It has been two full weeks since I injured my right knee on the Eagle Rock Loop.
I’ve had some time to think about what happened, and the first thing I needed to understand was why it happened.
I was on a steep, narrow section of trail carrying a backpack that weighed about 29 pounds. Twenty-nine pounds doesn’t sound particularly heavy for backpacking. But weight behaves differently when it’s strapped to your back and you’re trying to maneuver over uneven terrain.
I turned my upper body to navigate the trail. The pack shifted with me, adding momentum and causing my upper body to rotate farther than I intended.
Normally, that’s not a big deal. Your feet move, your body adjusts, and you continue down the trail.
But my right foot doesn’t work normally.
I have drop foot.
To pivot normally on my right side, I need to shift my weight toward the front of my foot, lift my heel and allow the foot to rotate with the rest of my body. At that moment on the trail, my weight was planted on my heel. Because of the drop foot, I couldn’t lift the front of my foot normally and reposition it quickly enough.
My foot stayed planted.
My upper body, with a 29-pound pack attached to it, didn’t.
Something had to absorb that twisting force.
My knee did.
And that ended my Eagle Rock Loop attempt.
The trip back wasn’t much fun. I limped my way out, went home and started dealing with the consequences.
Two Weeks Later
The first week was about recovery.
I stopped walking. I bought a knee brace, which helped immensely, and gave the knee time to settle down.
During the second week, I still didn’t return to walking. Instead, I shifted my attention to strength training. I’ve been working my entire body, including my legs, because one lesson from Eagle Rock is very clear:
Walking farther isn’t necessarily the same thing as becoming better prepared.
I had become very focused on mileage. Five miles. Six miles. Ten miles. More steps. More weight. More distance.
Progress was something I could measure, and I liked watching those numbers climb.
But Eagle Rock exposed a weakness in my training.
I wasn’t just preparing to walk a very long way.
I was preparing to carry weight over rocks, roots, slopes, mud and uneven ground with a right leg that doesn’t function like everyone else’s.
Those are different things.
And I pushed too hard, too quickly.
It cost me.
Now Comes the Harder Part
Physically, I’m beginning to feel like I can start walking again.
No backpack. No big mileage goal. Just walking.
Strangely, that’s not the part I’m struggling with now.
I don’t want to.
The drive I had before Eagle Rock isn’t there right now.
For months, I got up early and walked. I watched the miles accumulate. I watched myself get stronger. There was a destination attached to all of it.
Then I got hurt.
I stopped.
And somewhere during those two weeks, the momentum disappeared.
I’ve spent a lot of time talking about building physical endurance for the Appalachian Trail. Maybe I haven’t spent enough time talking about the other kind.
Mental endurance.
The ability to begin again after something knocks you off course.
Because motivation is easy when you’re excited about what you’re doing.
It’s much harder when the alarm goes off and you simply don’t feel like doing it anymore.
That’s where I am.
So I Am Starting Again
Not where I left off.
That’s important.
I’m not putting 29 pounds on my back and trying to prove that Eagle Rock didn’t beat me. I’m not immediately going back to six-mile mornings. And I’m not going to punish myself for losing two weeks of progress.
I’m going to reassess the training plan.
I’m going to keep strength training.
I’m going to figure out how to better prepare my body for uneven terrain, lateral movement, balance and the unique problems created by hiking with drop foot.
And I’m going to start walking again.
Slowly.
The plan needs to change because I learned something the old plan didn’t account for.
That isn’t failure.
Refusing to change a plan after discovering that it isn’t working would be failure.
So I’ll readjust.
I’ll redefine.
I’ll replan.
And then I’ll carry on.
At least that’s the plan.
And maybe that’s why this post needed to come before the first walk.
Because The Long Walk Ahead was never supposed to be a story about someone who had everything figured out. It was supposed to be about continuing forward when circumstances tell you that forward is going to be harder than you expected.
Today, forward isn’t six miles.
It isn’t a 29-pound backpack.
It isn’t the Appalachian Trail.
Today, forward is admitting that I’ve lost some of the motivation I had two weeks ago and deciding to begin rebuilding it anyway.
You don’t always have to feel like moving forward to move forward.
Sometimes you just have to start.
Forward still counts.
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