The trying is what heals you
3 lessons from an epically beautiful failure
Wild Letters is a newsletter about self-exploration and building a right-fit life.
Thank you for being here with me!
My dear reader.
I’m home from Arizona now, from making my attempt on the women’s self-supported FKT.
What a beautiful failure — that’s what I keep saying to myself — because really, it was.
Below, in today’s letter, I want to share three things I learned from this attempt. As you read, please know that I’m not looking for any advice or feedback; I’m simply sharing what came up for me, and what feels true as I begin to reflect on these past few months of intense goal-pursuit.
Lesson 1: The body is an ever-shifting mystery
The reason I quit the hike is this: I couldn’t eat.
It started just before midday on day 2, when I found that I had no appetite at all. But to hike like this one must eat (a lot) and so I’d try, I’d take a bite of something (sweet, salty, soft, crunchy, didn’t matter) and immediately start retching and gagging. This had never happened to me before, and my best guess is that it was somehow heat related. Or rather, a result of heat + effort.
The gagging meant that I could not longer eat while walking, so I’d stop and have a bar or some other snack as quickly as possible to avoid losing too much time. But soon my body wasn’t even letting me do that. Instead I’d need to take tiny little bites, chew and chew until I turned the food into a paste in my mouth, take a sip of water to make it into a slurry, and then force myself to swallow it down. Over and over, all day. Which. That is not how you effectively fuel yourself for an effort of this kind.
I also had major foot issues, which wasn’t a huge surprise but it was way (way) worse than on any previous thru-hike ever. Just blisters all over my toes, along the soles and sides of my feet, under my toenails, plus intense non-specific foot pain and tenderness, almost right from the start.
Despite those issues I made it 145 miles in the first 86 hours (a solid pace for this kind of effort, and one I’m proud of!) but the calorie deficit (and time loss of having to continually stop to eat and triage my feet) added up fast. I knew it was over when, upon waking, it took me more than 45 minutes to choke down a single Pop Tart, after which I slowly hiked myself 16 final miles to an easy hitch spot and got off trail.