With about a mile left in my lumber on Wednesday, I passed Mary(?) and Jim(?) coming in the opposite direction. Mary is usually the more talkative of the two when we pass, but this time, Jim said, “It’s going to be something else tomorrow!”
I was confused for a second, but then I remembered the weather forecast: a high of 16˚, windy conditions, and light snow. “Oh, yeah, I saw that! Gonna have to bundle up!”
And the weather people were not wrong.
It’s 7:20 Wednesday morning and I’m sitting in the room of our house that contains a desk, my computer, and all my camera gear1, wasting time, waiting for my lower intestines to give me the all-clear sign to exit the house for a lumber.
While doing so, I checked the weather. Ho hum, cloudy, 34˚, chance of snow flurrries, winds from 10-20 MPH; yawn, typical Michigan winter. But then I looked at tonight’s forecast; cloudy, snow showers and wind gusts up to FORTY miles per hour. Ma Nature’s kicking shit up a bit! Going to be even more trees down on Thursday.
OK, all clear, time to go.
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.
No matter where you live, people will say that the weather is psycho, except maybe in Pittsburgh, where crazy weather means going more than 24 hours WITHOUT “partly cloudy” skies (which is a nice way of saying “it’s cloudy with a chance of rain, yinz guys.”).
Last week, as I tramped over the gravel roads, my gut feeling was that the local trails wouldn’t be completely bare of slippy, packed snow until Monday. However, since I only trust my gut when it’s hungry or has to poop, I attempted to hike those trails on Friday with meh-like results.
Fast forward here, please. >>>
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.
The outside was a mess of ice, melting snow, slush, and rain on Friday, and after 15 miles of snowshoeing already completed, I was a mess of aching knees, stiff calves, sore hip flexors, and an arthritic mind. So with that, I took Friday off to bask in the glow of the dank sky and catch up on some long overdue house shit.
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.
