Recent words by Jocelyn (Unhinged Hiker)
Five thousand miles, just over 8,000 kilometers, is a difficult distance to comprehend.
I understand a mile. I understand twenty miles, and after the last seven months, I have a pretty intimate understanding of what thirty miles feels like. I know the particular exhaustion of reaching the end of a marathon-distance day, setting up my tent, eating whatever food I can convince myself to eat, and knowing that when I wake up I am going to pack everything away and do essentially the same thing again. And again, and again.
Five thousand miles feels different. It’s too large to hold in my head all at once.
Somewhere in all of these miles, walking became the most ordinary part of my life. I wake up, pack everything I need into my backpack, and start moving. A marathon is no longer an event. It’s sometimes just Tuesday.
What I didn’t fully understand when I started was how different it would feel to do this for more than six months.
There is the exhaustion of a long day, and then there is the exhaustion of a long year.
The first kind is easy to understand. Your feet hurt, your legs are heavy, you’re hungry, and you want to sleep. Usually you wake up feeling somewhat restored.
The second kind is harder to describe because there isn’t necessarily just one thing wrong. It’s the accumulation of everything that came before and never fully healed.
A thirty-mile day doesn’t exist by itself anymore. It sits on top of yesterday’s miles, last week’s miles, and the thousands of miles my body has already carried me through. A bad night of sleep matters more after months of sleeping outside. A day when I don’t eat enough matters more when I have been fighting being in a calorie deficit for months.
The “diagnosis” of the year is compound exhaustion. The realization that at some point, your body stops resetting completely overnight.
I noticed it gradually. My legs felt heavier in the mornings. My appetite became unpredictable. Sleep no longer guaranteed that I would wake up rested. Some mornings, I would sit in my tent, look at my shoes, and feel exhausted by what putting them on represented.
Not because I couldn’t walk another marathon.
Because I knew I could.
And I knew that after I did, there would be another day waiting for me.
That realization has probably been one of the strangest psychological parts of long-distance hiking at this scale. Eventually the question stops being whether you are capable of doing something difficult. You have accumulated thousands of miles of evidence that you are.
The question becomes how long you can continue asking your body to do it. Over the last several weeks, mine has forced me to take that question more seriously.
First came a corneal abrasion, an almost comical reminder that there are still body parts available to injure that have nothing to do with my feet.
Then I began experiencing blacking out and near-fainting spells. Sometimes I would crouch beside a water source to filter water, stand up, and feel the world begin to disappear. Sometimes it happened after stopping to eat. Occasionally I would be walking and feel lightheaded enough that I knew I needed to sit down.
At first, I tried to explain each episode individually. I needed more water. I needed electrolytes. I hadn’t eaten enough. I stood up too quickly. I was tired.
All of those explanations seemed plausible because all of those things are normal problems when you’re thru-hiking.
Eventually, though, there were enough episodes that guessing stopped feeling responsible. So for a little while, Project Perseverance included doctor’s offices, bloodwork, and an EKG.
Thankfully, nothing alarming showed up in those tests. That was reassuring, but it didn’t change the larger reality that my body was struggling with something, even if there wasn’t a neat answer explaining why.
I think earlier in this project I might have interpreted that differently.
When you attach a word like “perseverance” to something, it is easy to convince yourself that perseverance means continuing at all costs. Keep walking. Push harder. Don’t complain. Don’t quit.
Some stubbornness is certainly required to get this far. Motivation alone is wildly unreliable. There are days when the weather is terrible, your feet hurt, you’re bored with your food, you’re irritated by everything, and there is no inspirational revelation waiting around the next switchback. Yet, you keep walking because walking is how you get where you’re going.
But 5,000 miles has started teaching me the limits of that philosophy.
If the goal were to make myself suffer, this would be easy. I have gotten remarkably good at being uncomfortable.
The harder challenge is making this sustainable.
Project Perseverance doesn’t end here. I am halfway through a 10,000-mile journey for Complex PTSD awareness, and for the first time I am having to think less about what I can force myself to accomplish tomorrow and more about what allows me to be walking months from now.
That might mean fewer miles sometimes. It might mean more sleep, more food, an unexpected town day or another visit to a doctor. It might mean changing a plan I was deeply attached to.
The Pacific Crest Trail has been reinforcing that lesson lately.
I started the PCT with timelines, mileage goals, and a fairly clear picture of how I imagined the trail unfolding. Instead, I got snow in the Sierra, physical setbacks, changing timelines, and now closures that have complicated what I thought the end of this trail would look like.
For months, I pictured a very specific ending.
I’m no longer sure I will get it.
There is something almost fitting about that.
Long trails are exceptionally good at exposing the illusion that planning equals control. You can calculate mileage down to the decimal, schedule resupplies, study snowpack, and stare at FarOut until you have read every comment on every waypoint. Then the fires start, the trail closes, the body acts up, weather moves in, or something happens that wasn’t included anywhere in the planning.
You adjust.
That doesn’t erase the miles you already walked. It doesn’t make the journey unsuccessful. It simply means the path forward looks different than the one you imagined.
I have had to learn the same thing outside of hiking.
Project Perseverance exists because I wanted to use something enormous and visible to create conversations about something that is often invisible: Complex PTSD and the long, nonlinear reality of living with and healing from complex trauma.
When I began, I thought walking 10,000 miles would be a story about endurance. Halfway through, I think it is becoming a story about adaptation.
Healing isn’t particularly interested in the plans we make for it. There isn’t a clean progression where every difficult thing stays behind you once you’ve worked through it.
Progress and struggle can exist simultaneously. You can become stronger while also becoming tired. You can know yourself better and still occasionally have no idea what you’re doing. You can be proud of how far you’ve come without pretending the distance hasn’t cost you something.
Five thousand miles has cost me something.
My body is tired. Some mornings, I don’t want to get up. There are pieces of myself that feel worn down in ways I couldn’t have understood in January.
But there is another side to that accounting.
I have watched the landscape change beneath my feet from one side of the country to another. I have walked through deserts and over snow-covered passes. I’ve watched sunrises from places I never would have seen if I weren’t carrying everything I needed on my back.
Strangers have fed me, driven me, encouraged me, and reminded me that people can be extraordinarily kind. I’ve looked behind at entire mountain ranges and had the surreal realization that the only reason they are behind me is because I walked across them.
Thousands of moments are contained inside 5,000 miles that will never appear on a mileage spreadsheet.
Those are the things that make me hopeful about the second half.
I don’t know exactly what the next 5,000 miles will look like. At this point, pretending that I do would probably mean I haven’t learned very much from the first 5,000.
I know there will be more changes to the plan. There will be difficult days and incredible ones. There will probably be more moments when my body asks me to reconsider what I’m doing and how I’m doing it. Hopefully there will be fewer medical offices. There will definitely be more gas station food.
Five thousand miles ago, perseverance meant proving to myself that I could keep going.
Five thousand miles later, I think it means learning how to keep going without losing myself in the process.
I’m halfway there.
————————————————————-
About Project Perseverance:
Project Perseverance is a 10,000-mile journey raising awareness for Complex PTSD and supporting the work of The Healing and CPTSD Foundation.
Learn more about The Healing and CPTSD Foundation and sign the petition advocating for greater recognition of Complex PTSD.
You can follow Project Perseverance and Jocelyn’s journey at @unhingedhiker.
