Day 42: Acting my age

Start and finish: Off trail in San Francisco

As I woke up today, I was still under the assumption that I would be leaving tomorrow for the Pacific Crest Trail. The posts I was seeing on the PCT Reddit group were taunting me with news reports of clear paths and pictures of snowy mountain peaks. My backpack was set and I knew how many liters of water I needed. I even set my alarm for 5 a.m. tomorrow so I could catch a bus toward Reno, where I’d transfer up to the trailhead on local buses. But by 8 p.m. I let the wisdom of my friends and my own acknowledgements about the shape of my body take hold, and I decided to turn off my alarm and start planning for another day.

Most of my day was spent by a marshy cattle lake in the hills of Los Altos at a birthday party for Olivia, the young daughter of our friends, Carson and Grace. Many of the people who I first met after moving to California were there. Several couples had children in the past few years, and there was a menagerie of kids under five years old darting around on scooters, grabbing cookies from the food table, or just crying in their parent’s arms. As a result of all their parental responsibility, I didn’t get to see my friends as much as I did several years ago, so I was happy to spend time with them. 

Most of our conversation was just catching up or trading friendly barbs, but I spent time with a few people who brought the importance of listening to my body into focus. First I chatted with Chris, who had knee surgery about three months prior and was slowly regaining strength and flexibility in his leg. He had spent the past 11 weeks icing his joint and doing leg exercises to build back the muscle that had atrophied after surgery. He was doing well, but he still had several months of work in front of him. 

I could somewhat empathize with his position, albeit on a smaller scale. Back in the fall, I had been rounding a corner on my bike when my wheels slipped out from beneath me and my hand – trying to brace my fall – got caught between the frame of my bike and the ground. When I stood up, I looked at my thumb, noticed it was at an odd angle even for my double-jointed digit, and fell a diffuse but strong pain. I had broken the outermost bone and required two screws to help set the bone back in place. When the screws came out about eight weeks later, I then started a physical therapy regimen that took more than twice that time. It was tedious, painful, and – most of the time – unrewarding as the progress was so small as to be nearly invisible from day to day. 

At the birthday party, I also spent time with Maryann, who has gritted her teeth through multiple medical procedures and still battles joint pain on a regular basis. In her struggles, she has learned to listen to bodily signals that the rest of us take for granted or simply ignore. She implored me to listen to my body, wise advice from anybody but especially poignant from her. We all live on a fragile knife edge between facile capability and laborious motion, and we forget this at our own peril.

When Chris and I were trading emails at the beginning of my hike, he reminded me of the beautifully simple and sane goal of every SCUBA dive: everyone makes it back to the boat safely. The other tasks – seeing an octopus, making it through a cave, peering in through the window of a shipwreck – are all secondary goals. I’ve done dozens of dives and each starts with an attentive and important gear check. Then, throughout the dive, I make eye contact and signals with my partner continually and check my gauges frequently. Back on the boat, headaches and joint pains are taken seriously as possible signs of more severe issues. 

Lulled into a false sense of security by being on land, hikers rarely take such precautions. We don’t adopt hand signals to make sure that our partner is not overheating. We don’t do a pre-hike check that everyone has enough water. Often we don’t even discuss the goals or the intermediary check points. And injuries are viewed as something to push through, another obstacle to overcome.

On the trail, I am less impressed by the 20-year-old doing 30 miles in a day than the 70-year-old doing any mileage. The former requires a certain level of devotion and persistence to an immediate goal; the latter requires devotion and persistence to a much more diffuse and long-term goal. 

When people on the trail learn that I’m 35 years old, they are usually shocked. This is, in part, due to my small stature and young face, but also thanks to my pace and high daily mileage. Yet while I might be able to fool others into thinking I’m younger than I am, my body has no such misconceptions. Believe what I might, I have limits and the wear of mile after mile erodes my joints and tries my tendons. I needed rest, and ignoring that would mean trading the long-term goal of hiking at 70 years old for the relatively foolish short-term goal of finishing my hike a few days earlier. With a but of reluctance, I turned off my alarm for tomorrow morning, unpacked my backpack, and settled down to watch a movie with Alissa; the trail would still be there when I was ready.