Trudging

My friend Ana and I arrived in Green River around 10:00 pm on the 23rd of August and were invited to go on a hike at 7:00 am the next day.  That's a good idea, right?  So of course we did it.  The hike was on Mt. Peale, a 12700 ft. peak in the La Sal mountains about an hour and a half away from Green River.  It was a little longer drive than I thought, which led to an adventure involving my car and gas, but that's another story for another time.  

Being from Indiana, I have little experience hiking mountains.  Between that and the elevation, there were many times I thought Mt. Peale would do me in.  I'll state right now that I'm not an endurance person.  My body seems to be built for speed and agility, but slow and steady (or trudging, as I referred to it on the hike) is pretty much my least favorite thing.  In the story of the tortoise and the hare, I'm totally the hare.  My general strategy was to go as far as I could as quickly as possible, and then stop, gasping for air, because I was terrible at pacing myself.  I made it up, and back down, but I didn't make it pleasant for myself.  On the plus side, I'm sure I gave Ana a lot of laughs.

Another hike was planned which took place last weekend.  Mt. Elbert... a 14400 ft peak, almost 2000 feet higher than Mt. Peale and the second highest peak in the continental US behind only Mt. Whitney in California.  I probably should have been more scared for this than I was, but lately I seem to adopt the general attitude of "we'll just see what happens".

These are some of the people I spend my time with now.  Total goons.

We camped by the trailhead and rose at 4:30 after a night of sleep that was possibly the worst of my life... bone chilling coldness, the overwhelming quiet of a silent night punctuated by snores from the boys tent, and being squished to a 1.5 ft wide space by Hope.  The joys of camping.  The beginning of the hike wasn't bad at all, and the rising sun with the changing fall colors of the Colorado forest made it so beautifully worth it. 

Then, the trees faded away, replaced by an intimidating, steep rocky trail through scrub grasses and plants brave enough to survive the altitude.  As we journeyed up this path, there were a very limited number of things on my mind:

Put one foot in front of the other.  Breathe in, breathe out.  One foot in front of the other.  Get to the rock up there. Slow and steady. Water.  Breathe in, breathe out.

By the time we were halfway up the peak, I had blisters on my heel, sole, and toes, and my hip flexors were aching terribly.  My lungs and thighs burned.  I kept looking down and thinking, I don't know how, but my feet are still moving.  Though my steps were generally baby-sized, they didn't stop.  At one point, a man that looked part Native American and all full of sage wisdom passed by me on his way down.  He smiled and said good morning, but I must have seemed miserable because then he just looked at me with a smile in his eyes and said "I know."  

I had learned to trudge, but even more surprisingly, I enjoyed it in a way.  Maybe this is the kind of thing long distance runners experience (I wouldn't know), but there was something kind of cleansing about putting myself through that hike.  It's not really about reaching the top, though of course that's nice (some inspirational Miley Cyrus lyrics are running through my head, but I don't really like her or her music so I'll refrain).  It's something about the lesson of continuing, one foot in front of the other, when your head thinks there's no way you can. It's also about learning what you can handle and pacing yourself accordingly, which is I think one of the hardest life lessons of all.

Sometimes our little group got spaced out, and there was a time I ended up walking with a nice woman named Denise, who was about 45, hiking alone, and had climbed 14000 ft peaks approximately 65 times in her life.  Pretty amazing.  We encountered a man on the way up who thought it sounded like a good plan to spend his morning jogging. JOGGING. up Mt. Elbert. Denise just shook her head and said "He must be from Leadville."  Apparently people from Leadville are nuts.  I wonder if he could feel the daggers everyone was staring into his back as he passed by, because there were plenty of them.  Here you are, just pleased that you're still moving, and he suddenly makes you feel like you're super lame for struggling up this mountain.  You're pretty much a 90 year old woman waddling up in her PJ's, by comparison.

It's a little how life can feel sometimes, or at least it is for me.  I'm generally a "results" person, not a "process" person, and that can make it easy to compare myself to others.  So even if something is a personal achievement it always seems like it pales in comparison to the amazing things that other people are doing (I'm sure no one else has this problem).  It's an ongoing struggle, but I think the past year or so has helped me begin to see things a little differently.  To focus a little more on the journey and less on the peak.  To realize that in each season of my life, I am able to give something unique to the people and opportunities that have been placed before me- something that I couldn't give at any other time.  To remember that the successes or good opinions of others are not what I'm striving for.  And, in the end, to feel comfortable with my own pace.   

Yes, I did actually make it.