Mud, Rocks, Blazes by Heather Anderson

Author:Heather Anderson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781680513370
Publisher: Mountaineers Books
Published: 2021-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

I checked my watch again. It still had not been a full hour since my last snack. My stomach roared.

“Fifteen more minutes,” I responded.

I tried to wipe sweat off of my face with the back of my hand, but it was too slick with its own perspiration. I pulled up the neckline of my dress and used that. It too was soaked, but I managed to squeegee some of the moisture away. The lower elevations of Connecticut were as muggy as any day I’d spent in the tropics. Little gnats swarmed my eyes and nose. Small trickles of blood oozed from where they’d bitten my hands. I polished off the last of my water. I couldn’t drink enough.

“Hi.” I was curt to the handful of people perched on rocks and logs near the stream.

They had been chatty when I’d arrived, but when I plunged into the water to fill my bottle they watched me in silence. I was too hot to care. I’d covered twenty miles in seven hours and I still had eighteen to go—plus a mile on the highway—to reach my resupply box in Kent. The store closed at six. If I maintained my pace, I would get there just in time.

Thirty-eight miles in thirteen hours. Ugh.

Once past the stream, I mixed jogging into my stride on the flatter sections of trail. The only way to make it was to move faster.

“I have to move faster,” I urged myself breathlessly.

I’d drank nearly a gallon of water and yet I had only peed twice. I thought about the day of blood in Maine. It scared me to think it might happen again. So, I kept adding salt to my food for extra electrolytes and drinking as much as I could. I tried to not think about it happening again. Instead, I thought about how I was nearly out of food, which meant my pack weighed about ten pounds. I was able to pull the straps on my backpack’s hipbelt tight and jog without it bouncing wildly. My legs pistoned faster relatively well despite their single-speed usage over the previous weeks.

“I can’t miss this box,” I told myself sternly as the trail wound up a hill.

I leaned into it, grinding upward at a decidedly uncomfortable pace. If I didn’t reach Kent tonight, I would have to camp before the highway and wait until the store opened in the morning. It would cost me even more precious hours—this time not because of an unavoidable natural obstacle, but my own inability to hightail it. I could accept the limitations of rivers more easily than I could accept the limitations of my own body.

My watch beeped. I ate a handful of dried-fruit-and-nut bites doused in salt, and swigged the electrolyte drink I’d made at my last water stop. I was woozy—whether from the heat, humidity, dehydration, or lack of calories, I had no idea. Probably some combination of all of them. I suspected, despite the tablets and salt, that I wasn’t consuming enough electrolytes.

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