Gene Hikes the Appalachian Trail

Tag: life

  • Hiking and Resilience

    I’m pretty sure it was Yogi Berra who said ninety percent of hiking is half mental. Don’t fact check me on that. The point he may or may not have been trying to make was that you can be as fit as possible and have your loadout as ultralight as possible, but if the space between your ears isn’t where it’s supposed to be you will struggle on your hikes. If I was Yogi I would have said a good hiker needs to be resilient.

    The best way resiliency has ever been described to me is trying to make yourself like a tennis ball. It is easy to slam a tennis ball and see the thing deform, but it always bounces back to basically its previous state. When adversity occurs it can mess with you in horrible ways, and that is okay. Resilience isn’t invincibility, resilience is the knowledge that you can survive adversity and the ability to come through on the other side.

    In the Army we did a lot of resiliency training to help withstand the difficulties of everything we’d do and be able to train our brains to cope with overcoming unexpected obstacles. In every unit you had (or were supposed to have) at least one Master Resiliency Trainer, who took a ten day course to become the subject matter expert and give the required training to Soldiers. Resiliency training was twelve modules, so once a month, and after a year you started over again with the first module. Therefore, if you were in for more than a few years you got really used to the training. In fact, the resiliency tactics you learned were valuable to handle having the same resiliency training for the sixth or seventh time. In the most recent AR 350-1, resiliency training was scraped after the service labeled it as “outdated”.

    I agree that a fair amount of the mandatory training we did was tedious and unnecessary, but a good deal of it was extremely advantageous. I was never a Master Resiliency Trainer but, as an NCO, I frequently dealt with issues where resiliency helped Soldiers tremendously. I had many fellow NCOs and junior Enlisted who told me they gained helpful insights and ways of looking at problems and opportunities because of the training they received.

    Of those twelve modules I mentioned earlier, four seemed particularly beneficial. They are delineated in Table 4 of this academic paper about how to improve resiliency education:

    • ATC
    • Avoid Thinking Traps
    • Detect Icebergs
    • Hunt The Good Stuff

    I’d like to briefly go over each of these concepts as sort of an introductory course in resiliency for hikers. Maybe the training skills you learn can help you find the inner resolve to keep going on that inevitable day when it is pouring rain and your poncho has a hole in it and you get poison ivy on your junk and ants get in your last package of Oreos.

    ATC

    ATC stands for Activating Event ↦ Thoughts ↦ Consequences. This is the model for how we get into bad mental habits that undercut our ability to handle stressors. Inopportune things happen, no amount of mental or physical training can prevent that. What leads to bad results isn’t the fact that something happened as much as the bad thoughts we have about those things. The undesired consequences are the result of negative thought processes, not of the events themselves.

    The consequences referenced in the ATC model can be binned into emotions and reactions. Emotions are the primary feelings you feel after your initial thoughts. These emotions, like anger or frustration, can also be accompanied by physical changes like sweating or feeling numb. Reactions are how you express your emotional response to the world. Do you lash out like a Karen and make things worse? Can you be self-aware and keep a cool head?

    So, the obvious question is how can you control these thoughts. That leads right into the next resiliency concept.

    Avoid Thinking Traps

    Thinking traps are the preconceived notions we apply to scenarios in our heads immediately after activating events occur. These traps lead you down the roads with bad consequences at the end. Being conscious of traps allows you to mentally sidestep them. One of these is called “mind reading”. We either expect others to be able to read our mind or try to read someone else’s mind instead of just talking to them to find out what they think. Another one I know many people deal with is “always, always, always”. It is the thinking trap that assumes bad things will happen to you no matter what, so why try and fight it. Psychologists call this one “learned helplessness”.

    The thinking trap I deal with the most is “me, me, me”. The belief that everything negative that happens to me is due to my personal failings. The hardest thing for me to do is not blame myself whenever something goes wrong. I have to aggressively remind myself that other people can sometimes fail. I’ve seen Mariano Rivera blow saves. I’ve seen Dan Marino overthrow completely open receivers. I’ve even seen Nathan MacKinnon whiff on a wide open net. Trigger warning on that link for my Canadian friends.

