources. The training guidance is the standard progression published by REI and the long-distance hiking training literature. Everything else is my own, from 2025. Checked September 2026. This is what happened to me, not a training plan. I am one person with one body and no experience, and I got lucky that nothing went badly wrong in the weeks I was underprepared.