Date: 2008-03-07
From: Home

To: AT
Miles today: 0.0
Weather: overcast clouds

"Psychology of a Thru-Hiker Turned Section Hiker"As many of you who have hiked this trail know, and many of you who are thinking or planning on hiking this trail know, there is a tremendous amount of psychological energy that goes into even entertaining the thought that you might attempt this. I'm making some big assumptions here, but I doubt I was unlike many people, in that you deal with the little devil/angel voices telling you "What are you smoking? You can't do this" and then "Why the hell not...you CAN do this!" over and over. You go through a series of what-if questions (like what if I get hurt, what if I get eaten by a bear, what if I hate it, etc.) and these are necessary because it is the way we process our fears, but my rule #1 is to NEVER EVER make a final decision based solely upon a what-if, because it's just that...guessing. I don't listen to them in general, but you sort of have to acknowledge they exist.So you actually get out there...you somehow find a way to save the money, put life on hold, get the gear, convince your friends/family that you're not running away to join the Moonies, and you show up at the bottom of Springer Mountain or Mt. Katahdin. Next thought is generally, "Oh shit...what did I just sign up for?" And then you have to remember to breathe....For all of the hopeful thru-hikers, there is a mental game to play. It wasn't until I stepped foot on the AT on day #1 that I really understood the enormous task ahead of me, and my already humble respect for the journey grew ten-fold that day.So you hike, you walk, you hurt, you smell really bad, you get really hungry, you cry, you laugh, and you tell people when they ask, "Yes, I'm thru-hiking" and you're very proud of that. It's cool to say it and it feels good to verbalize what was for many of us a private internal dialogue in the beginning.Now fast forward to whatever circumstances occur in life that interrupt the task at hand...be it injury, illness, boredom, personal stuff, you decide you just hate hiking...or any of the millions of other reasons available. And notice I say reasons not excuses, because attempting a thru-hike of the AT is a choice...it's as simple as that, and nobody "needs" an excuse or even justification to stop doing it. If you don't want to do it...then don't.So now you find yourself off the trail. Some people are relieved and never look back, some people go home and feel horrible about themselves and then there are people that I lump myself in with....I knew the desire to finish this trail would never leave me, but for the time (and it was impossible for me to predict how long this sabbatical would be) I had to set it on a shelf and check back into life. Again, all my personal choice, but as we all know, sometimes even the right choices in life have tough stuff attached to them. So now the question you face is, "How do I cope with this?" I've seen tons of threads about thru-hikers trying to cope with checking back into life, coping with not hiking the next year when the trees start to bud and the earth starts to warm again after winter, hikers who felt like losers because they didn't complete the trail. So interesting to me how lost you can feel after focusing intensely on one single thing and when it's gone....you just don't know what to do. So my personal coping technique, and this worked for me by the way because I never ever ever wanted to walk away for good...I told myself someday I WILL hike this whole trail. So for me, I had to sort of pack it away in a neat tidy package, keeping everything clean and ready to go, but push it out of my mind. I couldn't really hop onto the forums and talk about the AT, I couldn't hop onto trailjournals and read the many wonderful stories on this website. If you notice, I still have pictures from my last week out there that I've not put up. It was too much. Sort of like losing a really good friend and not being able to look at pictures of your time together because simply put...it just hurts. The incredible thing about this though, is that my friend, this trail...it never goes away. She's sitting out there in all of her rocky/dirt/mountainous/muddy glory waiting for me, for you, for every single person who wants to experience her, and that's not going to change. When you first start off with the intention of thru-hiking, there's almost a feeling of "this is my one and only chance," and to an extent that's sort of true, because trust me folks, it's hard enough to put life on hold for one attempt, much less trying to put it on hold 2 summers in a row. What I found though, as the days passed, as the bills came in, as the paychecks got deposited, was that although my way to cope was to tuck it all away, that eventually, I felt safe enough to grab little looks, read a few lines of Persistent's journal, to open up my folder of pictures and look at them, and I realized, my friend is waiting for me to return and all that stands between me and that moment was one thing.....me. So I went through a similar cycle that I did the first time around, admitting to myself I wanted to do this, admitting it to my family, talking about the possible ways I could make it happen...again, weighing the pro's and con's of if I didn't and if I did, then I started talking about it using verbs like "when I get back out" instead of "when/if I get back out" and eventually it became real again. I went through about 2 weeks of not having any reason whatsoever to believe otherwise, but for me, it wasn't real until I posted it here again..that I was getting back on the AT to (hopefully) see it through to Mt. Katahdin. And now, I am freed of the pressure (self-induced might I add) of finishing it all in 6 months, I am going back out there with 1219.5 miles to go, and I know how it works, I know what to expect, I know the tricks, and I know that even if I can't finish it this year....it will be ok. My friend will always be there waiting........~Certain