    Detect Icebergs

    Okay, stop me if you’e heard this one before. The thing about icebergs is that there is a large portion above the water, and there is an even bigger part of it below the water where you can’t see it. Truly mind blowing, for those of you under the age of 13.

    Kidding aside, the Detect Icebergs module is all about how your core values and beliefs can affect your actions. These core values and beliefs are embedded so deeply into your psyche that they are basically hidden away from your conscious. The way you detect them is by asking “what” questions instead of “why” questions.

    “Why” questions focus on feelings but stay on the surface level of an issue. “What” questions force us to go deeper to find the root cause. For example, if someone says something that upsets me I can ask myself “why is that upsetting”. This will lead me to defend the fact that I am upset without getting any more insight. Asking “what part of that is upsetting” compels me to critically evaluate what happened and look further within my own beliefs and values for an answer.

    Icebergs are not all bad, in and of themselves. Let’s say you have a core belief that you should save as much money as you can. That is an admirable goal, especially in today’s economy. If something goes wrong with your car, your core belief might lead you to find the cheapest, dodgiest mechanic you can find. That might cost you even more in the future. Better to recognize your iceberg, decide to spend a little more on a more competent mechanic, and get your car fixed right the first time.

    Hunt The Good Stuff

    Resilience isn’t found only in mitigating the bad. There is joy in acknowledging and celebrating the good. Sometimes the exact thing you need when times are tough is to remember when they weren’t tough. Or maybe thinking about the good things that are the reason you suffer through the bad things.

    Reflecting on good things doesn’t just feel good. Being in a good mood leads to better outcomes in physical health, relationships, and mental health. The same psychologist who coined the term “learned helplessness” wrote a book called Learned Optimism about the power of positive thinking. Hey, that would be a pretty good book title too.

    Resilience is more than just these four modules (obviously). If you are interested in more information about resilience, whether for hiking or any other reason, here are some helpful resources:

  • Finders Keepers

    I’ve been walking around outside this year far more than at any time in my life. Honestly, it feels like I’m walking aimlessly outside more than anyone has ever walked. I averaged over 11000 steps a day last month and am looking to beat that this month. With all this walking around, I have found quite a few cool items hanging out on the ground waiting to be picked up. This seems like as good a time as ever to share some of my best finds so far.

    I want to start with this food bag I found one day near North Lamar Transit Center. There is some community outreach in the area that works with homeless people and newly released felons. One thing the organization does is hand out these bags with snacks in them. I guess the people that get the help think they are too good for it or something, because I see bags like this left on the ground nearby frequently. I am never one to look a gift horse in the mouth so I happy grabbed up this one.

    The bag itself was cool to the touch when I picked it up despite this being early afternoon. That meant it must have been dropped recently. I was already hungry when I happened on the bag, so I quickly devoured the Cheez-Its, string cheese, and oranges. I gave the unopened apple juice away to some kid and brought the sunflower seeds home.

    I had never heard of Neuro mints before I found an unopened package of twelve sitting on a park bench covered in graffiti. These Sleep & Recharge mints use the power of melatonin and chamomile to help you fall asleep fast. You pop one in and suck it like a Tic Tac or a Mentos and it helps put you out in 20 minutes.

    I used one when I needed to get up crazy early one day. I popped it in and played some silly YouTube video about an ancient civilization or the science behind black holes or some such. Within ten minutes I was out. I tried it again a few weeks later when I needed to hit the sack early and it worked again. I guess I’m sold. Neuro makes more mints to promote concentration, memory, and calmness. If I find any of those on a park bench I’ll try them too.

    For those of you who do not believe in an all-knowing and benevolent God, I ask you to explain this next set of pictures.

    Alright, admittedly some context may be necessary here. At the beginning of this summer I got a fruit fly infestation in my apartment. I’m not one hundred percent certain how it happened. One must have gotten in and laid some eggs in my trash or something. Anyways, due largely to my refusal to actually clean my kitchen and take out the trash like a normal person, a few flies became a lot of flies a few days later. Those flies expanded their nascent empire from the kitchen to include the bathroom in a few more days.

