Rewiring my brain in middle age by walking an absurd amount
50K in 50 States by my 50th year: Personal Reflections After a Year of Lots of Walking
Over Thanksgiving week 2021 I embarked on walking the first “real” state in my 50 in 50 by 50 challenge. I picked Lincoln, NH, a ski town that I fell in love with years ago, thinking it would be an easy introduction to this mad idea. Thanksgiving 2022, we went to another ski town (Stowe, VT) and then wrapped the year up in Texas. With 18 states down — 11 this year — I’ve learned a few practical things about walking in different places, but more important I’ve learned a shocking amount about myself and a tremendous amount about my country’s history and its people (more on that in another essay).
Some stats for 2022
- 11 states visited, 5 I’d never set foot in before
- 2,438 miles logged in 2022 (not counting incidental steps around the house, which puts it closer to 2,800)
- 15,520 steps per day on average (again not counting incidentals)
- 11 pairs of shoes — 2 retired, 4 in rotation, 2 for running only, 2 for trail only, and snow boots because I live in New England.
- 74.3% of my city walked
- 348 meters — (that’s 1141 feet) biggest single day elevation gain (in Henderson NV)
- 18.46 miles — longest day of walking (in Pennsylvania)
Everything gets easier with practice. Including mad quests.
That first trek in New Hampshire taught me some important things that I did, actually, learn from. I’m a stubborn fool at the best of times so that was not a given.
Traveling anywhere is a mental game of balancing excitement about the new with the realities of the mental demands of a different place. We arrive and have a few days to figure out enough long-distance, safe places to walk in this new place — that we may never return to — while working our day jobs as if we never left home. And of course also figuring out where to eat or get groceries, how to cook in an unfamiliar kitchen, what that weird noise was….
It’s a lot. The only way to truly figure it out is to do it, and then do it again but having learned from the last time. I’ve learned so much so far, some of it pragmatic but a lot more of it personal.
Some pragmatic lessons learned
Planning ahead seems like a no-brainer, but it’s easy to think that you can walk anywhere so just show up and head out the door. For short distances, that’s absolutely the case. For longer distances, not so much. I have learned to book places that are near trails (or in the heart of a city) so I have at least one way to get 10+ miles right outside my door. I’ve spent so much time studying Google Maps I can almost instantly spot the tiny green lines that indicates a greenway, bike path, towpath, or other footpath now. And because I do have to work while I travel, I use Citystrides to guide neighborhood rambles that let me accomplish my mileage goals while getting an intimate look at wherever I’m staying.
I will never be a morning person. My body is outright hostile to activity before about 1pm and doesn’t really hit its stride till 6ish. I’m learning just how important it is to ensure I have extra daylight after work because working is how I get to travel, so work comes first no matter where I am. And I’m learning that those extra couple of weekend days make the trip and I need to just book that time if I’m going to the trouble of visiting the state.
I’ve learned that quality gear makes it easier to succeed and harder to fail. But I don’t really need all that much. A truly waterproof jacket, an inexpensive Garmin watch, an inexpensive satellite communicator for those times I’m way off road, walking shoes that work with my biomechanics, a lightweight daypack that actually fits, and wool socks. That’s really all I’ve needed.
Pleasant surprises about middle-age fitness and my attitude toward it
Aside from having a mad quest— which isn’t a competition with anybody but my brain weasels — I have no particular reason to “train” per se. The mental shift from “I am training for this race/event/whatever” to “I want to be able to walk, hike, run, and swim for the rest of my life” happened this year, and it’s taken me utterly by surprise.
Physically, I’m shocked that my body has responded so well to the slow, gradual conditioning of simply walking every single day. The commitment to walking daily has built muscles, endurance, and fitness I’ve never had before, even when I was doing sprint triathlons in my early 30s. I can easily do everything I want or need to do when we travel, whether that’s tackling a hike I’m not technically prepared for or carrying suitcases up and down stairs. I’ve been able to start running and swimming again just for the sheer joy of it. While I haven’t lost as much weight as I’d hoped this year, I’m starting to care a bit less if I ever lose these last 20 pounds as long as my resting heart rate stays in the “athletic” range and all my other stats keep looking so good.
Along with this freedom to do, physically, what I want to do when I want to do it is a completely shocking freedom from caring how fast or how far I go. I don’t know who this person is in my brain but I’m delighted they’ve moved in. They’ve evicted the younger and angrier “always harder, always faster, always further” version of me and replaced that person with the mellower “I bet I could do this well into my 70s, and I’m super excited about that possibility.”
I still record my metrics obsessively — that’s just part of who I am — but now when I review the day’s run or swim I don’t bother to compare it to the prior ones. Some days will be faster, some slower, I may have gaps where I can’t easily run or swim for weeks at a time, but as long as I keep enjoying it and don’t feel like there are any real limits on doing what I want to do, that’s all I care about anymore.
I have never felt this feeling or thought these thoughts in my 46 years on earth. I have no idea what this means but it’s amazing.
Startling — but good — changes in my mental health overall
Note: I write openly about some of the results of some traumas in my life and how I’m grappling with them in mid-life. You may want to skip the rest of this essay if that’s not stuff you can read about right now.
While I’ve known it for awhile, I’ve been able to really deeply understand over the last year or so that the way I grew up wired my body for constant hyperarousal, and what the consequences of that are. I’m always “on,” always primed for danger that, thankfully, isn’t part of my life anymore.
