The Long Way Home: A Trail Runner's Season on the PCT

I started tracking miles obsessively somewhere around Kennedy Meadows, the way you do when a number feels like the only proof a hard day meant anything. By the time I reached the High Sierra, the counting had become its own kind of exhausting — another task layered on top of the actual task of moving through some of the most demanding terrain on the trail.

What Broke the Habit

It was a pass, not a plan, that finally cured me. Forester Pass, just over 13,000 feet, snow still holding in the shaded sections in early July. I stopped checking my watch somewhere on the switchbacks up, not by choice exactly — I simply had nothing left to spend on arithmetic. What was left was just the next foot placement, and then the next one, for close to an hour.

There's a specific kind of quiet at that altitude that doesn't exist lower down. Thinner air means fewer insects, less birdsong, wind that sounds different moving through less of itself. I remember stopping at the top, not because I needed to, but because stopping felt like the only appropriate response to what the last hour had been.

I finished my section four hundred miles later with slower splits than I'd planned for and, somehow, no memory of minding. The trail didn't teach me to run faster. It taught me that the number was never really the point — the point was whatever happens to your attention when counting stops being an option.