Читать книгу Mud, Rocks, Blazes - Heather Anderson - Страница 13

ONLY IN THE WEEKS that followed—after my body had healed— did I realize how deeply I’d failed. I’d been willing to literally run myself to death, and yet I hadn’t even come close to setting a new record. I’d also failed by believing that I needed to prove something to other people. If I could accept that my PCT record was a one-time thing, a fluke, then what should it matter whether other people believed in me? Proving them wrong wasn’t worth risking my health.

I spent my birthday alone in a hotel room in Colorado where I was attending a conference. I stared at myself in the mirror, at the dreadlocks crowning my head. They had begun a smidgen more than a year ago, when I was struggling through the desert on the PCT, then whipped into tighter locks in the winds of the High Sierra. I’d separated the dreads with vicious tugs as I walked across the monotonous miles of Oregon, but they’d grown thicker as I’d grown stronger. As the invisible miles behind me piled up, my dreads were a physical reminder of the passage of time and the distance I had covered. Their creation was bound with my own rebirth.

Because of them, I’d seen the PCT every time I looked into the mirror over the last year. Every day I’d carried that trail experience with me in a visible, defining way. Yet the face looking back was still a stranger. I couldn’t do it again. I couldn’t set a second record. The PCT had been a fluke. It had been an accident.

“You’re a charlatan, Anish. You were just lucky,” I told my reflection.

I buried my face in my hands and sobbed. I was not capable of breaking a record. I was still nothing. Perhaps, as I’d learned the previous summer, I did belong in the mountains and it was ok that I was only happy there. I could accept myself for what I was, but I also needed to accept what I was not: I was not an athlete. I was not a success. I was not special. I never would be.

The tears eventually tapered off. The PCT was all I’d lived and breathed for two months in 2013, but it had haunted me every day since I drove away from Manning Park, at the end of the trail. I was called The Ghost by people who followed my hike online, but the real specter was the trail itself. I began to hack the dreads out of my hair with a small pair of scissors, a nail file, and my fingers. They figuratively held the sweat, dirt, blood, tears, and emotion of thousands of miles of the PCT. They had to go.

“I can no longer let this one thing define me.” I spoke aloud to reinforce my resolve as I pulled another severed dreadlock out of my hair and threw it into the trash can. “No matter what any magazine author may say, my other hikes, my races, my life before the summer of 2013 was notable. It mattered. Maybe not to the world, but to me. Achieving the Triple Crown by the age of twenty-five was significant. The fact that my first successful multinight backpacking trip was the AT is notable. The fact that I did it in four months, despite being overweight and out of shape the year before, was amazing. Placing fourth in my first one-hundred-mile race was notable. Completing five one-hundred-mile races in one year when I was so injured that I hardly ran between them is incredible. Those things matter to me.”

Many times I’d felt my life ended when I reached the PCT’s northern terminus at the border with Canada, that my purpose on Earth was complete. My post-hike depression had swallowed me whole when I fought to find meaning beyond my PCT FKT. Now I was certain I could not let it become the only important thing I achieved.

After my spectacular failure on the JMT, I was finally realizing that forcing myself into the spotlight again and again had not helped me cope—and neither had seeing the locks, formed through toil and perseverance, every time I looked in the mirror. The PCT record was not the only thing that mattered about Heather Anderson. It took failing at the JMT record to find the temerity to stand in a hotel room and cut away the visible remnants of the FKT.

“I am not invincible. I am not perfect. I am human. I have dreams beyond what anyone else cares about. Aspirations no one will report in a magazine or mention on their Twitter feeds.”

Two and a half hours later, I ran a disposable hotel comb through what was left of my hair for the first time in fourteen months.

“I am moving on. I have reached the terminus again, only this time I am walking away without looking back.”

I vowed that I would never again speak publicly about my 2013 PCT hike. I would trade distance hiking and running for mountaineering. And I would heal. The comb snagged on the one small dread I’d left in the back, underneath the rest of my hair. I couldn’t see it, but I would always know it was there—just like what I’d done the previous summer.