I’m hypervigilant at night, which can lead to significant sleep disruption, which in turn can screw up weight and moods. Being “on” all the time also just means I’m constantly pumped full of energy, and that energy has to go somewhere. Most of my life, that “somewhere” has been academic and then professional. I’ve gone through long periods of my life of sacrificing everything — especially in the physical realm— to school and work, using all that energy to power through demanding assignments, which of course combines with my poor sleep to exacerbate weight and mood problems.
This pattern also made me, at worst, an absolute horror of a nightmare to interact with and at best unpleasantly unpredictable well into my early 40s. Diverting all that energy to a better balance between mental and physical activity makes me a much better human being. I’m not yet the person I want to be but at least I can practice being something I don’t hate.
I wrote about my brainweasels when I was getting started, and it’s time to revisit them. Growing up a certain way normalizes the brainweasels’ lying voices, which enforce rules that you don’t even know are rules until you wake up one day and realise you’re following a script that makes no sense.
The rules I internalized that are still very much with me:
- Failure at socially sanctioned things (school and work, in my case) as designated by people who matter mean that you are so shameful that you will be rejected and likely punished until you redeem yourself, although all failures can always be brought up at any time in the future to be used against you.
- You must do literally anything to avoid the failing and the sanctions that come with violating #1 above because being rejected by your primary caregivers is absolutely horrible to experience.
- Your comfort and happiness is completely irrelevant, particularly if they risk violating #1 or #2 above.
- Anger is the only truth, and like any truth it has strict rules. If someone who matters is angry at you, you will always prioritize fixing it over any other activity. If you are angry at people who matter, you will quickly learn that is more correctly felt as shame and self-loathing as part your failure (see #1 and #2 above), because people who matter are never wrong. You are only allowed to be angry at people who don’t matter (people who violate any of these rules and/or are outside of the abusive situation).
- Hurt, sadness, and feeling betrayed are vulnerabilities and weaknesses that will be used against you if they are made visible. This is for your own good, because people that matter are not weak.
Until very recently, if someone was (or might possibly become) upset with me, it would often trip over the “anger from someone who matters” rules. One of the other rules people who grow up like me often internalize is that everyone matters more than we do. I would compulsively sacrifice everything else going on (including and especially anything for me, like exercise or time with friends) so that I could avert it or fix the anger. I would also fixate on the situation so that I never let it happen again, replaying it over and over in my head. This inevitably lead to a cascade of shame and self loathing, sleep disruption, short-temperedness, and lots of other nasties from all the adrenaline and terror kicking around in my system.
Forcing myself to walk away to do something else for a little while (go for a walk, run, or swim) while promising myself I would get back to the “urgent” matter afterwards, or first thing in the morning, has been transformative this year. It has helped me put the brakes on the cascade of shame and compulsive behaviors that have characterized my adult life, certainly hasn’t hurt my work at all, and most important has given me a lot of time to live in a new way of being so that I can truly feel that it isn’t a threat. I’m not somehow miraculously fixed, but this is one of those big shifts that I can feel is going to make me look back in 10 years and not recognize the person I am today.
I have known, intellectually, that how I’ve lived this last year is how I should be living — prioritizing a balance between being attentive to work because it’s important to me, but doing the things that let me step away from it and gain some perspective or just clear my head. It’s the advice that everyone spouts and it makes a lot of logical sense. But people who grew up like me often can’t act on that knowledge because we learned very powerfully that it is too dangerous to us personally to take that risk, that it could easily blow up and make everything so much worse. We learned early that it’s OK for other people, but never for us. We have to have some other thing that helps us take action. In my case, it was tricking myself into following the bad script to my advantage.
With this challenge, I committed publicly to walking a significant distance in all 50 states in just a few years without disrupting my work. This puts it into rule #1 territory — a socially sanctioned thing, and therefore something at which I must succeed. So now I must avoid failure at all costs.
To avoid failure at walking a very long way is simple — you have to walk a lot, which takes a lot of time. I “have” to walk a couple of hours a day, which means that I’m often doing that after work no matter what’s happening. Suddenly I have to choose between avoiding failure at all costs or the comfort (and yes, it is comfort) that I feel from following all the rules to avoid people being mad at me. Comfort is irrelevant, avoiding failure always wins. Living the contradiction in the rules, living in their weak spot, lets me experience the feelings needed to unravel them in ways that simply knowing about them never could.
This is a big journey and I don’t know where it’s going, and frankly it wasn’t what I intended. Being on the road so much and being so physically active has opened doors in my brain and emotions I never could have predicted.
I’m privileged to have the time, means, and work conditions where I can pursue this particular goal, and recognize that many are not in the same situation. The main thing I’m taking away from my journey so far is that no matter what, it takes time, patience, commitment, support from people around you, and an awareness of the unspoken rules still governing your life to start to get out from under the weight of the past. Be gentle with yourself on that path, forgive yourself if you can for being unable to act on the things your adult brain knows because your conditioning is standing in your way, and know you’re not alone.
I have set myself a goal of completing at least 50Km in all 50 states by the time I’m 50. To acknowledge that I’m traveling on land that was stolen from others, I am donating $500 to the First Nations Development Institute for each state I complete.
Thank you for reading and supporting me on this journey. If you’re able to chip in — for your state, or for all 50 states — you’ll help me double the impact I’m able to make on my own.