    By that point I was fully invested in doing everything to end the outbreak. I was cleaning up after myself like a normie. I poured apple cider vinegar and ammonia down my drains. I maniacally tossed out any trash as soon as I created it. None of it had any lasting effect on the situation. I briefly considered throwing in with the invaders and becoming Lord of the Flies. But then I realized they didn’t need me at all. I would just be Jester of the Flies if anything.

    While I was at my most desperate was when I found this Zevo behind a dumpster. I truly believe the Lord himself left it there for me to find. The box had one electronic trap with three cartridges. I plugged it in overnight and awoke to dozens of those things dead in the trap. The tide had finally turned. Through perseverance, continued hygienic practices, and efficient use of all three Zevo cartridges I was able to lick the incursion.

    Outside of the supermarket one day I found two cans of Zoa. Zoa is the energy drink from The Rock. The Brahma Bull, The People’s Champion. The most electrifying man in sports entertainment. Normally I don’t drink this sort of stuff, but they were free so I took them home and stuck them in the fridge.

    When I drank them the next day they were pretty much exactly what I, a non-fan of these sorts of drinks, expected. The fruit punch taste was okay but was overpowered by a tinny aftertaste and that “too sweet” taste you got from artificial sweeteners. I can only complain so much because they were free, but I wouldn’t ever pay for one of these. In order to improve the product, what I think…

    … okay, I’ll shut up and move on.

    Yes I will address the elephant in the room. A lot of these treasures I discovered have been food. It makes sense that I would notice food above everything else, I am a very food motivated individual. Coming out of the library I found this collection of jerky strewn about on the ground. I rounded them up into a small pile before taking the first picture.

    I tossed these into my backpack and kind of forgot all about them. While on one of my hikes I was dying for a snack and remembered this turkey jerky existed. They were great to get me over the finish line that day and on a few hikes since. The taste was as salty as expected and spicier than expected. I enjoyed these and would even buy more with my own money in the future.

    I found this black gardening hat less than a block from my apartment. And, yes, I washed it before I put it on. Great for keeping the sun out of my face. Big, floppy brim and easily foldable to fit in my pocket.

    As useful as this hat was it wasn’t something I needed. I already had three boonie hats so I had little need for a fourth one. After rocking this thing for a couple weeks I gave it to Goodwill. And, yes, I washed it first. I like to think some little old white lady is planting petunias somewhere in greater Austin while wearing the awesome black hat she found as a bargain at the thrift store.

    This one happened just last weekend. Not long after I wrote my whole post about the twentieth anniversary of quitting smoking. If I had found three cigarettes 21 years ago I would have been overjoyed. If I had noticed that they were Marlboros, like these, I’d have done the Ray Lewis dance for a full fifteen seconds.

    What really happened is that I merely stopped and contemplated why someone would have dropped these and not gone back to pick them up, considering the price of cigarettes nowadays. Then I decided to take a couple of pictures. Then, if I’m being honest, I thought for a fleeting moment about how nice it would be to smoke one. Then I just walked away.

    Insert something profound about how the things you find actually find you.

  • Worst Fear: Bear Rape

    The Revenant won three Academy Awards, including Best Director for Alejandro Iñárritu and Best Actor for Leonardo DiCaprio. It is based on the true story of Hugh Glass and his fight to survive the American wilderness in the early nineteenth century. In what is by far the most memorable scene of this movie, Glass gets repeatedly violated by a bear in the woods.

    That was a movie after all. Do bears really want to rape people? Or is that just movie magic and suspension of disbelief? Would a bear find me attractive? That is quite a few questions to ponder. What is the word for being violated by a bear? Well, I looked it up and couldn’t get a definitive answer. I tried all sorts of search terms:

    • “bear rape man”
    • “how can bear rape man consent”
    • “jeremy allen white shirtless pics”

    I got all kinds of weird, weird things and went down all sorts of disturbing rabbit holes, but no luck on finding conclusive terminology. Also I need to clear my browser history more frequently. Seems like if I raped a bear it would be “ursophilia”, so maybe the term I’ll use is “reverse ursophilia”.

