NCT 9: STRESS

Just, like... all of Ohio.

Has this ever happened to you? Let's say you've got some minor assignment or piece of work with a flexible due date - let's say an essay, just for the sake of argument. You're chugging along, getting your work done well ahead of time, when you're unavoidably interrupted. Oh well, you think. You're basically halfway through, and it won't take much time to finish. But the next time you go to pick it up, you can't quite remember what you wanted to say, and so you take the next opportunity to be “interrupted”, since you're basically halfway done anyway. It won't take you very long to finish it, after all! You can afford to be distracted. Just for today.

And then it happens again. And again. Life gets busy and challenging, and the longer you go, the harder it is to just get the thing done - it takes more and more time to remember where you left it. And then your flexible due date has extended all the flexibility it can, and your essay is officially Late. And now, because your essay is Late, it also has to be Perfect (to make up for the Lateness). The pressure to be Perfect means you want to write it even less, and you find every excuse not to do so. You are now actively procrastinating, and you know it.

Meanwhile, your other work is piling up, and unfortunately, some of it relies on what you've said in The Late Essay to make sense, so there's really no point in trying to work on anything else until you've finished The Late Essay. But you can't finish the essay! It has to be perfect, and perfection is stressful, and you are now so behind on everything else that finishing The Late Essay will force you to emotionally confront your backlog of work, and you just can't handle that right now, okayyyyy?

And you keep on stressing yourself out and feeling badly and distracting yourself on purpose until it's the end of the semester, and you're forced to write five half-assed term papers in an overnight blitz of anxiety and caffeine, and accept a C+ grade on everything so you don't fail your whole degree.

No? Just me?

Needless to say, this is not one of the perfect, brilliant essays I've written a hundred times in my head. It's not even the rough draft of one of those, though I may post a couple of works-in-progress for premium subscribers. I'm gonna half-ass us right past meeting Dan the Trail Angel and our awesome evening with Steady. I'm half-assing it through my epic IBS attack that derailed us from reaching Zoar, which meant we got even more hospitality from Dan despite the fact that it was Father's Day and he totally didn't have to help us out. Because I'm writing this at the end of the Ohio “term” and totally okay with a C+ grade, I'm not gonna go into detail about the maddening thicket of thorns that was Clendenning Lake, an 11.5mi stretch of bushwhack hell described on the Buckeye maps as “a pleasant dayhike loop”. We're going to zip right past the shirt-drenching, skin-destroying, heartbeat-in-ears heat that dogged us all the way across Southern Ohio, and zoom over the demoralizing pointlessness of a 167-mile loop that took us the wrong direction. Let's not get into the fact that there were somehow no towns despite being almost entirely on roads, and how badly malnourished we got from the food at gas stations and Family Dollars.

The truth is, Ohio was extremely hard in a way I wasn't prepared for. While the extreme heat and humidity conspired to make the flat terrain much harder than it ought to have been, the real difficulty was mental. We'd been expecting smooth sailing through the state, thinking it was mostly rural highways and smooth asphalt bike path. It would be a bit boring maybe, but we'd be hitting town every other day, and the easy miles would let us make up time. Light packs and fast miles are their own kind of reward, and would make up for monotonous scenery. Of course, Ohio wasn't like that at all, not until the last 200 miles when we joined the Miami River bike trails. The incorrect expectations were as much to blame as the bad trail conditions, but I was miserable nonetheless.

The first 800 miles of Ohio were a slog of brutal heat, poorly maintained trail, and rugged backwoods roadwalks made dangerous by aggressive dogs. Most of it goes the wrong way - giant loops and zig-zags seemed to take us every direction but westbound, and the repetitive rhythm of bad trail/hot road all day, every day, made it feel like we were making no progress at all. To make matters worse, Constantine and I took turns getting sick during our first week in Ohio, which absolutely killed our momentum and made the state seem even more endless. Unplanned zeroes for injury or minor illness are just something that happens on trail, but the timing could not have been worse; we were derailed three seperate times in the first two weeks, first because of his waterborne illness, then because of my IBS, and then because of heat exhaustion that put us both in danger. It was a rough introduction to a rough section of trail, and I spent the rest of the state anxiously re-calculating our averages and castigating myself over every rest day and every break. It was an obsessive, unhealthy habit, and I convinced myself that we were hopelessly behind schedule and would never be able to finish the trail. Some days weren't that bad of course - you can't be miserable every moment of every day - but by and large, by the time we got to town, the very last thing I wanted to do was painstakingly relive the last section. Writing my usual detailed essays is a marathon effort of memory - to write vividly, I need to remember in vivid emotional detail, and all I wanted to do was forget. So I didn't write anything!

I would try to catch up on trail, writing up the day as I settled into the sleeping bag, but we were pushing hard for miles and often got to camp late. I wasn't sleeping very well, either; the sleeping pad had sprung a bunch of inexplicable holes, and with no access to larger towns, we had no way to patch it. Waking up four times a night with my butt on the cold ground meant it was hard to get up in the morning, and I fell asleep immediately every night. So no time to write there either, and as I fell more and more behind I gave up on trying. By the time we got to Milford and started walking the right direction again, my writing was over a month overdue, and I had no desire to revisit the awful trail we'd just left.

We think the sleeping pad is actually defective, and now that we can accurately forecast when we'll get to town, I'm going to email Big Agnes and try to replace it. In the meantime, I was finally able to get some Aquaseal glue in Milford, and I've been patching the seams every night as new holes appear. So far, we’re up to 18 seperate leaks, which is just ridiculous. The last week or so on trail has been everything we expected Ohio to be - just smooth, cruisey bike path interrupted by occasional towns, and we've more than made up for our slow pace in the beginning. Sitting in a motel room in Defiance, OH, it looks like we'll get to North Dakota after all. We only have two more days left in this state, and I hear that Michigan is awesome.

So that's Ohio! Not the most detailed or well-written update, I know, but done is better than perfect at this point. I might try to go back and recreate the skipped sections in detail after we're off trail, as I have a reasonable amount of drafts and notes, but for now, I'm ready to move on. I'm ready to move on from Ohio in general! So it's a clean slate for Michigan. On we go!

Yours Lazily,

Magpie