The pieces of our kit that we get asked about consistently are our poles, our packs and our solar array. My go-to comeback for our poles is "life is better as a quadruped".

What I love about Pacerpoles:

1. They help me go faster
2. They help me walk metonymically, with better posture to boot
3. They don't force me to grip them tightly, in fact, I barely grip them at all – they just comfortably sit in my hand
4. They help me not fall over when I lose my balance. Most poles will do this, but these poles have a superior range of useful movement
5. They help me go upstairs with a great upright posture
6. I've got "Do wah diddy diddy dum diddy do" out of my head, replaced with "Shoulders down, ease back and walk tall"

I originally was investigating poles for Sandi, as her knee was causing issues. After a lot of investigation I had almost decided on Pacerpoles. The final straw was when I started using the poles we bought my mother to help her walk to the shops… she never took to them, so we took them back and gave them a spin and were impressed enough with 'normal' poles to get, what I consider to be the Rolls-Royce of poles.

The differences between Pacepoles and other poles do not look huge, but they are extremely significant. The whole aim of these poles is to push yourself along, rather than pull yourself along. This changes your walking style completely, and the way that you use your arms. It really is very easy to walk upright with these poles, especially with our Aarn balance pockets.

It took a little bit of practice to adjust our walking using the poles (especially going up stairs), we found the videos and other information on the site helpful, although watching it is nothing like actually doing it. Though, once the style had become more habitual (you never stop with Heather's walking ‘mantra’, "shoulders back–and slightly down–look up–walk tall), we have not looked back. Now, I can't conceive of walking without our poles now, and for anything tricky (like our 6 hours up a creek across slippery stones: Lannigans Creek to Batsh Camp), I'd say they are essential.

The Mantra

Heather encourages the muttering of "Shoulders down, ease them back, look up", as it's very easy during a long day to go back to our bad walking habits. We often have tunes we can't get rid of (Do wah diddy diddy dum diddy do is only typical of the fluff our brains tend to regurgitate), so it's actually nice to replace that (when necessary) with something actually useful; I just rephrased it a little so that it scanned correctly: Shoulders down, ease back and walk tall. …go on, sing it: I know you want to! [See here for the fully worked lyrics]

Go Faster

I did some analysis of our training walks (back when we were preparing for the Australian Alps Walking Track), and compared our poled times with our non-poled times. It averaged out, over 5 different walks, to improve our walking speed by 13%. Impossible to argue with that.