Ironjen's Appalachian Trials Lists Part 1: Why am I hiking the Appalachian Trail?

I'm sitting here looking at a post from Appalachian Trials congratulating the hikers who have finished their thru-hikes this week!  I noticed two reactions as I scrolled through the photos.  First, I get really giddy and almost teary every time I see a photo of the sign atop Katahdin!  Second, I'm noticing that today is August 1, and I can't imagine wanting to be done this early in the hiking season!  I even had trouble finishing AWOL on the Appalachian Trail!  I put the book down for a couple of weeks when I had two chapters left, because I wasn't ready for the virtual hike to be over.  I wanted the experience to last.

Of course, that's no guarantee that I am going to feel the same way after walking over 2,000 miles!  Who knows, maybe by then I'll be tired of sleeping outside, walking through rain, communing with bugs and not being able to get away from the stench of myself, my gear and my husband! (Just the smell of you, hon!  I won't want to get away from you!)  It's that not knowing how I'll feel once I'm deep into the experience that makes me a little nervous, and I suppose that's at least part of what makes a thru-hike appealing.

I see the experience a little bit like my first Ironman.  When I decided that I wanted to do an Ironman, I was still sick with dermatomyositis.  I had just started running, as part of my "do everything they tell you you can't do" plan to get well.  I watched a friend do a sprint triathlon, because he insisted that I would love the sport.  I mostly went to make him shut up about it.

Back when I was sick

By the time he crossed the finish line, I was dead set on doing a triathlon.  I didn't want to do a sprint.  I had done the math in my head already, and I could have pushed my way through that distance that day if I had wanted to.  What was attractive about the idea of an Ironman, was that there was a big question mark on that.  The most I had ever run was 9 miles, I had no idea how to actually swim with a real swim stroke, and I owned a steel mountain bike from 1996.  Nothing about my situation in that moment spelled guaranteed success in my attempt to swim 2.4 miles, bike 112 miles, and run 26.2 miles in under 17 consecutive hours.

Ironman Swim Lake Placid 2008

Ironman Bike Lake Placid 2008

Ironman Run Lake Placid 2008

In Zach Davis' book, Appalachian Trials, he writes about anticipating challenges, and being mentally prepared for them.  Part of the strategy is making lists prior to leaving on the trail.  I never wrote the lists on paper when I did Ironman, but I did catalogue the thoughts in my head, and I wrote a lot on my blog about why I was doing what I was doing, the benefit of crossing the finish line, and the drawbacks of quitting before.  When weather on race day turned into a downpour that lasted over 15 hours, when I faced the killer climbs of the Adirondacks on the bike and run courses, and when the midnight finish cutoff loomed less than 30 minutes ahead, I reminded myself what the finish meant.  It was a nail in the coffin of a disease I wasn't supposed to be able to defeat.  It was me claiming control over my life.  It was proving to myself that I am capable of anything. . . It worked.  I did all of that.  I went on to do it three more times.  I'll eventually do it again.  First, I need to do this other thing. . . this thru-hike thing, and I need to be prepared.  (Muskrat does too, but he's been busy with budget spreadsheets!  He likes that stuff!)

Ironman Finish Lake Placid 2008

Ironman Finish Coeur d'Alene 2009

Ironman Finish Arizona 2010

Ironman Finisher Medal Cozumel 2011

My reasons for this thru-hike are not as clear cut and easy to define as my reasons for doing Ironman.  Dermatomyositis is far behind me now that I have been well longer than I was sick, and my confidence in myself is miles beyond what it used to be.  My physical fitness is pretty stellar.  So, why DO I want to do this?

Here's the first draft of my first list:

I am thru-hiking the Appalachian Trail because:

• It has intrigued me for the last 25 years.
• I want a grand adventure.
• I want to make a photo book of the trip.
• I want to share an epic adventure with my husband.
• I want to live in the woods.
• I want to see if I can.
• I want to try a new kind of endurance activity.
• I want to take Magnuson Photographic in a commercial outdoor direction.
• I want to see New England, and on foot sounds good!
• I want to have something awesome to remember the east coast by.

