WALKING

Someday I would like to hike the Appalachian Trail. Perhaps that wish is a bit too much, considering the time and money and circumstances that all must align to make it come true. Living as I do very close to where the trail passes through our part of Virginia, I have had a number of friends and acquaintances who have hiked its complete length, and I probably have never expressed to them just how much I admire their feat. I have one friend out there walking as I type this, in fact, and his is a journey that I especially respect.

I imagine that my thoughts of hiking the trail are terribly romanticized and that, given the fact that I have never really hiked at all, I likely have an incomplete sense of the toil involved. Despite this, I think I have it in me. Of course, I also think I have a book or two in me, but I do not see them lying around anywhere nearby. Yet.

I am certain hiking the Appalachian Trail could very well be the hardest thing a person ever does. And, that is precisely what I am after. Somewhere along the way I became a person who seeks out physical and mental challenges. Actually, I suppose it happened when I became a runner. When I realized I could run, then that I could run a 5K, and then that I could run a half-marathon and then that I could run a marathon, a whole world of possibilities began opening up for me. There are now many times when I tell myself, "If you can run 26.2 miles, you can buckle down and do this." Whatever the this may be at the time.

People think that the hard part of running any distance, but especially longer ones, is the actual running itself. That is certainly one part of it, absolutely. After all, if it were not for the exertion involved, it would not be called exercise in the first place. And, of course, it takes much time to build up running muscles and the endurance to run for miles and miles. But the hardest part of distance running is far and away the mental challenge of it. Your brain, in the beginning especially, tries to tell you over and over again that you are doing something wrong. It asks you to stop. It begs you to stop. It tells you in a thousand different ways that you are foolish. And you believe it. But then comes the point when you realize that you do not have to listen to those thoughts. You can go further. You can stand it for another minute, another mile, and even another hour. That is when you realize that you have become a runner. You actually begin to crave the thrill of finding that point when it hurts and then pushing yourself beyond it.

Cheryl Strayed, in her book called Wild, which I finished last week, echoed these same thoughts in writing about what it took for her to keep putting one foot in front of the other each day on her hike from southernmost California to the Washington-Oregon border along the Pacific Crest Trail. Hers was a long walk of around 1,100 miles, putting a mere marathon to shame in some sense. In fact, there were days when she hiked nearly the equivalent in distance of a marathon. Then she got up the next day and walked some more. And then again the next day. On and on. Strayed had romanticized the notion of hiking for months in the wilderness, too, and found that the hardest part was the pure and simple daily grind of it. The fear, the weather, the animals, the blisters, the long list of dangers the trail holds all were no match, it seems, for the difficulty of merely keeping on, pushing herself further than she ever thought she could go. It is an astoundingly powerful thing to reach such a point, to grasp fully your own potential and to feel wash over you the pleasing ache and throbbing mix of exhaustion and accomplishment. The real sense of this was powerfully written by Strayed in her book and was bolstered by her skillful weaving into the narrative the difficult events of her life that led to her decision to begin in the first place. What she accomplished out there on the trail is compelling enough, but the story of what she found inside herself along the way made for a book that I could not help but plow through.

I think something else that draws me to want to hike the trail is the notion of simplicity. To be out and away, to be disconnected from an addiction to information and immediate communication, carrying everything you need on your back, with a singular and clear purpose: to just keep going. Perhaps it is the age I have reached or perhaps it is recent events in my own professional life--likely a combination of those things--but I find myself thinking more and more these days about what can be eliminated from the clutter of my life. It is so difficult in our culture to not be driven by the idea that more is better. More anything. More everything. Do not get me wrong, I myself am surrounded by stuff. I pine for gadgets and clothes and indulgent meals and so many things. But I am coming to see the emptiness in those cravings, the lack of real fulfillment once they are realized, and I am also coming to see how very little I can actually get by on. It is appealing to me to think of boiling it all down to the absolute barest of essentials.

Of course, I am told there are snakes. If I have one reservation about my ability to hike the entire Appalachian Trail, it is definitely the snakes. That might be harder for me than walking for miles and miles day after day with all I have on my back.