The most hiked woman in the worldYour job is hiking: Christine Thürmer on ultimate freedom Can't login? Please be patient while your account is being set up!

Christine Thürmer didn't notice much of Corona on foot from Görlitz to the toe of Italy's boot. What sounds like romance and adventure is efficient planning and good stamina. The former manager is packing for the next tour from Görlitz to Finland. Their equipment weighs five kilos. With unpretentious normality and sparkling energy, it does away with the clichés of "higher, further, faster" and ultimate functional equipment in the hiking scene. And she is convinced that what she does can be done by anyone with normal health.

Thru-hiking, as known from the big trails in the USA, is not yet very common in Europe. Pilgrims are the trend here when it comes to long distances. What is the difference? Christine Thürmer: The goal of a pilgrimage is a spiritual one in terms of the destinations, the stages and also the walking. Pilgrims also have a different infrastructure than hiking. You usually sleep in hostels or hotels and not in tents. When hiking, the focus is clearly on experiencing nature. Historically, a pilgrim wanted to get from A to B as quickly as possible. That's where the highways and railway lines are today. Pilgrim routes are quasi forerunners of main traffic arteries, always close to civilization and not designed according to natural aspects. This means that you also drive a lot on asphalt. But hiking is as close to nature as possible. You don't hike into the blue, but have a strict process, what does it look like? Christine Thürmer: It's like in the Bible, you should work six days, and you should rest on the seventh day. I run six days and spend one day a week in a shelter to rest, wash my hair, charge my power bank, etc. Experience shows that such a rhythm pays off in the long run. Obviously, this was already recognized in Old Testament times. Of course you can go through two weeks, but you need regular regeneration, otherwise you lose interest and hiking becomes torture.

Couldn't you have stayed in your old job as a manager, where you restructured companies? Where is fun, romance and fulfillment? Christine Thürmer: What makes me happy are performance, reduction and renunciation, overcoming and self-determination. Anyone who believes that one has to give up everything and only have to go into nature to find oneself succumbs to a false consumerism. Nature does nothing, is at best a backdrop and the inner transformation will not fall like manna from the sky. But when you're walking through continuous rain for days with only five kilos of equipment, then every little bit beyond that becomes a total luxury and triggers feelings of happiness. In concrete terms, this means that I could scream with happiness if I had a warm shower.Reinhold Messner once said that the mountain doesn't give a damn whether you climb it or fail at it. What significance does nature still have for you if it is at best just a backdrop? Christine Thürmer: I agree with Messner, nature doesn't care at all whether we're there or not, whether we find it beautiful or not. When it comes to beauty, we again apply our man-made standards. The contradiction is that everyone wants to be in untouched nature and forgets that it is no longer untouched. I want to see the great nature everywhere, in the overwhelming mountain panorama in Patagonia as well as in a spruce forest in Brandenburg. Take nature as it is and don't try to attach Insta ideals. What criteria do you use to choose your routes? Christine Thürmer: I'll just go! Many are looking for great adventures. I try to consciously avoid the adventure, because it will come one way or the other. For me, part of the adventure is that it's not particularly spectacular right now. The criteria are rather banal. Can I get through Poland during Corona, where there is not much except for a few spruce forests? Or everyone had advised me against Hungary because it was boring. In fact it was great. 1200 kilometers of hiking trails through hilly, nice low mountain ranges, wild camping is allowed, I was able to eat delicious and cheaply throughout the country, there is a thermal bath on every corner. Of course you don't have any breathtaking panoramas there, but that's not what I'm interested in. Excited to the skies, sad to death – when is that when you're hiking? Christine Thürmer: Everyone has downs in the initial phase. Most of the time it's an overload and you just need a break. My advantage is experience. I've seen almost everything before. Crying or hitting trees with my sticks out of frustration, that only happens very rarely to me anymore. Over time, one learns to assess potential difficulties and act in a timely manner. Sure there are days when you could scream when it's raining, you're standing on a steep slope in prickly brambles and you're lost. But I know this will pass. Cheering to the skies, I have that very often. Every evening when I take off my shoes, make dinner and stretch out on the sleeping pad, I think to myself, what a great day, what a great life. This luck gets me again and again!

Did you also cover a few kilometers in Austria on your hikes around the world? Christine Thürmer: On the Salzburg Almenweg, I had a blast there. There are certainly more spectacular landscapes, but if you want to see something of Austria, the Almenweg is great. The alpine pastures are managed. From completely original, without electricity, where the butter is still pounded in the butter churn and the water is heated in the wood stove, to the 3-star level with hay beds, there is everything. That really got me. I got the most marriage proposals on the Almenweg. Not by smart young farmers, but by future mothers-in-law. That wasn't meant as a joke. The work on a farm is hard, you are outside a lot and not many women like to do that. Since I like nature, they believed I could do it and showed them straight away how to milk a cow. You only get such insights if you are not a day tourist. That's why I've included the Salzburger Almenweg as a tour recommendation.