I'm sure I will add to it, but so far that's what I have!

©2014 Jennifer Magnuson, All Rights Reserved, Unauthorized reproduction is prohibited.

Pre-Trail Reading and Reflection

This morning, as Muskrat recovers from some surgery he had yesterday, we finished David "AWOL" Miller's AWOL on the Appalachian Trail, his account of his 2003 thru-hike. I had always heard really great things about the book, and I loved it, though I was surprised at how clinical of an account it is. Maybe it was my projection of my own storytelling style that had me expecting to hear a more introspective and emotional story. Despite the book not meeting that expectation, I found myself drawn into the story of footsteps through the green tunnel. It was almost meditative, as I anticipate some of the hike will be. Two of the passages in the book that stuck out most for me were these:

"The payoff, though difficult to quantify, is much greater than I expected. I have no regrets about having gone; it was the right thing to do. I think about it every day. Sometimes I can hardly believe that it happened. I just quit, and I was on a monumental trip. I didn't suffer financial ruin, my wife didn't leave me, the world didn't stop spinning. I do think of how regrettable it would have been had I ignored the pull that I felt to hike the trail. A wealth of memories could have been lost before they had even occurred if I had dismissed, as a whim, my inkling to hike. It is disturbing how tenuous our potential is due to our fervent defense of the comfortable norm." -David "AWOL" Miller, AWOL on the Appalachian Trail

"Hiking the AT is 'pointless.' What life is not 'pointless?' Is it not pointless to work paycheck to paycheck just to conform? Hiking the AT before joining the workforce was an opportunity not taken. Doing it in retirement would be sensible; doing it at this time in my life is abnormal, and therein lay the appeal. I want to make my life less ordinary." - David Miller AWOL on the Appalachian Trail

"I want to make my life less ordinary." I have a feeling that this is one of the things people have judged me for the most in my life, yet it is one of the things that I am most proud of, and also one of the things that I wish I had done better when I was younger.

There was a time in my life, that due to the influences of parents, teachers, peers, religion, etcetera, that I thought that there was a checklist to happiness, a roadmap to fulfillment that I saw modeled all around me. My heart had always been drawn towards the outdoors, adventure, mountains, unconventional living, but the evidence of my actions clearly demonstrated that I felt far safer with "the conventional norm."

I mentioned how I felt shamed by my classmate's reaction to the one and only time I voiced my desire to go to the woods in lieu of going to college. Somehow that moment of honesty, and the shame that I felt from it, spurred me to a gorgeous engraved piece of paper that hangs of a wall matted and framed in walnut. It has an embossed seal, some foil lettering, a bunch of signatures, and at one time it gave me a sense of worth and value, and it made me feel as though I had done what I was supposed to do on the way to being happy and fulfilled. After suffering a less than exciting year in an office, an incurable and debilitating bout of illness, an ill-advised marriage and the subsequent divorce, I see it as a symbol of dreams deferred, and as a learning experience far more valuable than anything I ever did in the classrooms where I earned that degree.

I don't regret it, and it certainly didn't ruin my life, as life is pretty grand! I just wish that I could tell my younger self to quit looking at the people around me, many of whom I later learned weren't as happy and satisfied as they led me to believe, as examples of how to succeed. I'd tell myself to take the time to get to know who I am and what I really want, and to always follow that deliciously tense tugging that I feel in my chest when something ignites my passion. I lived by the checklist, and I almost died by the checklist in my mid-20s. Experience has taught me that there is much more risk in living "the comfortable norm" than there is in living a life "less ordinary." My 30s have been about living from my heart, and they haven't disappointed me yet.

My heart says it's never too late to hike.


©2014 Jennifer Magnuson, All Rights Reserved, Unauthorized reproduction is prohibited.