Since I’ve been forced down to the Not So Stankment to ride the trainer while my knee heals from whatever I did to it, and have no current photos that aren’t of beer, food, or my dogs, I figured I’d show what cameras I’ve been using while hiking the 2023 Comeback Special and 2024 Lumber Through Hell Tour.
After a week off from hiking, I headed back into the woods on Thursday to finally get some miles in. Or at least that was the plan.
Well, that was sort of an odd weekend, with no hiking and no footy other than lame international friendlies, but I’ll take what I can get.
This is a big one, people. A GIANT post of ill-written word salad to make you feel better about yourself this weekend.
Well, I’m going to have to chalk this week up as a “lost week,” with only two days of hiking, and neither one of them was void of pain.
Monday’s 6-mile hike was the one that told me that I was fucked in the knee and lower back department. My back injury was brought forth from carrying Jake (The Dog), and my knee is fucked from overuse and being old.
This week started off simultaneously good and bad.
As I sit typing this dross on Sunday, I am trying to put out of my mind that earlier this week, I hammered out 3 lumbers in 3 days and got 18.5 miles in on dry trails before we got hit with a Thursday morning storm that brought 4 to 5 inches of heavy wet snow; the sort that breaks snow shovels.
I thought that January broke me on Saturday when I looked out the window, saw heaps of rain-soaked snow, and said, “fuck it, I’m ‘running’ on the treadmill.” I was wrong.
No, January would save the real breakdown for Monday morning’s hike.
Do you smell that? It smells like hyperbole.
– Me
I’m no good at this.
While you may think that I’m about to say I’m no good at this whole “life” thing, and I tend to believe I’m not, I’m actually referring to multiple days off from outdoor activities. In post-blizzard Michigan, during the longest, darkest, coldest, rope-to -the-fucking-attic month of the year.
It’s been four days since I was last in the woods, and it might as well be 4 months. While I know it’s near impossible, I feel like I’ve lost every shred of fitness I gained over the last 16+ months; my Instagram feed is set to be bombarded with ads for big and tall stores (again), and the brain that I have worked so hard to semi-salvage from a sticky web of depression and life-long self-loathing is set to go into shut-down mode and return me to the fart scented sheets of The Bed of Torment.
This is a long one, people. No reason, really; I just found myself wasting time every so often this week and writing down random shit.
6:05 AM on Christmas Morning, and I was up as usual.
No, I wasn’t waiting to gleefully rip through a giant pile of presents (although there was one with my name on that I had my eye on); I was up waiting for the freaking sun to start thinking about rising so I could squeeze in a few miles before we did the version of Christmas Morning you do when it’s just a couple and their 19-year-old son who is now thankfully way more into sleep than opening holiday presents.
Sadly, the sun wouldn’t be fully up until after 8, so that meant I had nothing to do but tend to the dogs, drink coffee, and look at the ever-declining interwebs until I had enough light for woodsy lumbering without a headlamp.
