It’s almost 6pm and I’m totally fucking over it. I’m over this hike, I’m over the thigh chafe that’s forced me to hike in my thermal tights, and I’m certainly over the fact that this last climb to Chantry Flats is easily three times longer than I remembered it being.
And now, with everything that I’m over, I’ve suddenly entered into some sort of race with a dad and his crew of chubby children. “Push, push, push” he tells his brood as they miserably huff and puff their way to towards the parking lot, on what I can only assume is some sort of twisted family-bonding-bootcamp-fiesta which I do not understand. As he glances back at his winded family I can see the smugness in his eyes as they start to pull away from me. It’s a perverse sort of smugness that every female runner, hiker, cyclist, athlete of literally any persuasion has seen and instantly recognizes. It’s the smug look of a man who is deeply insecure about his masculinity, and desperately needs to demonstrate this by refusing to let you pass him.
For the male readers out there, it goes something like this. You (the lady) are running along, minding your own business when you start to overtake the runner in front of you, for the purposes of this post, we’ll call him Trent. Suddenly, upon realizing that you’re in fact, the host to lady-parts, Trent has to suddenly pick up the pace for 100 yards until he becomes fatigued and then slows down. Fuckin’ Trent. This whole charade – you approach, he accelerates, he then slows to a near walk, – will repeat itself, sometimes for miles! Trent the Insecure Runner Bro will continue to do his little insecurity dance until you either stop and let him get far enough ahead that you don’t have to deal with him, or pull the trigger and pass him like the god damn champion that you are.
I stop.
This weekend I have done enough. I have tried enough. And I do not need to prove it to anybody outside of myself. Certainly not a Trent.
In fact everything I’ve ever done outside is completely irrelevant to everybody, except me. I’ve never had to sprint for first place, I’ve never held a record, an FKT, or a first ascent. Everything I’ve ever done outdoors has likely been done before, done faster, done in better style, done with substantially less swearing – by some pro athlete, or some spectacular weekend warrior. And beyond that, my weekend long distance hiking and running pursuits are almost completely at odds with my day-job self. Very few people I interact with on a daily basis understand the what of my weekend adventures, and I’d venture to guess that almost none of them can begin to understand the why of any of this insane garbage I voluntarily – no – willingly put my body through. They say that if it doesn’t kill you, it makes you stronger. But the truth is that if it doesn’t kill you, it just makes you that much crazier the next time, and that much harder to relate to.
Most of my weekend adventures start with me sitting alone in a parking lot full of strangers, and end in roughly the same manner, except now those same strangers are giving me some crazy side-eye because I probably look vaguely homeless. Lord knows I’m certainly dirty and smelly enough to raise some concerns.
And this is exactly what awaits me as I finally, finally crest the hill into the Chantry Flats parking lot. Dude-bro-dad Trent is standing there with his miserable looking family, dozens of other clean LA locals are standing around with their small bottles of water and even smaller dogs, and a church group of Korean hikers has just loaded up and pulled out of the parking lot. And me? I don’t do anything. No one is there to congratulate me on one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. Most people don’t even want to make eye contact with the dirty sunburned woman looking for her friends car. I simply load my gear into the back of Mac’s too-nice feeling BMW and send up a silent prayer that hiker stink comes out of a leather car interior.
Because this crazy idea that started more than a year ago with a line on a map, and ended in a friends car. The idea to hike 53 miles over an entire mountain range in just two days, climbing more than 10,000 feet of vertical, descending more than 14,000 feet into the deepest and most tree-chocked canyons of the San Gabriel Wilderness, the idea to cover an entire trail from start to finish as fast as I could, just to see if I could. The idea that stopped being really fun around mile 46, became really painful around mile 48 when I was running down the trail as black flies swarmed my legs, and then became some sort of transcendent type 2 style of suffer-fest joy around mile 50. That stupid idea that I managed to wrangle one other crazy person into (hi Mac, you’re a bad ass!) might just be the highlight of 2017.
And for all of that, none of this matters. I love that in crazy made-up outdoor adventures there is no real way to win, or to succeed (beyond the obvious one: getting home safe), and because you cannot win, you also cannot really fail. Literally, nobody gives a fuck. No one is watching. Everybody is too busy gazing at their own navels to give a fuck about yours. So why not try to do something amazing, just for you?
But what do I know? I’m just some crazy girl who hikes through the wilderness.