Wednesday, June 06, 2007

A long walk

A Long, Long Walk

On Saturday, April 28, 2007, I along with 97 other wackos set out at 3am to walk from Georgetown to Harpers Ferry, WV. Here's the post-walk report.


I did the whole thing. It was really long—not surprising, but experiencing a 19-hour walk was surreal. I had dreaded the 3am start, and setting my alarm for 1:30am, knowing that I'd have to undertake one of the most extreme physical challenges of my life, was just terrifying. I drugged myself with antihistamines, which allowed me to get about 4 hours of sleep.

There was an astonishing number of people at the start—97 according to the www.onedayhike.org website. The sign-in tables were lit by Coleman lanterns. Someone passed around a sheet with emergency phone numbers. We were asked not to bail out without telling one of the volunteers. Ideally, we were to try to drag ourselves to the nearest rest stop. Bicycle-riding volunteers also patrolled the trail looking for people in distress.

We started just as the bars closed in Georgetown. I didn't see any drunken revelers, but thought that they might think that they'd had a few too many if they had seen our troop marching down the canal tow path with our little flashlights—the hard core ones with headlights. The weather was chilly and very humid. There had been thunderstorms during the night and a possibility of more lingered. (It would drizzle off and on at times throughout the day.) Those without flashlights risked soaking their feet in giant puddles, and a few did. I was glad that I had invested in a light. Raluca, the crazy friend who'd gotten me into this absurd situation, clearly wanted to walk much faster than I did. I'd learned in my training hikes that if I walk as fast as she, my hips start to throb after about 15 miles. I decided that I would pace myself. Raluca purposefully-walked on ahead and I strolled at a measured pace. Similarly, I decided not to try to stay with David, the third of our fundraising pack who was attempting the 100K. He was determined to average 5 miles per hour, and I knew that that pace would kill me.

We walked for two and a half hours before there was any natural light. Before sunrise, I saw a light to the left of the trail and hoped that it might be an indoor restroom with plumbing. It was, it was clean, and was just what I needed. Since the vast majority of facilities on the hike are porta-potties, I took this as a very good omen.

At sunrise, I saw a tree that was covered with turkey buzzards, big ominous-looking birds that you don't expect to see in packs. There must have been 20 or more. I half expected to hear horror movie music and see Alfred Hitchcock meander across the trail. That didn't happen and the big birds seemed uninterested in doing much of anything until later in the morning.

The first rest stop was at mile 12. My feet were already hurting, despite the fact that I had taped over all the spots that had bothered me during training hikes. The problem was the sandy soil on the tow path tended to get in my shoes. Later, I noticed that the hike recidivists wore gators over their sneakers to keep dirt out. I shook out the sand and added more tape to the new hot spots, grabbed a drink, and marched on. Sometime later, I came upon David, who was walking much slower than his target pace. He had trained for the hike by walking around a track and said that walking on dirt and gravel was much harder. He said he was reconsidering his options. He was walking slow and didn't seem to want company so I left him behind. Later, I learned that he had bailed out at the halfway point. Meanwhile, Raluca was speeding on ahead, occasionally sending me text messages with her progress. The distance between us grew at each posting.

At the second rest stop, mile 23, there was fresh coffee and muffins. Both tasted great. I especially needed the caffeine. I shook out more sand, taped my feet some more and relaxed a bit. When I got going again, my feet were especially sore. I realized that long rest stops were a bad idea because my feet tightened up.

I ran into a nature photographer who'd traveled all over the world. We talked about birds in South Africa. I tried to describe an eagle that had amazed me near Kruger National Park and he mentioned the names of three or four kinds and described them. None sounded like the bird I remembered, but my memory was pretty fuzzy. (I have a special sympathy for folks who can't recollect important life events when called before a grand jury.) He impressed me by telling me the names of all the birds we were hearing by the path. That's a such-and-such. It usually doesn't arrive here for a couple more weeks. I impressed him by telling him that I was walking to Harpers Ferry, but he wasn't tempted to hang with me for the remaining 35 miles or so. He was just on his morning constitutional and would soon return home for coffee and the Sunday paper. I was so jealous.

