Up

Where was I?

Oh, that’s right–at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. Tired, cranky, and sore. (Did I mention the sore-soreness?…that was sore?)

We “woke up” (though I’m not sure it can be properly called waking up if you haven’t slept) early and packed up our stuff. On the way up, the plan was to take the Bright Angel Trail, which is 9.8 miles and would have us surfacing at the parking lot where we had left our rental car.

One of the first features we encountered on the way up was called “Devil’s Corkscrew.” Which true to its name was like a corkscrew, carved by the Devil.

So, um, we didn’t end up taking many pictures of the hike up.

At one point embarrassingly early in the hike, my husband took my pack. And then he mentioned something about the switchbacks being relentless.

That word got stuck in my head, and I repeated it over and over with every step.

“Relentless. Relentless. Relentless.”

As soon as I caught myself doing this I knew I had to come up with another way of coping.

Power through

At first I told myself, okay this has to be over sometime. The sort of hold-your-breath-until-it’s-over approach. Otherwise known as checking out. This tends to really help at the doctor’s office and during uncomfortable meetings, but didn’t work here because all I could think about was the pain of every step. Plus there was no pretending we were anywhere near the top.

Meditation

Then I thought, instead of trying to make myself completely unconscious during this time, how about I do the opposite and treat every step as a meditation? So I started my conscious breathing, awareness of the pain, and trying to follow my thoughts. Which totally worked! (For a good three minutes.)

Rest in Motion

At one rest stop I wanted to stay longer, but my husband wanted to move on. So I said “okay, I’ll just rest while walking.” This was a cool concept. I thought okay, how do I cultivate a state of rest while hiking? It was sort of an affirmation thing, where I had to un-tense my shoulders and calm my thoughts. I thought this was brilliant and deeply philosophical, and would make the awesomest super insightful blog post…but um, that didn’t work either.

The top

Anyway, I wish I could say I learned some huge lesson, and that one of these techniques totally worked for me and I used the power of my mind to skip happily up the canyon. But really, it was rather miserable for a while there.

I guess we should take a photo before I collapse...

But at least I did it. And the best part was that we kept our sense of humor throughout the hike. (Although at 1.5 miles from the top when my pride insisted on taking back my pack so that I could finish carrying it on my own?–and thereby slowing myself down even more– I think my husband may have come thisclose to losing his good cheer.)

Edited to add:
Okay, I just thought of one thing I took away from this experience. Some perspective. The other day I was having blood drawn (normally a harrowing and painful event for me), and I looked over at the needle, and my arm, and I thought…

“Well, at least this will go faster than hiking the Grand Canyon.”