Oh, Christmas Tr(aining): A Journal on Anxiety and Preparation

I’m finding myself at Ghost Town coffee working on my iPad, which is pretty much what every day looks like after my morning training session and before running or splitboarding in the snow with my training group.  Everywhere I look there are more and more signs that Christmas is right around the corner, actually, it’s next week, but the only Winter event I can seem to think about right now doesn’t involve any gift giving or family or songs… it’s a competition, and one where the only person I’m concerned with beating is myself.

I remember this same, effervescent feeling of anxiety wriggling in my gut about this time last year as I was preparing for a weeklong training expedition in Norway.  “Have I built up my cold tolerance enough?” “What if I haven’t run enough miles?” “I’ve left my gloves hanging off my wrists.again., and now I have to slip my jacket back on..again..and take my gloves off…again….just to switch from my resting kit to my moving kit.  Why can’t I ever seem to remember to do that?” It’s amazing to me how the more I do the more things I see that I haven’t done.

In eight weeks’ time I will be flying North to the Yukon in a grueling weeklong endeavor to prove to myself that I know how to handle myself in the Arctic.  The journey is 300+ miles in a race that has reached temps below -50 more than once, and is in many ways my greatest opportunity to prove myself as an expeditioner thus far.  This is an environment that offers little forgiveness for the unprepared.  Exposed skin dies quickly out there.  Drinking water can freeze, leaving competitor’s dehydrated during the long gaps between aid stations, an unfortunate situation to be in as the body’s risk of hypothermia increases greatly the longer you go without drinking.  Equipment can freeze and shatter, fire-starting equipment can fail, and God forbid you lose control of your hands while the elements are continually trying to end you.  This is no trial by fire, it’s a trial by ice.

The dangers are very real, but that’s no reason for fear mongering.  The fact is even when I’m running my fingers over this keyboard that creeping, dark voice in my head that says I’m not doing enough is still talking.  Between the Christmas music, weekly Tuesday beers with friends, and other moments of my time where I’m not training in the mountains or in the gym, I hear him telling me all the ways I’m going to fail, and I appreciate him saying so.  The anxiety is proof that I’m taking this seriously, and it would be ludicrous to walk into such an event with the blind confidence that it will go perfectly.  Every week I spend hours in the cold, and every week I am finding little details to adjust that will make me a better expeditioner.  I’ve learned to put my jacket sleeve between my knees when I open the vents because that allows me to keep mty over gloves on, but to close the vents I need to hold the gauntlets between my forefinger and thumb.  When putting on my resting jacket or need to do something more intricate I place my overgloves against my chest so they don’t begin to freeze when I put my hands back in them.  These lessons come not with doing things wrong but with doing things inefficiently, and I think above all that is my goal for the Yukon; to be efficient and knowledgeable in all the necessary systems which keep me moving forward.  The pursuit of perfect is a fool’s errand, and while I usually seem to hold myself to the standard of the fool, I truly am beginning to learn that I can’t be a perfect athlete or run a perfect expedition.

Days before she left to attempt the woman’s speed record to the South Pole, my mentor, Wendy Searle, soothed some of my fears with just one line of support.  “I don’t expect you to do everything right.  Instead, I believe you’re strong enough to handle yourself when things go wrong.”  Would Shackleton’s crew not be one of the greatest survival stories of all time without this same belief?  Was it not in an attempt to navigate tragedy that McNish, the Endurance’s carpenter, ripped pieces of wood off a sinking ship to build and repair the lifeboats that brought those men to safety? They navigated the worst of the world, and we celebrate them not for what they did perfect but for how they persisted through everything that went wrong.

So this competition, yeah, it’s one against me.  I want to truly know if I am doing enough to make it to the South Pole next year, and I not only expect but hope that all the things I haven’t yet prepared for make themselves evident to me so I can use these next 11 months to address them.

Fear not, I am excited for Christmas, and with any luck I’ll be spending it sleeping in the snow on top of one of my favorite mountains.  The voice will keep talking.  He’ll keep telling me about how I’m unfit to represent what’s possible for Appalachians.  He’ll denounce my efforts as a conservationist and point out how my trail cleanups and time volunteering in the outdoors is less than half of the good work of the ‘real’ conservationists, and yes, sometimes he confronts me with visions of me kneeling in the snow, alone, with black, frost bitten fingers which, in dying, have robbed me of my ability to save myself, but I’m not afraid of him or his threats.  I’m too busy training to humor him, and right now I’m preoccupied with hiking through a blizzard to cut down a Christmas tree for my cabin.

He can keep talking.  I’ll keep feeling the snowflakes melt softly against my cheek.