Curiosity is her middle name and she’s fascinated by human performance. But now she’s left the world of elite athletics, Hanny Allston is more interested in how we can all be our best, and keep the wilderness at its best too.
They say youth is wasted on the young. In her 20s, Hanny Allston ground that theory into the dirt beneath her lightweight running shoes.
Allston was an elite athlete by the time she was in her late teens. She won the 2006 Junior World Orienteering Championships, the first Australian woman to do so, four minutes clear of the person behind.
Qualified in teaching and medicine, she headed into a career teaching primary school, but found herself in a dilemma about the path ahead. Buying time, she set up a hobby business, coaching runners in the parks of Hobart. “It was very much about teaching some running skills and having a giggle,” she says. It was her mother who sensed that it could be the bedrock of things to come.
The business grew exponentially. Over the coming years, she coached trail running groups across Tasmania, Canberra and Europe with Graham, now her husband and business partner. The pair met working casual jobs in the outdoor gear shops of Hobart, and spent quieter moments on the floor murmuring about what they would do if it were their own store. In 2015, that became a reality. They opened a retail outlet in Hobart and later one in Launceston, selling the kind of sophisticated gear they’d seen in Europe – lighter, more stylish, with an environmentally sustainable edge. Both the business and Hanny Allston would win Telstra awards.
Amazingly, she was still running competitively for some of this time. When life dealt her personal adversity, she found the space to process it by writing a memoir, a work of poise and eloquence.
By the time she exited her 20s, Allston and her enterprises had a substantial following – distance runners and outdoor enthusiasts who connected through a portfolio of camps, workshops, webinars, training programs, private coaching and online writing.
What does a person do when they’ve reached the top of their game in athletics and business by their early 30s? Some channel their powers for the greater good.
. . .
In 2015, Hanny Allston visited the wilderness areas devastated by summer bushfires, with photographer Rob Blakiss. Bearing witness and running through fire-strewn areas brought her into direct contact with climate change and made her question everything. “It catapulted me into a new realm,” she said. “I had been running amok all over the world, doing extraordinary things with my sport, but what was I doing to help this situation?”
Gradually, she realised that facilitating tours and guiding runners in the wilderness landscape could inspire them to want to protect it. It became her calling, to help people experience Tasmania’s rare natural landscapes with a sense of reverence, rather than the desire to conquer, and merely notch up another peak or trail.
In her experience, Tasmania can exert a transformative power over people. “It’s a bucket list destination for runners, but it frightens the socks off people,” she says. “It’s a different level of wild and rough. The elements are more heightened.”
Running in the wilderness in Tasmania is a profound experience. It moves many of Allston’s clients to tears. She puts it down to the austerity and grandeur of the wilderness, its ability to “peel back your ego”. Standing below a King Billy pine which has survived fire and humanity for a thousand years, or swimming in a mountain lake – such experiences create a landmark shift in perception.
Such a calling and perspective can only do good if it has a chance to be heard at strategic and policy making level.
Having completed an Australian Institute of Company Directors course when starting her business, Allston become a fixture in the institute’s members’ room in Hobart. It was primarily for the heated lounge, free tea, and a “quiet, sunny space to work in”, but she made connections there that opened a door to the National Parks and Wildlife advisory council, which advises at state and Commonwealth level, on the management of Tasmania’s parks and reserves, and the Wilderness World Heritage Area. Through working hard and making an impression, Allston won a place at the relevant table.
. . .
This is a pivotal time for Parks and Wildlife, she believes: custodians of fragile, natural landscapes, and overseeing the admission of people to them. “There’s a tussle happening between those two imperatives, and it’s present in Tasmania very strongly.”
Conscious of her comparative youth and perceived inexperience, she completed the AICD’s full directors course to add weight to her existing credentials. It’s imperative that a next-gen perspective is included in the thinking of the future, she says. “We have a different approach on risk, a different way of looking at strategy, and a different understanding of the power of technology, of socializing and networking, and thinking about what we want the world to look like for our children.”
Allston is keen to enable other, younger directors, of smaller, more unusual companies, of start-ups and scale-ups; to give them access to the knowledge she now has. While we’ve seen more women on boards, the next push is the younger mindset, she thinks. She’d like to see senior government employees and parliamentarians access the AICD journey too, recognising their role as directors in the public sector. “The more diversity we get at the table, right across business and statewide, the more powerful Tasmania will become.”
There are parallels in the athletics world, where individuals who ran slightly slower than the top performers “were not entitled to the same knowledge and information and support, because it was trapped at the very elite tier of the Australian sporting system”.
It can be hard being part of the early adopter wave, she says.
On the advisory council, she sits alongside specialists from ecology, geology and Aboriginal cultural heritage. Her own role is as a voice from tourism and recreation, bringing perspective on how we manage Tasmanian parks sensitively as well as commercially. With that in mind, she’s turning her scrutiny on the concept of regenerative tourism – when a product or venture actually enriches a culture, landscape or community. At grass-roots level, Hanny and Graham must figure out how the next trip they run to Cradle Mountain will enrich that region, give back to the small businesses on the journey and ensure those guests leave as advocates of Tasmania.
. . .
With her competitive days behind her, Hanny has rediscovered the joy of being in wilder landscapes for their own sake.
In 2019, a coming-of-age run was the Western Arthurs, a loose ring of jagged quartzite peaks in southern Tasmania. As if that wasn’t enough, in the same year while on holiday in Europe, she ran GR10, the 866km French trail that runs the length of the Pyrenees, from the Atlantic coast to the Mediterranean. Hikers who are in good shape and accustomed to mountain trekking, complete the GR10 in seven to eight weeks. Hanny Allston did it in three weeks. Pushing through emotional and mental challenges, she entered the “quiet space” the lone runner can reach. It’s a spiritual place, and intoxicating.
Husband Graham has been a catalyst in helping her move away from competition. With a passion for exploring and connecting to nature, it’s Graham who encouraged her to do the longer trails that have stood as rites-of-passage for her. It was Graham who drove the hired hatchback as support car in the Pyrenees, running in to meet her at the end of each day.
Many people can’t understand the appeal of running through a landscape, rather than walking or wild camping, says Allston. “But your sensations are so heightened because you’re so well-prepared for the landscape, yet so vulnerable too.” Her descriptions of seeing a place from “a 4am star-scape right through to dusk, getting back to the car weary and covered in mud, and glowing from the inside out”, could make even this rambler break into a jog.
. . .
Back in the days when we had to list an “occupation” on an passenger arrival cards, Hanny Allston never knew what to put. So the world champion just scribbled “athlete”.
Those wins on the trail, the eclectic nature of the business she runs and the broader roles she is accruing have equipped her perfectly, as Tasmanian at large and ambassador for the wild. Whatever the cap and wherever she may venture, Hanny Allston is just hitting her stride.
Fiona Stocker is a Tamar Valley-based writer, editor and keeper of pigs. She has published the books A Place in the Stockyard (2016) and Apple Island Wife (2018). More of her writing can be seen at fionastocker.com.