Difficult Pursuits
It’s been almost a year and a half, yet Kenny and I can’t still shake off the euphoria and sense of accomplishment of having reached the roof of Africa at 19,341 ft amsl.
In one instant one dream comes true and many others blossom.
Night 1, the only night where Kenny wasn’t trying to sleep off an intense headache.
I don’t want to romanticize the climb. Trekking up Mt. Kilimanjaro for us was difficult, maybe almost impossible. I fared reasonably well with the altitude but Kenny did not, and seeing him struggling, so weak and tired, affected me emotionally. Even though we’d chosen the route with the highest success rate, trading longer time on the mountain for an almost guaranteed chance to reach the top, Kenny never seemed to acclimate to the thinning air, his acute mountain sickness (AMS) only worsening every morning as soon as we set foot on the trail. Each day we made it to the subsequent camp, he collapsed on his side of the tent and laid there until the next day, when the early streaks of sunlight pierced our tent walls and reminded Kenny the suffer fest would continue until he reached camp again.
On October 28th, 2017 at about 7 AM, the impossibility of the feat lifted from our shoulders and hearts as the final stretch of trail leveled out to welcome us to Uhuru Peak. “You did it, we did it”, was all I could muster between tears of joy, exhaustion, and pain. Kenny could barely talk, but he nodded his head in agreement. Without really knowing it, we did the hardest physical thing we’ve ever done in our lives.
“We did it, you did it”
The descent brought to life the inevitable question:
What’s next?
To this day, we still don’t know the answer. I had goals before 10/28/17, but as corny as it may sound, the mountain changed them. It was like discovering a whole new realm of possibilities within me.
I descended Kilimanjaro plagued with the idea of climbing higher. To become the first Puerto Rican female mountaineer (which I get it, it sounds ridiculous, but I have to say it). I gave it a few months thinking I was just living off the high of oxygen depletion, yet the idea stuck. Because of where I live, my profession, and my limited days off, I can’t pursue it as I’d like to. I don’t know when or where I’ll be able to shoot for higher ground, but as one of my all-time favorite quotes go: I will prepare and someday my chance will come. In that preparation I’ve introduced what I’ve been calling “difficult pursuits”.
Difficult pursuits is a few things. At its most basic level, it’s a list I’m developing of physically stringent day hikes in the United States. It takes into account distance, elevation gain, total altitude, terrain, and potential danger. It’s meant to be a list of challenges that will bend, but shouldn’t break a seasoned hiker, and complement his or her additional training to do more difficult things (like climbing a 20,000+ ft mountain). Last year I tested out the Grand Canyon Rim to Rim, and this year I will be re-attempting the Presi Traverse in the White Mountains after bad weather ruined my plans for a thru-hike in 2017 (although I did do a potential difficult pursuits hike in the Whites).
At a deeper level, though, difficult pursuits is about chasing the high of achieving greatness through hardship. It’s about pushing through pain, discomfort, obstacles, boredom, plateaus, endless switchbacks, to arrive at an outcome that defines your work’s purpose. Doing hard things is not a novel concept; in fact, most of the people we’ve come to admire are or were obsessed with this same idea, regardless of what they called it. Difficult pursuits is a necessary component in the human experience for whoever wishes to live a full life.
There are way too many people living their one life in comfort, shielding themselves from effort and likely failure. At times, that sounds enticing to me; after all, there’s enough stress as it is, and pushing myself to be better is the last thing I want to do. In the grand scheme of things, however, I progress in my quest to reach higher ground both figuratively and literally. I hope you choose to do so too, because a life built on pursuing difficult things is a life worth living and talking about for years to come.