Our team: the trustees

Nick Allen’s Story

For Nick Allen, Mastering Mountains embodies two passions: his love for the outdoors, and his desire to enable people with Multiple Sclerosis (MS) and Functional Neurological Disorder (FND) to enjoy the outdoors and achieve their adventure dreams. Like many New Zealanders, Nick's love for the outdoors resulted from a childhood spent outside. However, his passion for helping people with chronic neurological diseases emerged from his diagnoses with these conditions and the wish that someone had modelled for him a meaning-filled life spent outdoors, despite the diagnosis.

As a young adult, Nick was an active climber, tramper and cyclist, propelled by a singular goal: to climb in the Himalayas. Not long after his 21st birthday and despite his high fitness level, unexplained neurological symptoms began to cast a shadow over his dream. Weak, fatigued and often in pain, Nick found it increasingly difficult to walk. By the age of 24, he became dependent on a mobility scooter to get around outside.

Two years later, Nick was diagnosed with Primary Progressive Multiple Sclerosis. The diagnosis was devastating. In the beginning, with no one to guide him or model an adventure-filled life after a diagnosis of MS, Nick believed that MS marked the end of his outdoors pursuits.

Through the support and encouragement of his family, Nick found stories of others who, after an MS diagnosis, regained mobility and went on to pursue their sports and hobbies. Although none of those stories were of hikers or climbers, Nick sold his mobility scooter and adopted the Overcoming MS, evidence-based approach to lifestyle, diet and exercise. After a few years of specialist rehabilitation, Nick began hiking and climbing again.

In 2015, Nick achieved his dream of climbing in the Himalayas, successfully summiting Imje Tse (6,189m) in the Everest region of Nepal. Through this trip, he launched Mastering Mountains and raised roughly $10,000, seeding the Trust's grant fund. Then in 2019, Nick led a small expedition to explore the unclimbed granite faces of a mountain range on Stewart Island. While rock climbing there, the team logged a total of ten first ascents.

Nick experienced a series of significant health setbacks in 2020. He found himself reliant on crutches to get outside and plagued by debilitating fatigue and chronic pain. In a few short weeks, Nick lost years of upward progress. However, in assessing this flare-up, his medical team determined that he had been misdiagnosed with MS and rediagnosed him with Functional Neurological Disorder (FND) and Fibromyalgia.

FND is a strikingly underresearched neurological condition that is frequently misdiagnosed as Multiple Sclerosis. Like MS, FND causes the signals between the brain and body to become distorted. Unlike MS, this distortion occurs for unknown reasons rather than from nerve damage.

Nick's diagnosis of FND, along with the significant lack of public awareness about the disorder, spurred Mastering Mountains to broaden its mission to include FND. Despite the diagnosis change, Nick remains firmly committed to Mastering Mountains' goal of helping people with MS. Nick hopes that he, along with the grant recipients, might model meaning-filled lives spent outdoors, regardless of whether a person has MS or FND.

Nick and his wife Rebekah live in Christchurch, where Nick is currently undergoing physical rehabilitation and works as a content creator. Nick loves to head into the Southern Alps and Port Hills as often as possible.