I was listening to a book on tape—Carry by Stephen King. It was the perfect sort of mindless stuff to keep me from thinking about my feet and hips and how much farther I had to walk. Almost. Around 11am, I noticed that I had no Advil. I had carefully packed a plastic bag with enough to last me for a 200-mile hike. I had forgotten my analgesics on a 30-mile training hike and had had to rely on breathing exercises I'd learned when Missie was pregnant to get through the last miles. I took a couple of Advil before the start, but they had long worn off, and now I was worried. Fortunately, Kevin (husband of Allison, who is leading the fundraising effort) called to tell me that he had started the 30-mile hike and he had packed more than enough Advil. He promised to leave me some at the 36-mile rest stop. I said a prayer of thanksgiving, wished that I was further along than mile 28, and searched for a focal point and commenced abdominal sleep breathing.

My feet weren't feeling any better at the next rest stop at mile 31 so I decided that I would get all the sand out I could, apply tape to a particularly sore spot, and draw my laces as tight as I could stand them and not take the shoes off again. A very helpful nurse-type person helped me, but I can't remember with what. I asked her if she had ever done this hike. She looked bemused and said, "I'm not crazy." Yeah.

At the next rest stop, a nurse jumped up when she saw me and handed me a baggy with 6 Advil. Apparently, I was described as the freakishly tall guy wearing an Indiana Jones hat and number 79. Probably any one of those features would have been sufficient, but she had apparently been looking out for me for a while. (I really did wear an Indiana Jones hat, although I did not carry a whip.) I was very happy to get the drugs. There were also sandwiches. I opted for pre-packaged sliced turkey, fresh tomatoes, lettuce, mayo, salt, and pepper on nondescript whole wheat bread. It was wonderful. I also grabbed a baggy full of trail mix and some fig newtons for the road and marched on.

I was happily listening to my book on tape when a woman named Rose started talking to me. I was tempted to cut the conversation short and plow ahead, but I knew that my Ipod battery would not last to the end of the walk. Also, Rose was walking at roughly the same pace as I and kind of cute in a middle-aged sort of way. She was the perfect hike companion.

We talked about everything. I know how she met her husband. (It was on a hike, but he has no interest in walking 62 miles in a day. He's happy to provide drop-off and pick-up service.) I know that she'd done this hike three times before she had kids, and finished twice. Her teenage daughter walked with her for the first 31 miles, but found that even a teenager needed to train to survive such a long walk. Husband had picked up daughter. Her son is going to Yale in the fall. She'd worked as a reporter for the Wall Street Journal and we compared names of reporters that we know. Now she's a freelancer and teaches a writing class at AU. She told me about her travels. She's going to Bhutan this summer. She also knows everything about me, or did by the end of the hike. We talked for about 4 hours, desperately trying to find topics interesting enough that we wouldn't think about the pain and tedium of the hike. At times during our walk together, it was also cold and rainy, although it never rained hard. We had rain jackets, which helped a little, but we didn't want to think about the weather either. Our forced companionship sort of worked.

While walking with Rose, I noticed that my hands had inflated like balloons. They looked like the hands of a very large, very fat man. I could ease the swelling a bit by holding my hands over my head. This conformed with my dark fantasy that the walk was really the Bataan Death March with rest stops.

I told Rose about how unhappy I'd been with the food on my cross-country bike ride in 2005—and how much I had craved great food when I was burning 7,000 calories a day. When we got to the 48-mile rest stop, I had a cup of Lipton's instant vegetable soup in a styrofoam cup. She asked how it was. I said, "wonderful." It was hot and salty and tasted delicious. She tasted the soup and said, "That was a bit of an overstatement." I agreed that, objectively, she was right, but in the particular circumstances, it was just perfect. She immediately doubted everything else I had told her about my past. There was also fresh coffee, which was the best tasting coffee I'd ever had. I have no idea why mediocre food tasted so good on the hike, but it did.

We marched out. The sun was getting low in the sky and we still had 14 miles to go. I was actually feeling remarkably strong, but Rose was slowing down. At around mile 50, we were about to overtake some slower hikers and Rose said that she would walk with them. At this point, I decided that I just wanted to get the hike over with. I sped up. My feet were hurting and my hips aching, but there was a zen-like quality to the pain. I skipped the last rest stop. The volunteers said, "We have hot chocolate and goodies," siren-like in the dusk, but I would not be tempted. I just wanted to get the damn walk over with.

