TL; DR: I’m tired and I don’t have time.
It has passed a little since my last blog. I started writing another publication, but I have not finished it yet. To be honest, I have not had free time. Through those who require a lot of time, hiking in itself and all the secondary activities that are accompanied: camps, errands, planning, socialization and rest. It can be difficult to find free hours to write.
And it is not only the moment I feel short, but energy. Even if I meet the unchanging time, I am not always in the right head space to produce prose. The CDT has been more demanding logistics and physically than expected. Through the general range it is in this way, but this particular path is especially.
When I say that he physically demands, I mean a bodily tiredness for a challenging land. And as for the requirement logistically, that has to do with how complicated and/or dirty planning in advance it is while on the walk. In my experience, the AT was a physically demanding path, but not logistically demanding. The PCT was the opposite. It is the combination/and the combination here in the CDT, and I have been tired, all of you.
Spoiler alert: I’m not leaving the way
Do not worry, this does not mean that I am renouncing my walk. Nothing of the sort. In fact, I am doubling when I focus on the walk itself. After a lot of deliberation, I have decided to give up blogs while I was on their way.
This does not mean that this walk does not blocked … eventually. I sincerely enjoyed creating all my blogs prior to the walk, from the comfort of my sofa, without a rigorous daily schedule of physical and mental demands. After I returned from the path, I would like to resume where I left it and share my outstanding aspects, the low lights and the favorite memories of the path with all of you.
My writing process
I am a quality person about quantity. I’ve been thinking about this in the last two weeks. I know in my instinct that I simply cannot walk more than 20 miles per day and produce the quality of writing to my own standards. I am a decent writer, but it really stands out in the editing phase. As long as I have that first existing draft, I can instinctively create something wonderful with something mediocre. That is my process.
But I don’t have time for many (if there are) editions here. Complete dissemination, the last two publications I made very fast in my zero days, I read skim, and published before I could guess. This was an excellent exposure therapy in the healing of my perfectionism for life, but it is not excellent for quality content. I do not say that those publications were bad, but I know they were far from my best job.
Comparison trap
For a moment there, I began to hit me. I fell into a comparison trap, knowing very well that there are many walking bloggers walking 30 miles a day and publishing daily blogs, while I could barely handle one every two weeks. I couldn’t (and I still can’t) wrap my ADHD brain around how they find time. As a neurodergent, I constantly have to remind me not to compare me with neurotypic people. My attention, productivity and consistency is inherently lower. An important way to experience ADHD is that it takes me for more time, especially mental things such as writing. It is something that I am working on while I navigate a world designed for the standards.
We suggest the trek leadership that we are aware of writing in the newspaper, maybe in the store at night. In theory, this sounds good and well until you are crawling at your sleeping bag at the end of a long day of physical effort and you can barely keep your eyes open, much less write an ingenious and eloquent blog. At least that has been my experience. The last thing I want to do at 8pm in my store is to write, unless it is unusually inspired that night.
Why don’t you write in your days free?
Uugh, I would love to be able to do that. The only problem is that there are no days off. It is in mid -August, and as a south side that Red of the Montana/Idaho border (which means that I opted not to take the Big Sky alternative that cuts around 400 miles of trails), I am beginning to worry more and more with the trio of time to cross red before winter.
The general rule is that you want to be through the San Juan in Southern Co before the first week of October. We still have everything Wyoming and Colorado to spend, and less than two and a half months to do so. We cannot afford to take many zeros (one day of zero miles, also known as a day off), and instead, they have replaced the neros (a «zero» nearby «, mileage to debate, but ours is usually 5 to 15 miles) to keep things moving forward. In a perfect world, I could take a zero once a week and use that time to work in my blogs from the picturesque and welcoming library of trail town, Latte in trail town The hand. But, unfortunately, that is not my reality.
Take hot: the days of the city are exhausting
Instead, the city time looks like this:
If we have a scheduled trip in advance, great. We know exactly when we go to the city. If not, we are doing Caketop. It could be five minutes, it could be an hour or more until we have a trip, there is no way to predict it. Once we eventually reach the city, generally food is the first order of the business. Gorging in hamburgers or BBQ or Tex-Mex or any other local delicacy. The following is typically laundry, then a shower or a shower and then laundry, any order in which they are presented. If it is a small city, we probably have to stop at the Post Office to collect our refueling boxes and any other article we ask, and send other items home. Then we will go to the grocery store/General/Service Station to complement the box with anything else we need to overcome the rest of the leg. We try to remember if we are outside the disinfectant or vitamin I (ibuprofen), but sometimes we forget and have to ration or not do or make a second trip back to the store. We are going to register in our night accommodations (generally a motel or shelter) and we will organize our replenishment and freshly washed clothes and pack our packages. Eventually we will go to another food frenzy, probably in the same restaurant where we were previously because the city only has one. At this point it is only when bedtime. Maybe at some point we squeezed in a call to the parents, we sent text messages to a friend, planning the next section, creating social networks or blog content, socializing with other hikers, but generally some or all of them remain on the way as minor priorities. The next morning, we do everything we could not do the day before for any reason and then we left as soon as we can, often late in the morning. All this happens in a window of approximately 24 hours of being in the city. If you are exhausted reading this career paragraph, think about how exhausted I am running through these cities, with all this and more in my mind and in the list of pending tasks. It is much worse if it is not a city of a street and everywhere we need to visit it extends. It is not surprising that I find me completely exhausted in the days of the city.
I began to feel more and more overwhelmed by having to do all of the above and create content for the Internet. For a second there, spiral, questioning whether blogging was even for me, but I don’t think that is the problem. I think it is the aforementioned time and energy scar. All this was using my mental health and affecting my ability to be completely present and enjoy the path, that’s why I’m here to start. That is the number one priority, so I will return to the basics. I’m going to focus on my walk and leave writing about it for later.
I have not made a final decision on how I will proceed with my Instagram publication. I can publish stories when I feel like that, that’s what worked well for me on the PCT. Or you can take a break completely until you are back at home. We will see how I feel.
Does time matter?
I was resistant to make this decision. I felt that the readers of the walk was disappointing, and not honoring my commitment to be one of their bloggers. Not only that, but for some reason I was stubbornly caught in wanting to publish in real time or in almost real time. A part of me felt that my blogs would become irrelevant or that fewer people would like to read them if they publish them after the walk instead of during. Especially if, assuming that I succeed, everyone already knows that I finished the road. Why would you mind returning and reading about that if the end is spoiled?
However, I have little or no evidence to support this. Why would time matter? Who knows, perhaps would have less competition for the publication of readers during the low season instead of when everyone else is publishing. And from a quality perspective, I know that I can give these blogs my best when I am not mentally exhausted, I have had the right time to reflect on these experiences, I can offer retrospective observations and have a damn second to edit them. In addition, I will not even have experiences worthy of a blog about which to write if I am overwhelmed and without permission while on this trip. I need to live it first, write it second.
Sign … for now
I will sign with an update in real time. We are currently just over 900 miles on our trip, and we have officially finished Montanaho or Idahontana, which prefers. Yesterday we cross the limits to the Wyoming and Yellowstone National Park!
I hope to share the rest of this trip with all of you in the future, but for now, I will walk south and assume everything.
For more content through hiking (and other miscellaneous life updates) Follow me on Instagram @keljens
