Milestones
July 4-10th: 39 miles // 19 walking; 7 running; 13 hiking (Eagle Creek)
July 11-17th: 31.1 miles // 20 walking; 11.1 running (Forest Park & Tryon Creek); + Dance Dance on Wednesday
Milestone, The First: A 5k without thinking. I just ran it. After weeks and weeks of no running. I just started running and didn’t stop until I hit 3.1, which turned into 3.5, and my legs felt amazing, and my chest didn’t feel like it was burning itself in effigy and all of that was quite unexpected, a bigger-than-baby step for this always-only-a-sprinter, and then I turned around and did it all again the next day.
Milestone, The Second: A 13-mile hike. A Saturday morning hike was my idea, but I didn’t anticipate a thirteen-miler straight out the gate. I’ve long loved hiking, have spent countless summers exploring various destinations only reachable by foot, but it’s admittedly been awhile since my weekends were consistently characterized by endless green, my feet tackling delightfully muddy trails, my eyes taking perpetual snapshots of waterfalls. I grew up playing in the woods, traipsing trails new and old from as early as I can remember, trying to get lost for hours at a time in the dense woods surrounding Priest Lake and never quite succeeding. My dad had done too good a job teaching me how to navigate the trees. I always seemed to know where I was even when I was sure I didn’t.
Among a list of eight hikes suggested by Cayly, Eagle Creek was sitting there, batting its alluring mileage at me, wooing me with promises of challenging terrain, multiple scenic pay-offs, pools I could swim. I couldn’t remember what a thirteen-mile hike looked like, but I stopped being able to sit still when I realized that was what I wanted: I wanted to tackle the longest hike on the list, and her favorite. The one requiring a 4:00am wake-up.
I nearly bounded out of bed at 4am, so excited was I to see this trail, so eagerly anticipating perpetually sweating and laughing with Cayly as we climbed and climbed and climbed. I knew before stepping foot on the trailhead I would love this hike as much as she did. Knew following a gorgeous creek for half a day was going to be a perfect way to start a Saturday. Knew I would be taking countless pictures even while realizing none of them would be able to capture the deafening beauty of standing next to a roaring waterfall while it pours itself over a 130-foot wall of rock. I knew all of that.
What surprised me was never once did I want to stop. Never once did my body feel like it couldn’t handle the mileage. If anything, my legs were telling me they wanted to go farther, wanted to keep pushing, wanted to create a new trail from the end of the old one. The waterfall-littered hike itself was breathtaking, and Cayly and I didn’t see another soul for the first two hours, unless you count the doe and her two fawns who bounded in front of us along the trail, and who we met on our way back, standing mere feet away from us this time.
It was (and no doubt will continue to be) one of my favorite days of this entire year.
Milestone, The Third: Running without music. This happened accidentally this past weekend as I visited Tryon Creek for the first time (after yet another stellar recommendation from Cayly), and again found myself instantly captivated by the sheer beauty of the place, the unexpected quietness of the space. We already have Washington Park, Forest Park, countless coastal spots just a short distance away, and then there’s Tryon: A veritable bonanza of green resting comfortably in the middle of our otherwise bustling city. It’s almost unfair how beautiful Portland is.
It was pouring when I parked at the nature center, just as it’d been pouring most of the night and all morning, and as these trails were new to me, and because I was so smitten with the sound of the rain hitting the canopy overhead, I decided I wasn’t going to start with headphones in my ears. A mile in and I had already forgotten they existed, and there I was, thoughtlessly and merrily running the way so many do, the way my sister always has, listening to nothing but the woods telling me stories amidst my own breathing and the rhythmic turnover of my feet on the forest floor.
There’s something about rainy woods that will always be so comforting to me, as if the raindrops themselves are keeping me company, spurring me forward with their steady rhythmic drip drip dripping, my pace quick quick quickening as the trail bends and I stretch my legs as long as I can, eagerly anticipating what I can’t yet see as much as I what I still can: Lush green tumbling in, surrounding me on all sides, ferns reaching out to brush my legs with their waterlogged tendrils, branches falling over themselves to touch my head, my shoulders, narrowly missing my face as I dodge in and around and through them.
I ran four miles of rolling trails with a giddy grin on my face and by the end of it my legs were tired and all of me was soaking wet, and that giddy grin? Well it really hasn’t left my face.
(For the visual learners (myself included; holler), I’ve created a Flickr set to house all of my woods-traipsing photos, doing business as Hike The Planet! More coming soon and very soon.)