Client Spotlight: Free to Roam, and yet, Where am I now?

Jennifer and I began working together in mid-June after she felt the nudge to bring more structure and confidence into her fitness approach. Plus, she was preparing for an upcoming adventure in Europe that would include days of hiking.

After hearing about Jennifer's trip months later, I was totally in awe and inspired by her solo adventure and the perspective she carried with her. Here's her story in her words below...

~~

I had known for months that I wanted an extended solo summer escape, though I wavered on exactly where. I only knew that I wanted to hike: to walk and think and be a human in a landscape. It wasn’t until a late-spring Philadelphia heatwave that the Alps sounded like a promising respite.

I’d heard that Slovenia was a beautiful country with friendly people, alpine hikes, valleys, villages, and a lovely slice of the Adriatic coastline.

The country also has a strong culture of hiking and a deeply held sense of the "right to roam" - the belief that the land belongs to everyone, and that walking it is a welcome, shared inheritance rather than a privilege.

My travel window was from late July to mid-August, which only left a couple of months to plan and prepare. Though I was in fairly good shape, I wanted to be able to go where I wanted and as far as I wanted without the limitations of tired legs or injury.

Between my design and consulting practice and life in general, I had little time to train, and I found that I was exercising in a scattered way, making little progress and enduring one small strain after another.

With about six weeks before departure, I reached out to Jen. She immediately understood my goals – intense climbs and descents, long continuous days hiking, a loaded pack on my back. Her expertise and enthusiasm gave me confidence to dive into the training plan she built for me.

And it worked. I spent two and a half weeks hiking and walking – up steep beech-forest cliffsides, through dense conifer groves to secluded alpine lakes, into high alpine pastures, down to the valleys along the turquoise rivers, and along the Adriatic coast south into Croatia and north into Italy.

No injuries and I never had to quit a hike early or choose the easier trail. Even during the most challenging moments, I had such gratitude that I live in a body – this body – that can move and feel and connect: with the landscape, with other people, with myself.

Gratitude, too, that I could end each day thoroughly exhausted and sore and yet wake up at dawn the next morning excited to walk on.

Like many people, much of my daily life is spent considering where I need to be next – plans, meetings, errands. On vacation, that mostly falls away. But that only removes the question of where I ought to be going. It doesn’t answer the more important one: Where am I now?  

Hiking brings a clear answer: although I’m moving, I know where I am – I can feel the uneven earth beneath my feet, the slope of the path, the exertion in my muscles.

Jen has retooled my training program for fall and for new goals. As I prepare for the next long trek, this daily practice of strength and movement is a chance to return to that same question: Where am I now? What a gift.