I’m feeling this deep craving to be outside. To run, walk, or just stare up at the sky through the trees, or out at the lake (melting still).
Lately I’ve been listening to audiobooks about thru-hikers again. Hikers who spend months on the Applachain or Pacific Crest Trail. Hikers who go for the fastest known times and push their bodies forty-plus miles a day and encounter bears and snakes and, most terrifying of all, their own self. It’s a close cousin to the ultra marathon stories I love. Journeys like that are reckonings with the mind. More about the mental strength than the hardening of the muscles.
I’m writing a story about girls who run fast, but what I’m really interested in is endurance.
In one book I read (Natural Born Heroes by Christopher McDougall) it explained that you can know if a sport (or movement) is natural to being human by looking at the ability difference between men and women. When there’s a large gap, like say in boxing, that means we were not built to do it. It has no practical use in survival situations.
But in endurance sports, long distance running and hiking for example, men and women’s abilities equal out. We were built to cover miles and miles.
I find that thought incredibly freeing.
As my eyes grow tired of screens and I find that I have to discipline myself not to reflexively reach for my phone, it’s a gift to look out at the stars or ahead at the road or anywhere that’s further than a few feet ahead of me. The world is bigger than the boxes we live in every day.
In a month I’ll be spending a vacation week hiking and running and disconnecting. It can’t come soon enough.
With Love,
Natalie