Notes Along the Way- Week 14
April Is a Practice Run
I keep wanting to know how things will turn out.
Tomorrow Avery and I leave for four days in the backcountry, and I find myself doing what I always do before something that matters: reaching for certainty that isn't there. I want to know we'll both find it fun. That it won't be a suffer fest. That she'll come home carrying something she didn't have before — some felt sense of her own resilience, her own appetite for adventure, her own appreciation for nature — something she can take with her to Boston in the fall and beyond.
I want to give her that. Most parents do, I think — to give their kid experiences that help them find out who they are in authentic ways. This trip was her idea, actually. So perhaps she already knew what she was seeking.
But I can't know any of it in advance. That's the part I keep bumping into.
April is going to be a lot. Right after the Smokies, we head to Boston for her admitted students day — which will be its own particular kind of emotional weather. Then, back home: jury duty, the completion of my cancer registry courses, and a gravel race I entered as a dress rehearsal for Unbound.
Unbound is fifty-something days away.
April is probably my most important training month, and it's also the month most likely to swallow my training whole. But I've been sitting with a question that keeps reframing things for me: what if the busyness isn't in the way of preparation — what if it is the preparation?
Because here's what Unbound is actually going to ask of me, and it has less to do with my fitness than I like to admit. It's going to ask me to handle the unknowns as skillfully as I can.
At some point out there on the Flint Hills, things are going to get hard in a way I can't rehearse. The weather might turn. Something might hurt. The answer to whether it's worth continuing won't be available yet — it will only become available by continuing. Tolerating that is the whole training.
Which is exactly what I'm doing when I head into the Smokies with my daughter — hoping it's enough.
I can't know if the trip will be what I want it to be for her. I can't know if she'll feel it — that spark of feeling more deeply alive — or if it will land quietly and reveal itself to her later, or not at all in the way I imagined. I just know I want to give her the chance. So we go.
That's the whole thing, really. You don't get certainty first. You get the trail, and then you find out what's inside.