    To say that I fear reverse ursophilia somewhere in the woods of Appalachia would seem obvious. I believe every single person on the planet would choose not to experience this if given any other option. But how likely is this to happen? Are there big, burly bears along the Appalachian Trail and are they on the prowl for fresh meat? To clarify, when I talk about “burly bears” in this post, I mean the family Ursidae.

    American black bears exist along most of the Appalachian Trail. My research indicates that they are more interested in my improperly stored and disposed of food than my improperly protected orifices. You can’t put a bear canister around your bunghole, but you probably don’t need to. Safe to say that the odds of reverse ursophilia are vanishingly small. But how about a non-sexual encounter with a burly bear?

    There are very few encounters of any kind between black bears and humans each year. Fewer than one person is killed by a black bear every two years since 1900, according to sources. But an incident doesn’t need to be fatal to end in reverse ursophilia. There has been an almost 100% increase in bear incidents since last year.

    Why is that? It seems like droughts and scorching temperatures everywhere are putting pressure on the food resources bears depend upon. This pressure causes them to venture out of their comfort zones and into more contact and conflict with people. More people doing more outdoor activities in ever-decreasing wilderness spaces exacerbates the problem.

    Still, by and large, bears don’t want to have anything to do with us. Sexually or otherwise. The reason for that seems to be the old standby “they are just as scared of us as we are of them”. They must have access to my search history. As long as you don’t feed bears or poke bears, stay on designated routes, and practice meticulous litter discipline they will probably leave you all alone. But bring bear canisters and bear spray just in case.

    Being raped by a bear? Horrifying result, imperceptibly low likelihood. Having an incident with a bear? Troubling to possibly injurious result, very low likelihood if appropriate steps are taken.

    To finish up I want to revisit The Revenant and my favorite fact about it. In that movie a young Will Poulter portrays Jim Bridger. Bridger wound up becoming one of the most influential explorers in the American West. He has multiple towns and schools named in his honor. Coolest of all, in my opinion, he is immortalized along with John Calvin McCoy and Alexander Majors in a statue at Pioneer Park in Kansas City.

    Majors, McCoy, and Bridgers (L to R)

    No bears or people were harmed in the making of this blog post.

  • Happy Twentieth Birthday

    Photo by Wiktoria Skrzekotowska on Unsplash

    September 4, 2006 was twenty years ago today. I celebrate that day each year because it is the day I quit smoking. Or, more accurately, it is the most recent day I quit smoking and the first time I did not start smoking again within a few months. I treat this date as though it is another birthday because quitting smoking gave me a new lease on life. And I didn’t even need to do a credit check and put down a security deposit for this one.

    I started smoking fairly late for someone who grew up in the rural south. I never smoked in high school despite my dad smoking over a pack a day for my entire life. Some of my earliest memories of my dad are of me sitting on the floor playing with toy cars while he filled the entire room with smoke that I imagined was the cool fog my mini racers were navigating on their obstacle course that included our coffee table and the legs of his chair. I never took up smoking until late in college, but I quickly made up for lost time. Smoking is one of those things you understand is disgusting and bad for you the entire time you participate, but because it is an addictive drug you are powerless to do anything about it.

    Marlboro Reds were my cigarette of choice. I loved Reds more than baseball fans in Cincinnati. Every time I smoked a cig that wasn’t a Red, I would think of how much better a Red would be. I was able to keep my habit down at about a half pack a day for the decade or so that I smoked. I tried to quit many times. Or, to be more accurate, I actually did quit many times. I just started back up again after a few weeks or months.

    I remember when Boston outlawed smoking in bars back in 2003. I was certain that was going to be the tipping point and I could easily quit if the bars were off limits. Fast forward to me standing around in the freezing cold outside of the Druid in Inman Square taking drags and shivering my ass off.

