Therese Marie

The following is the story behind a random photograph from my Northbound adventure on 1,189.8 miles of the Appalachian Trail. This time I bring you to Smarts Mountain in New Hampshire, where I had a classic “break down” and felt like giving up. Spoiler alert: I kept hiking. 

Smarts Mountain, NH

I don’t want there to be any illusions about this photo: I am not having a good time. 

At the end of my hike,

my dad came out to Maine for a few days and had a hard time getting up and down the hills. No matter how physically fit you are, hiking 34 miles in 3 days with no prior experience is rough on the body. “How do you DO this?” he kept asking, exasperated.

“Just like you’re doing right now, Dad! One foot in front of the other,” I’d laugh in return, not even breaking a sweat.

“No, how do you do it if you don’t want to go on? What if you physically can’t do it?“

So I’ve been thinking about this question a lot since he asked, because my answer was, “I don’t know, you just…do it.” But that’s not enough. That answer doesn’t give credit to all the bad days I had on trail.

Pictured above is me during one of those “I cannot go on” moments. I made it up Smarts Mountain in New Hampshire and I wanted to…die, maybe. I don’t know, actually. I was so out of sorts that I couldn’t think at all.

Here are some reasons why I fell so hard at the top:

1. It was mentally intimidating. The whole mountain is an L shape, so you climb this huge portion, it gets flat and you think you’re done. Except then you get a view of an even HIGHER point. I looked with disdain and dread at the little pinprick of a fire tower at the top of the monster to my right, confirming that it was indeed the actual summit of Smarts Mountain. The sight of the far off fire tower almost made me cry. I was physically beat and the world greeted me with a view that confirmed the pain was not over.
2. The terrain was bullshit. “Only a half mile more,” is what I repeated to myself. But it was a half mile of straight-up, rocky, rooty climbing. I arrived at the base of the steep climb and whimpered. Once ascending, I stopped often because I was out of breath. It took me probably 30-45 minutes to complete “only a half mile.”
3. I was in a terrible mental place. For some reason that morning I woke up in a cloud. I was sad and disheartened for seemingly no reason at all, which happens. I was feeling supremely unmotivated, which meant my body felt like lead, which meant I was entering panic attack mode. Not a good mental climate to make a strenuous climb in. BUT! Forward. Always move forward.

It is with an unfortunate confidence that I come to tell you this: anyone who says he doesn’t have any bad days on the trail is either lying or hasn’t been out long enough. Just because the land is beautiful and the lifestyle is wonderful, that does NOT mean bad days cannot exist.

You have to keep going. Immediately for sheer survival reasons. You’re hiking alone. You don’t know when the next person is going to be passing by. You’re only carrying enough food for 3-5 days. And unless you have a seriously serious life threatening injury, I don’t see how you can justify paying thousands of dollars to get the wilderness people to drag your ass off the mountain. You will find it in you to just keep hiking forward.

But it becomes so much MORE than that. I kept repeating, “Just another step. You have to keep stepping,” because I knew there was no other way out. I couldn’t turn back. There was nothing waiting for me in the south.

A tough lesson I learned was to only carry what I needed, and that goes for mental baggage too. If your pack is bothering you because it’s too heavy, you need to do a shakedown and get rid of things you’re not using to shed excess weight. If you’re constantly perseverating over a problem, you need to let those thoughts go because they’re only weighing you down.

When I saw Rocket at the base of the tower around the corner, I collapsed. Immediately.

He laughed at me and took a picture. That was all I needed to click back into place. The reality of the situation sunk in through my own thick, panicked atmosphere: I had made it to the top despite all the odds I set up against myself. 

Climbing up the mountain took patience and determination.

No matter what sort of rock bottom I found myself in, I always knew that I had to move forward. That’s the way of the trail, especially for thru- or long distance section hikers. You are bound to a single direction. One way in, one way out. And I was willing to let go of all the heavy thoughts I carried for the past decade.

It can’t matter how tough the climb is, because you came out here to achieve a goal.

For lots of different, crazy reasons you came out here to hike from Georgia to Maine. If you’ve got that goal in mind, you simply cannot let something like Smarts Mountain defeat you.

To be honest, I think people are physically capable of anything. I’ve seen hikers above the age of 60, hikers with prosthetics, hikers with serious injuries or illness. Physical ailments don’t stop hikers: lack of mental motivation does. 

If you’re not having a good time, if you don’t WANT to do something completely insane (like walking 2,200 miles from Georgia to Maine), you’re going to have problems. You’re going to want to stop and go home.

It’s the same as with anything else. If you don’t like living in a city, you’re not going to work a job saving up for an overpriced apartment in Manhattan. The examples could go on.

So even when you’re immersed in your passions, you can still find yourself fallen and broken.

Doing what you love doesn’t always mean you’re going to be happy doing it. You simply can’t have this romantic idea of being happy all the time. You would be ignoring all the difficulties and nuances, all the tough climbs and beautiful views. You wouldn’t be giving credit to your tough work.

I’ve come to find that the road is difficult no matter which route you choose to take. 

What matters is that you’re moving forward.

And moving forward towards something you love gives you a sense of fulfillment, so even when you’re having a terrible day, you still get a view like this:

Proof that you’ve made it somewhere awesome.

You made it. You are here. You are alive. And you are in love with the world, the life you’ve created.

Fly on,

Lil Wayne.