Pip Lane - Pip in the fast Lane

From clandestine historic French bridge leaps with bungy pioneer AJ Hackett to conquering New Zealand’s highest mountain Aoraki Mount Cook, experienced Queenstown physio Pip Lane has lived life to the full.

Raised on the Coromandel beaches, the daughter of a surgeon and nurse, Pip, was a passionate runner, representing her district in cross country.

A quick pre-OE trip south as a freshly graduated physio student in 1985 landed Pip a Queenstown job with Sue Farry where she became hooked on skiing. She then worked as a physio in London saving for four months around Europe.

Money was tight travelling with friends in a Kombi. “We’d share one coffee just so we could clean our teeth in the handbasin at the café.” Out walking the Greek coast alone, she stumbled into a Club Med without realising. “A Belgian girl shared her coupons with me for this amazing buffet dinner and at midnight I took off back to the Kombi like Cinderella,” she laughs.

By 1987 Pip had returned to Queenstown Physiotherapy to work for Sue. “She was a fantastic boss, amazing. Any opportunity that came up she’d say, ‘Go for it’.’”

It was advice Pip ran with.

The following year a couple of entrepreneurial, adventurous young Kiwi speed skiers, AJ Hackett and Henry Van Asch, arrived in town, catapulting Queenstown and commercial bungy onto the world stage. Pip, then dating Henry, was right there with them, even during one of AJ’s most famous radical French leaps off the 147m (482ft) Pont de la Caille in 1989 – then the world’s tallest bungy jump. France had banned bungy a few years prior after AJ’s widely publicised jump from the Eiffel Tower, so AJ, Henry, Pip and friends worked undercover all night in an underground car park making the bungy. “At sunrise we jumped, AJ, Henry and then me,” she grins. “It was very clandestine. I can’t believe I did that,” she laughs. “I just had such faith in those boys.”

Snowboarding was just emerging in the French Alps, so they brought back boards, among the first to appear on Coronet Peak, attracting odd looks.

Fortunately, Pip’s unsteady sea legs saved her from being shipwrecked off the tip of NZ when a flatmate invited her as crew on a yacht delivery from Cairns to Wellington. A seasick Pip had flown the Tasman stretch but the boys, who hit a storm in the Rangoon Moon, survived.

Legendary physio Al Garrard joined the Queenstown practice in the early 1990s. “Everybody loved ‘Monster’ and he really enhanced my career.” Pip later did post graduate studies in manipulation.

Around that time heaps of young Japanese snowboarders arrived dyeing their hair orange and boarding every day. “We’d be open until 9pm just to strap them all up ready for the next day. You did anything you could to keep them on the slopes,” she says. “They’d have a crazy season snowboarding and at the end of winter they’d dye their hair black again and go home to be respectful.”

In summer Pip developed a love of tramping and climbing, travelling to the Himalayas to trek in Nepal with renowned local guide Mark Whetu, climbing Island Peak at over 6000m.

She and local doctor Fiona McPherson also did the challenging Snowman Trek in Bhutan climbing 11 5000m passes – one of the hardest treks in the world. “We paid $US200 a day to be in the country on that guided trip spending 21 days in remote mountains. The village kids had never seen blonde hair. They wore dried yak cheese necklaces to gain fat as they’d always lived at high altitude.”

In the early 2000s Sue asked Pip one evening to treat a wealthy American billionaire client, in NZ for the America’s Cup, at Punatapu Lodge. The woman then flew Pip to the family superyacht in Auckland for follow up and a month later to Aspen, New York and Miami as her personal physio. Sue, Pip and six other women, all special in this woman’s life, were flown to Bhutan to celebrate her 50th birthday. “I was the youngest at 41. The eldest was an inspirational 85-year-old Texan Tiger Moth pilot.”

By 2007 Pip had got together with long-time friend and physio classmate Andy Ralph, then living in the US. After a short stint there they moved back to Queenstown where, “just in the nick of time”, Pip, aged 46, became pregnant with their twins Isaac and Mia in 2010.

When they were preschoolers, the family lived in Northern Queensland for three years, where Pip worked in a pain management clinic – a highlight taking their four-year-olds snorkelling on Great Barrier Reef with their 88-year-old grandfather.

Back in Queenstown they opened Move Physiotherapy in 2016, selling to APM Workcare in 2022. They still work there where Pip’s a strong advocate for treating acute and chronic pain differently. “Chronic pain requires a different approach and often needs input from a multi-disciplinary team.”

Adjusting to motherhood at 47 was huge, but “the best thing I’ve ever done”. “They continue to challenge us and enrich our lives.”