    I kept trying to quit many other times. Being in the Army sabotaged my attempts as much as anything else. I got to the point that I could quit for the entire month, but come drill weekend I just had to get a pack to smoke in order to make it through the day. One pack to survive the weekend would become a few packs to survive the entire week of, which eventually just became me starting to smoke all over again.

    I know now that my whole problem was that I never really wanted to quit for me. I wanted to quit because cigarettes cost a lot of money. Or I wanted to quit because society told me I should quit. Those were external motivations, and they just weren’t good enough for me. I never actually wanted to try and quit purely for myself until I realized just how destructive it was for my own life.

    Ben Affleck puts it very well in an interview with Howard Stern. Here, he talks about how he was not able to quit drinking until it all but ruined his life. “The cure for addiction,” as he states, “is suffering.”

    In summer 2006 my Reserve unit went to Fort McCoy in Wisconsin for Annual Training. We were there for an exercise with many other Chemical units around the country. On the way there I bought two cartons of Reds, expecting them to last the entire two week trip and beyond. I was wrong.

    I’m not sure what was different about this AT that made me smoke so much more than usual. Yes, it was hard, but AT was always hard. There was a lot of “hurry up and wait”, but that was also nothing extraordinary. Whatever it was, all I did was smoke and smoke and smoke. In two weeks, I smoked both cartons. A carton is ten packs of cigarettes, each pack containing twenty cigarettes. And yes, I did lend lots of smokes to people, but I also bummed at least as many from others.

    Basically I smoked a pack and a half each day. An explosive increase from half a pack a day. Once I got home I knew there had to be a major change. I did not want this to be my new normal. I did not want to get cancer before 40. I did not want to have trouble climbing two flights of stairs.

    The first thing I did was set a date. I chose Labor Day because it was the end of a long weekend. I spent the weekend smoking more than normal, hoping it would cause me not to miss smoking for the first couple of days. On Labor Day itself I went to Olde Country Buffet and got a gluttinous meal of meat loaf, more meat loaf, fried chicken, red velvet cake; all the normal stuff you get at Olde Country Buffet. A few alcoholic beverages were consumed as well. I did my best to make the entire weekend feel like a bacchanalia of vices.

    For the most part it worked. I spent most of the following week just recovering from all the overindulging. Probably the hardest part was not getting three or four ten-minute smoke breaks at work. I never missed cigarettes until the next weekend. By then I could tell myself “you’ve already made it four days, keep going”.

    Because I had so much resolve this time, it continued to go smoothly. My first drill after quitting was tough, just because when I told people I quit they didn’t believe me. So they spent the whole weekend trying to shove lit cigs into my mouth. Other than that, I would occasionally see someone smoking and get an overwhelming feeling of envy. It felt like an itch on my heart. I just desperately wanted to steal that person’s cigarette and smoke it for myself. This happened every few days initially, then slowly got progressively further spaced out. Even now I still get that feeling once every 9 months or so.

    The biggest downside was weight gain. There is a reason every thin, beautiful, eastern European supermodel smokes like a chimney. I slowly put on pound after pound despite doing and eating exactly what I did before. That frustrated the shit out of me, because I was supposedly getting healthier as I watched my pants get tighter and tighter. I put on about 12 pounds before I finally got a handle on it around Thanksgiving, then I needed a few months to lose it all back.

    The second biggest downside was that I picked up spitting outdoors. Like, all the time outdoors. I had developed an oral fixation with the cue that being outside meant my mouth needed to be busy. When I stopped smoking I started spitting all the time, but only outside. It’s pretty fucking disgusting but I have no idea how to stop doing it without smoking again.

    The positives are great. I save tons of money that I used to spend on cigarettes. My health and endurance are as good as I could hope. It has truly been a complete life transformation, and that is why I treat it as a second birthday.

    Of course, having a birthday on 9/4/06 means I share a birthday with the Queen Bey herself. For my 20th birthday and her 45th, we need to have a dance party celebration!