The psychology of a day at the beach

Permission to relax?

One of the biggest revelations Ciara and I have had about the AT is that hiking 2,200 miles is a time-consuming task. You wake up, pack your bags, walk for ten to twelve hours, set up camp, sleep, and do it all again the next day. One of our friends abandoned the trail because it was «too much of a city pace.» An unspoken urgency of people eager to pack their bags and start logging miles can permeate the air during mornings in shelters or tents. You tell yourself that you will walk once in a while and then rest when you are in the city. But then you get to town and as you resupply, shower, do laundry, and catch up on all your other real-life shenanigans, you look around and realize you’re just as exhausted as when you arrived.

Since we started, I’ve been fascinated by how people approach each day. Some are militant: they set an alarm, drink instant coffee mixed with oatmeal, and attack the trail with a ferocity unknown to humanity. They have their predetermined mileage for the set day and nothing stands in their way. Some people are much calmer. Stay in your tent long after the sun has risen, prepare breakfast, pack up at your own pace, and then continue down the trail.

As always committed, I like to think we’re somewhere in the middle. We choose a “target” tent or shelter site for the next day, usually 15 to 20 miles away, and walk toward that predetermined location. We said, «yeah, we’re going to walk 30 miles tomorrow,» and then we went 22 miles and said, «that’s good for today» (we’ve never walked thirty miles, but it felt good to say, «we’re gonna walk thirty miles»).

Being from the Northeast, I think we have some kind of underlying anxiety that makes us need to “earn” the right to relax, and that we shouldn’t relax until we’ve finished our work. “We can rest after we have walked X amount of miles,” an approach to our daily/lunch breaks that we have employed more than once. We’re not even a quarter of the way to Katahdin, so if we start dawdling and “fooling around,” we might not get there at all.

But is that what this is all about? Or should we approach each day as an individual entity? Do you just wake up, start walking and see what happens?

My friend Eric, comedian and coffee shop philosopher.introduced me to the “top-down” and “bottom-up” approaches to life. Most of society operates with a “top-down” approach. You set a goal in the future and orient yourself each subsequent day to achieve it. I want to be a CEO, so I’m going to work my way up the corporate ladder from associate to manager to executive to get there. I want to run a marathon in six months, so I’ll run this amount every week to stay in shape. I want to get to Katahdin, so I’ll divide 2,200 miles of trail between the four months I want to spend on the trail and hike the required 18.33 miles each day to get there. It is an effective strategy to achieve what you want.

But what happens when you wake up and say “I’m going to walk”? There is no other goal in mind. You know that each step takes you further along the path and that is the only thing that matters. A “bottom-up” approach.* If you accumulate enough days together, you will eventually make it to Maine, but you will also allow the serendipity and magic of the trail to shape your days in such a special and unique way.

At the crossroads of these two philosophies is where we find ourselves on Tuesday. We camped at the top of Pond Mountain and then hiked three miles to Watauga Lake Beach. We were there at 9:45am, just three miles into what was hopefully going to be an eighteen mile day. But then we are faced with the scene above. We look around and think, «Is this a beach day?» It was going to be sunny, 80 degrees, and our friend Cardinal was unloading a box of PBR from the shelter down the street, so it really looked like it was going to be a beach day.

We chose a picnic table in the shade and set up. As more of our friends came down the path, they all stopped by the table in some way. Some checked in, chatted for a while, and then moved on. Others opened a beer, took off their shirts and jumped into the water. I was interested to see what option people chose when presented with the option to continue walking or relax. There was absolutely no right or wrong decision, but the choice each person made would affect how the rest of their day, and subsequently the rest of their hike, would unfold. Some people wanted to reach Damascus and avoid the rain forecast for the following night. Some people just wanted to relax.

Every day, we are presented with a thousand similar options. To walk or relax. Every decision we make has an unforeseen ripple effect on the rest of our day and subsequently the rest of our trip to Katahdin. The AT is the ultimate «choose your own adventure.» I guess that’s why they say, «do your own hike.»

We stayed on the beach until just after 2pm, then finally succumbed to the voices in our heads urging us to keep walking. The rest of the day sucked. Wet, sweaty hikes during the hottest part of the day and hellishly difficult hikes off trail to get water. I think we covered ten miles that day, instead of the eighteen we had covered, but we appreciated those hours on the beach and endured the sweaty miles we inherited from the cold during the cooler part of the day.

If you find a bench in the forest, do you sit down?

One interesting thing a guy named Sparky told me early on was that AT is harder for him than boot camp is for the Marines. I had a hard time believing that, but when I asked him, he said, «Sure, the bootcamp is hard, but once you get through a couple of weeks, they try to train you to complete it. You can turn off your brain and just show up to training. You just go from ‘chow’ to ‘chow’ (meal to meal). Everything is predetermined and you don’t need to think about anything.» The path is exactly the opposite. Apart from where you have to go, everything else is up to you. Determining how far to go, where to stay, what to eat, when to relax, and many other variables along the way can be overwhelming. And often they are.

As for C and I, we are practicing being as flexible as possible with our plans. When we set expectations and things don’t go the way we expected (which is how most plans go here), then we’re setting ourselves up to feel upset or disappointed. Like today, we woke up in Damascus and weren’t sure if or when we were going on a hike, but here I am still in the library, so it looks like it’s going to be zero. That being said, I need to wrap this up because we have a dinner reservation at 5:30 with the rest of our friends. Presence is a practice and we will continue practicing until Maine 🙂

*I probably destroyed the “top-down” vs. “bottom-up” explanation, but I gave it an honest try.

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