Date: 2014-10-07
To: One Year Later
Miles today: 0.0
Weather: light rain

Carol and I completed our thruhike of the Appalachian Trail a year ago this week. I need to write the story of the aftermath as much as I needed to write my daily experiences out there. This isn¢t a happy story or a sad story but it¢s an honest one.The first half (Northbound) of our the experience was a lot more fun than the second half (Southbound). We went over a thousand miles in the South without meeting any other thruhikers. We spent a lot of nights without any company. With a few exceptions, the AT looks the same from West Virginia all the way to Georgia, which isn¢t the case going north to Maine. After five months of hiking, thinking daily about the prospect of accomplishing something I wanted to be extraordinary, finishing the trek felt good but not climactic. I was ready to be done. There were no cheering crowds on the top of the last mountain nor any of the people we met along the way. We walked up that hill with a couple of family members, signed the final trail journal and walked back down to a parking lot and got in a car. The joy in the experience was hiking, not finishing.I used to be an endurance cyclist. Riding a bike fifty or a hundred miles regularly offered me the chance to feel a tangible sense of accomplishment. I¢d done something hard. I earned my fatigue. I felt special, if only in my own mind. That¢s the way I felt daily on the Appalachian Trail. I felt special. Trying to come to grips with the reality of not hiking has been harder in some ways than hiking. For one, the sense of accomplishment left quickly and has never fully returned. When I was hiking, I was a hiker. Now, I¢m not. There¢s no daily reward. In my mind, the AT belongs to the people who are on it right now. When I got home, I joined the Appalachian Trail Society but I¢ve never read one of the magazines they send to our house. I joined a few AT groups on Facebook but never participated in them much and left them all some time ago. In the past year I¢ve spent exactly one night backpacking.We researched the hell out of the Appalachian Trail before we started our hike. We read books. We spent hours on the Internet. We spent every weekend in the woods for four months. Even during the trip we pumped people for information. We stayed in contact as best we could with our friends who finished their hikes in late July and early August. What was life like after the trail? I knew depression was common, the same with weight gain. I made lots of plans to successfully readjust to the world. Those plans didn¢t end up working all that well. I knew I didn¢t want to be that guy who can¢t shut up about something he did, who forces conversations to his experiences. I¢ve done pretty well at that one, although I did post pictures for months on Facebook until a friend felt he needed to tell me to stop. Because I maintained a blog all the way through our hike, everyone I knew had already heard my best stories. I didn¢t get a lot of questions from anyone, except about my feet.What I¢ve done is think about the trail a lot, too much, trying unsuccesfully to be happy about having done it. The depression I felt after coming home lasted for months. A trip to a section of the trail in the Roan Highland this summer was sweet but still made me sad. Moutains I once walked over easily were no longer easy. I weigh 60 lbs more than I did when I finished hiking. I¢ve looked at our 1800 pictures too many times. A website where I have a copy of them stored sends me an email every morning with the shots I took a year ago to the day. That¢s about to stop and I¢m glad. The experience keeps creeping slowly away from me. I think that¢s natural and positive. I¢m ready to stop with the ¢remember when¢s in my head and even with Carol.I¢m ready for the longing to stop. I want to create a new way of feeling like I¢ve accomplished something, which means I need to accomplish something. Now that I found photography, I have something else to think about, something else to be passionate about but I still need to recover parts of me that worked so well for years before the AT.