I passed many, many people in the last 12 miles. They mostly looked bedraggled and were walking much slower than I. I greeted them with a cheery, "How are you doing?", to which they'd answer with an unconvincing "fine" or just look at me with a combination of hatred and incomprehension. It reminded me of how Paul used to fly effortlessly by the weaker riders (that is to say, almost all of them) on long climbs during our cross-country ride and say "What's up?" Of course, he was young and handsome and charming, so I think he only evoked a response of "Ah, youth!" I was significantly older than many of the people I was passing, and even the old guys didn't seem happy to see me. It was kind of fun.

Around mile 59 or 60, a designated cheerleader told me what to expect ahead and really made me think that the end was near. "Go up to the bridge and cross the river." It wasn't that near. I was hallucinating bridges in the twilight. I passed under at least one real bridge which was not the final bridge. Eventually, I came to the bridge, where a volunteer with a flashlight directed me up the stairs and told me that another helpful volunteer would direct me from the other side. I felt like I was being initiated into a fraternity, and I guess I was (a fraternity of lunatics). I passed some townspeople out for an after-dinner stroll and some cheered me on. On the other side, another volunteer directed me to walk up a hill and I'd get to the community center. He did not mention it was a really long hill. The community center was in the next town—something I'd failed to notice in my pre-walk preparations. (I'd assumed that Bolivar Community Center was named after the Latin American freedom-fighter (would we call him a terrorist now?) rather than the town beyond Harpers Ferry of the same name.) Nonetheless, I kind of liked walking up the hill. It stretched calf muscles that really needed stretching. For the first time all day, I felt hot. I took off my rain jacket and my Indy hat and marched ever upward. I passed a couple of women who were looking disoriented in the street. I promised them that we were really near the end, and hoped that I was right. Eventually, Paul called out to me. He was hanging out at the car on a side street listening to the ball game and patiently waiting. (Earlier, I had underestimated my time to completion so he had been waiting for a while.) He cheered my accomplishment, in the way we cheer on people we love doing utterly irrational things. I told him that I'd pick up Raluca and Tess (an Urban Institute RA who had done the 32-mile walk) and come back to him. When I got to the community center, the volunteers also applauded me and gave me a patch to commemorate my accomplishment. There was food. The best turkey chili I had ever tasted, which I swallowed in several gulps. Some kind of soft drink, which was very cold and delicious. The food magic was at its peak. People were sitting around with dazed expressions. Some were having their feet tended to.

I finished right at 10pm, exactly 19 hours after I'd started. Raluca had finished two hours earlier—one of the first finishers of the long trek. She had a large painful blister on her foot. I expressed sympathy, and I did feel some, having suffered foot trauma myself, but secretly, I was also a little happy. She had marched through all of our training miles and never shown any signs of mortality—or age. She is 20 years younger than I am and has periodically teased me for being old. I was glad to see her come down to earth.

This also meant that I had to walk back down to get Paul and ride up with him to the parking lot. This required some convincing on the part of the volunteer/guard. Eventually, she relented when I told her one of my companions could not walk another step.

Although it was a long drive back home, I was so glad that I wasn't sleeping in Harpers Ferry (or Bolivar) like many other walkers. I really wanted to sleep in my own bed. When I got home and took my shoes off, I noticed that I'd covered about every bit of exposed flesh on my right foot. There was one big blister on my heel, but otherwise it was not that bad. The hot shower felt great and I fell asleep in about 10 seconds.

The next day, I felt great. My feet hurt a little, but I was not a cripple. I walked Beamer (our aging dachsund) and for the first time, his geezerly pace was not holding me back. I was happy to be taking baby steps. It was a beautiful spring day and I DID NOT HAVE TO WALK 62 MILES! I've started most days since the walk with that thought, followed by "Life is Good." Having survived, it was a wonderful thing to have done.

The website says that of the 97 people who started the 100K walk, 53 finished. No indication how many died or were seriously injured. They promised stats on all the finishers sometime this month. I figure I probably was in the middle of the pack of those who finished. I'm fine with that.



The walk, by the way, was to raise money for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. My neighbor, Allison, will be raising money until June 12. If she raises enough, she’ll be Woman of the Year for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. Her goal is $100,000 and she's tantalizingly close as of June 9—currently at $99,000. Your contribution could put her over the top.

To donate online, Visit www.allisonschallenge.org and click the donate button in the upper-right hand corner. That website also has more information about the challenge.

Some links

posted by Len Burman at 7:14 PM

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