They tell you it'll be a long walk, to eat a lot of carbs, pack a bunch of electrolyte drinks and wear some light gloves, because your hands might get a wee bit nippy overnight.

But what they don't tell you is that your toenails will consecutively drop off as the days pass.

They don't tell you you'll be a walking k-tape mummy for the next year or that for a whole week after the event, you'll feel as though you've taped bits of LEGO to the soles of your feet every time you try to walk.

You're probably wondering what exactly this masochistic experience is, and why so many people participate in it every year?

Good question, we don't know, but we are the Oxfam Trailwalkers.

When the opportunity was presented to me in October last year, I took it on like a classic millennial.

'YOLO, why not,” I believe was my exact answer when I was asked to join a team.

The deal is four of you decide you're insane enough to walk either a 50km or 100km trail through the Eastern Bay of Plenty for Oxfam New Zealand.

It's a charity experience with a time limit - for 50kers you have 18 hours and for 100kers you get 36.

The team I joined decided to 'go big or go home”, and at the time I thought 100km sounded doable. It was in its third year and no one had died yet, so I guessed I'd be fine!

So off I went to buy a training notebook to plan and document everything. I started getting about on my feet, slowly and small at first, and then somehow found myself tackling 12-hour treks across ragged bush in Te Urewera National Park.

The training seemed to go without a hitch and, before we knew it, the big day was here. It was time to walk 100km.

We set off from Whakatane Heads at 6am sharp, on Saturday March 11. Onwards and upwards - quite literally - we went, trudging through some of my favourite tracks in the Eastern Bay.

My first drama of the day involved burning out my footwear, only 20km in. They tell you: 'don't train the month before the big event,” and going by that advice, I hadn't put my trainers on since late January, so how was I to know the bottoms were wearing?

Cue my first blister, about the size of a $2 coin, which was able to tenderize and spread as I trudged along 18km of hard sand - a memorable but in no way enjoyable experience.

By 36km I'd changed shoes, but it was too late, the damage was done. On I went for the next 20km, biting through the agony.

After 12 hours we hit 50km and I'd hit a wall. Cramping in my left calf muscle set off a messy display of tears, regret and self-doubt, and it didn't help that at each of the eight checkpoints we stopped at we were asked: 'Is anyone pulling out?”

I pulled it in and we set forth into a long night, most of which is a blur. But what I do know for sure is that there was a pretty awesome jet boat ride which helped us cross the Whakatane River, loads of farms, a stop into a local marae and loads of hills.

When I tried to explain the terrain of this section of the trail to someone after the event it went something like: 'Up, up, up, up, up, up, up, down, up, up, down, up, up, up and up some more.”

The bits where it gets fuzzy for me are trying to remember the amount of ungraceful toilet stops I made while realising the hard way that I really should have trained my stomach to handle electrolyte.

Then there's the part of the track about 70km in, where one of our support crew who was accompanying us kindly explained to me the cantering horse I'd spotted was actually a fern.

I had documented my fair share of the day on social media earlier in the day, but I was grateful during this night leg to be in forestry blocks far out of coverage, because by 75km I was in a state.

More tears ensued after a long night of scaling up old logging roads and feeling like I was letting the team down, but they were short-lived, wiped away, and the journey went on.

Day broke and the weight of sleep started to kick in, which meant more hallucinations. I think at a point I was genuinely seeing my headlight shining on the ground, in the middle of the day, when I wasn't wearing a headlight anymore.

We got to about lunchtime on Sunday and, after having being focussed solely on my feet for nearly 20km, I looked up and realised we were at the end. We had done it, in just under 32 hours. In my 24 young years of life, I've never experienced a better feeling.

I'm two weekends out from the event now and as the time goes on, my toenails grow back and the blisters get more bearable. I'm starting to forget about all of the things I thought were a really big deal at the time and, instead, I'm starting to remember how great an experience it was.

I said this to a friend, who likened my attitude to a mother after child birth – a link I thought was in no way comparable, but I can understand her reasoning.

So will there be a next time, you ask? Yeah, probably.