Evadnee Le Goff and Anita Musevenzo became the first all-women team to complete the Nine Peaks Challenge on 30 March.
Left: Evadnee Le Goff, right: Anita Musevenzo
The Nine Peaks Challenge is the summiting of the highest peak in each province of South Africa, done all in one go. The two women started in Limpopo and ended in the Western Cape; they were unsupported and were given all the necessary coordinates for each peak to self-navigate on both the mountains and the roads connecting them.
The team ‘set a competitive time’ taking eight days, 22 hours and 42 minutes to complete the entire adventure, Nine Peaks Challenge said in a post on Facebook.
They covered a distance of 3 000km by car and 160km on foot, climbing roughly 8 000m in total, which is just short of the height of Mount Everest.
Anita is a city girl with a hiking addiction. When she first started hiking she knew nothing about the ‘great outdoors’, but hiking very quickly became her passion. She has a YouTube channel, African Hiker, where she posts videos to help city folks like herself find the courage to get outside.
Evadnee is a lifelong hiker and mother of two. She has worn many hats in life, and with her background in psychology, accounting and confectionary she immediately became a key member of the team. Often referred to as the project manager, she has all her ducks in a row.
We caught up with the team to find out more about this daring challenge and what it took to successfully complete it.
Why take on this very difficult challenge?
‘There was the lure of being first, and we wanted to push the boundaries of what we are capable of. Evadnee and I are two very ordinary women, we are not athletes, we just have a passion for hiking.’
What was the training like, and how long did you train?
‘We trained for six months. The first three months were mainly training via frequent hiking and doing multi-day hikes then from January to March. We had strength training sessions twice a week at Performance Purist, which was gifted to us by Decathlon.
‘So in the three months leading up to the challenge, our week looked like this:
‘Monday – gym
‘Tuesday – rest/short walk
‘Wednesday – laps at Westcliff Stairs [in Johannesburg]
‘Thursday – gym
‘Friday – rest/short walk
‘Saturday/Sunday – hike.’
What were your expectations for the challenge?
‘Our main goal was to complete it. We made sure to cross all the t’s and dot the i’s. Our secondary goal was to take people along on the journey with us. We had a live tracker and were updating on social media as often as we could. This challenge was for more than just us.’
Why did you choose to have an all-women team?
‘We chose to do the Nine Peaks Challenge as just ladies because no all-female team had successfully completed it. We wanted to do something ground-breaking as women-only.’
They were supported by Entsika Group, Decathlon South Africa, Garmin, forever.fresh.foods and Racefood.
These are the peaks in the order that the women completed them:
Limpopo – 2 126m up Iron Crown
Mpumalanga – 2 331m up De Berg
North West – 1 816m up Nooitgedacht West
Gauteng – 1 913m up Toringkop
Free State – 3 291m up Namahadi
KwaZulu-Natal – 3 451m up Mafadi
Eastern Cape – 3 019m up KwaDuma
Northern Cape – 2 156m up Murch Point
Western Cape – 2 325m up Seweweekspoort Peak
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