heaven

KK and I went hiking on the Appalachian Trail in Massachusetts this week. Just four days in the middle of a week we're spending up here visiting her crazy family. It was a great hike. The first night it rained incessantly, though we stayed nice and dry inside our trusty tent. Even inside the tent, though, everthing gets moist, and it was a good 24 hours before we really dried out. The weather didn't clear up til about noon the following day, so we had a soggy seven mile hike to the next campsite. But the rain made everything feel lush and verdant under the tree canopy, as though if I just reached out with my senses, I'd be able to feel the forest growing around me.



In Massachusetts, you can only camp in designated areas, so we had the company of other hikers most nights. Our second night, we met some extremely entertaining thru-hikers. They were doing 20-plus mile days, and smelled like they hadn't showered in a month (which they hadn't). One was a 60-something year-old guy who was 100 miles from being done. He walked from Georgia to New York, and then took a bus up to Maine and was walking South back to where he left off in New York. He was skinny with a long white beard, and he walked around camp like he felt every one of those two-thousand plus miles in his bones, bent crab-like over his battered feet, wincing. He was travelling with a tall seventeen-year old kid who went by the trail-name of Stretch. Stretch had just graduated from high school, and when he talked to you he peered out from under a thick greasy curtain of curly blond hair. The two had met on a bus on the way to Maine, and they had now walked 600 miles together. They cooked and ate 10 hot dogs for dinner, complete with buns and a ziploc baggie of ketchup that they had bought in the last town they walked through.

On our third day we walked ten miles to a campsite that we had all to ourselves. We passed through Cheshire, a little New England town surrounded by small farms where we got lunch at a sandwich shop. On our way out of town, the trail passed through a cornfield, where we stole three ears of corn to cook for dinner that night. When we arrived at camp, Kati made up a fire while I went and fetched water from the stream nearby. We cooked our stolen corn in the coals, and watched the light fade through the trees.



I love backpacking because it reduces my needs and wants to their most elemental levels. If I don't need something, I don't bring it, because everything has to be carried on your back. In fact, a good chunk of our conversation as we walk is usually about what we brought that we could leave behind next time (you'd be amazed at what starts to look expendable by mile ten under a heavy pack). And I think some of the most satisfying meals I've ever had have been ones that I carried out of civilization to eat. My friend JJ posted recently about the concept of "enoughness". Backpacking feels like an active exercise in enoughness to me. Being out in nature is one of the simplest pleasures I can think of, and also one of the most satisfying. And it feels like a relief to shuck the burden of things I hadn't realized I didn't need. At a stream-crossing on our last day, we passed this on a collapsed stone bridge - it's a nice reminder:

90 degree heat + 90 percent humidity + 10 hilly miles = I really earned my omelette

For my inaugural post at this here blog, I have a race report from the Annapolis 10-miler. The weather here in the DC area has been unbelievably hot and humid for the past few days, which by all accounts is just as it should be for this race. I'd never run it before, but everyone I talked to who had would kind of widen their eyes and shake their head knowingly while telling me not to expect a PR (personal record) on this course. Apparently this race is known for the "three H's" - hills, heat, and humidity. Being a little stubborn, and possessing a tiny kernel of competitiveness buried deep inside me somewhere, I took this as a challenge.

So I googled around for a speed program, tacked up a schedule on my office wall, and amazingly (for me) stuck to it pretty well. My goal for race-day was to run something like 8-minute miles (revised from my initial goal of sub-8 minute miles, which I decided was a little unreasonable, given the three-H's. Oh, and also my unconquerable habit of visiting the candy jar at work 20 or so times a day). And guess what? I came pretty close.

The official results aren't up yet, but I finished in about 1 hour 22 minutes, which comes out to about an 8:22/mile pace. Not as fast as I was hoping, but still pretty respectable. Nevermind that the guy who won the thing did it in 54 minutes...

And for all the dire warnings, the race itself was a BLAST. It was really well run, with tons of volunteers, and there must have been water stations at every mile. I was never thirsty, that's for sure. And just past the halfway-point, they were passing out orange slices and sponges soaked with cold water. Even better were the crowds cheering on the sides, which included a dozen or so families hanging out in their front yards while we all ran past, cooling us down with their garden hoses. That was definitely the best part. Though there were a couple little kids holding supersoakers who clearly weren't sure they were really supposed to be squirting us. As I ran toward them, I'd outstretch my arms and nod, like "Yes, please," and they'd just make a shy face and kind of clutch the squirt gun to themselves until I ran by.

All told, a fun way to spend a morning. Next year: sub-8's!!