Imagine this...

Imagine this... You wake up in the morning, stuff a few hundred calories into your mouth, pack up your things and head to your local gym. You decide to start your daily workout with 4 to 5 hours on the stairmaster. You don't stop climbing up that machine until you absolutely can't take it anymore. This is when you get off the stairmaster, eat a few hundred more calories and take 45 minutes to breathe. Then you jump right on the treadmill. You force yourself to maintain a pace for 3 straight hours that allows you to constantly feel your heart beating in your neck and even your finger tips. Once your three hours on the treadmill are up you immediately head back to the stairmaster for another 4 hours. Thats your daily workout. Oh, but I forgot to mention, you have to do all of this with 35 pounds on your back. If your moving, the weight is on your back.

Thats basically what thru hiking feels like every day...if not harder some days. Except we don't have a water fountain just yards away. We don't have a controlled air temperature building to do our workout in. We don't have a protein, fresh fruit smoothie bar at the entrance of the woods in the morning. Instead we get to do this workout worrying about where our next sip of water is going to come from or if the water we have on our back is enough to make it up the mountain. We have rattlesnakes and bears to watch out for.  We have to hike when its 115 or 25 degree out. We hike in the rain, the blistering sun, the wind farm winds. We walk through sand, mud, grass, through rivers and lakes, and more sand. If we get hurt, we still walk. We deal with our shoes blowing out and our tents not closing (thus sleeping with mosquitoes). We go to sleep shivering and wake up with ice on everything we own and all our drinking water is frozen solid. We put the same dirty socks on every morning. We do workout after workout without showering and at the end out our workout we don't get to go home and make a nutritious and fresh meal and curl up in our warm beds. We eat the same foods day after day and never enough of them (powerbars, Ramon, Pasta Sides, and a variety of Frito Lays products). Then we lay just an inch off the ground and wrap ourselves in a sleeping bag that smells just as badly as we do. We push ourselves to the limit; to the breaking point. Sometimes we break (stress fracture) and sometimes we don't.

And then it happens... Your walking along a ridge of a mountain and the wind blows just right. The sun starts creeping up over the the tops of the mountains and the sky turns to most amazing colors. The birds begin to chirp their morning tunes. You can hear a faint trickle of a waterfall just below. The wildlife of the mountains begin to stir and wake. The morning wind blows the scent of fresh mountain wildflowers just under your nose and your just standing there 14,000 feet high in the sky able to see for hundreds and hundreds of miles.

Its then that you realize. You realize your not an employee of some corporate business or a piss on at some retail store. Your not a student pushing through college or a kid with credit card debt. Your not fat or ugly, cold or tired. Your not sunburned or hungry. Your feet don't hurt. You don't have cracked bones or altitude sickness. Instead, all you are is ALIVE. It's that moment you understand that you would do anything. You would do absolutely anything and push yourself as hard as necessary if it meant that once more, just once more you could feel that way again.

We're not out here to look hot in a bathing suit or to prove something to anyone. We're not here so that we may or may not fit into a certain mould of person. We are out here because every so often the wind blows just right....