Day 3 (I've decided to go by day, rather than yesterday/today/Tuesday, mainly because I can't for the life of me keep anything straight any more!) was wicked. I don't mean that in a positive, "wicked! gnarly!" kind of way. I mean that in the, "wicked, vicious, downright evil" kind of way. Why?
Because we were fighting a headwind. Uphill. ALL. DAY. LONG.
That gorilla I mentioned in my last post? It had me in tears during lunch, frustrated because I'm so bad at this, afraid Zac would get sick of me holding him back, muscles in pain from so much forced work.
I didn't know how I was mentally going to make it through the afternoon, and this time we were on a deadline. There was a 6pm ferry we needed to catch in order to make it to our campsite.
At first, I started trying to conquer the hills by counting reps. 8 sets of 8, every time my left foot pedaled down. I told myself that once I finished "8, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8" I could pause and wait for the burning to subside. That worked...for a couple hills. But it only worked for so long. Then I started singing an old warmup from highschool...the alphabet, sung in fifths (do re mi fa sol fa mi re do kind of thing). And then I decided to give my brain something to worry on instead of my legs.
I taught myself to sing the alphabet backwards.
And you know what?
We made it to the ferry at 5.30
Welcome to the world of "it only gets worse until it suddenly doesn't" (ie, you're experiencing exactly what I experienced at the beginning of my thru-hike). I'm betting that you'll look back in a month and a half and you won't be sure when it stopped getting more painful/harder and instead became natural/easy/fun.
ReplyDeleteI'm so excited you're doing this! (Also, I got a surly cross check today.)
Congrats on conquering today's demon. I'm (we're) proud of you for this adventure. Looking forward to talking. Luv, papa
ReplyDeleteI am so proud of you, lady. You're perseverance is incredible and inspiring.
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