Earned Invincibility
If you listen to podcasts about endurance sports, you'll hear a common theme come up among the hikers, cyclists and runners whose idea of fun is covering long distances under their own power. Many of them are recovering addicts and alcoholics. They often say "I traded one addiction for another." That's me.
After a struggle with drinking that stretched back to my teens, I got sober and stayed that way in 2008 at age 43. It took nine months for me to drop 100 pounds. The following year and the year after I rode my bicycle over 10K miles each year. Then I switched to long-distance hiking, completing the Appalachian Trail, a distance of 2189 miles in under six months.
The vocabulary of people like me includes the phrase "type 2 fun". This is any activity that leaves one miserable during the event, but is rewarding and fun to remember later. The transition between the misery of doing the thing and the rewarding feeling you get for having done it, is the most peaceful place in the world.
Grueling physical exertion reduces your cognitive ability. By the end of a long day of movement, many endurance sports participants have lost the ability to do mental math; an important skill when its primary function is allowing you to know how many more miles you have to go until you can stop.
When climbing mountains, all day every day, during my AT adventure, my wife who was also my hiking partner, seldom cared about the day's elevation gain. When a mountain showed up in front of her, she just climbed it and kept going. Not me. I studied the mountains we were going to encounter each day, calculating how much it was going to suck while making our way to their summits.
Laboring away on the wooded slopes of the Smokes, the Berkshires or even the treeless granite expanses in the Whites, you had no way to determine the distance to the top. Every hiker hates the false summit, a spot that looks like the top, but isn't. You struggle to climb your way there only to find that your big mountain just became your bigger mountain. It can happen in succession, multiple time on the same peak.
Eventually though, you arrive at a spot that you cannot climb beyond. Often there is a sign with numbers on it telling you exactly how far you are above sea level, as if that had some meaning. After a long climb, my mind would start out racing with an inner dialog that seldom varied, "Damn, that was hard. I'm glad it's really over. I wonder if there's a view up here. Where can I sit down? How much water do I have? How far away is the next mountain?"
All of that takes much longer to type in hindsight than it does to live through it in the moment. In the moment, you feel your heart rate begin to slow. It becomes easier to breathe. The burning in your thighs starts to lessen. You are flush a bit from having won a battle with the natural world. You remain undefeated and nothing feels better than knowing that. You're literally on a mountain top. You are high, absolutely high. You get this sense of earned invincibility.
I'll always be an addict, always chasing a high, but finally finding peace.
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