Wrong Shoes, Right Body
What I trained for wasn't the race. It was this.
I had miles of uphill trail between me and the car, I was wearing my hiking boots and jeans, and my family was waiting at the bottom with no food and no energy left to climb. I had gotten us into this. I was going to get us out.
“Give me the keys,” I told Brent. “I’ll run back up and get the car.”
He looked at me the way he sometimes does — the look that asks whether I’ve actually thought this through or whether I’m just moving fast enough that thinking feels optional. “It’s over four miles? Are you sure?”
I studied the map on his phone, added up the trail segments, and felt a flicker of doubt when I confirmed he was right. Then I let it go. I was decided. This was what was happening.
“That’s ok. I’ll jog slow. It’ll be my long run for the week.”
I turned and trotted away, feeling the weight of the water bottle in my hand, aware of the bra that was decidedly not a sports bra, and grateful — genuinely, specifically grateful — that my body was ready for this. That I had made it ready. That all those early mornings and long Saturday runs and months of showing up when showing up felt optional had quietly accumulated into this: the capacity to do something hard when hard became necessary.
I always say I train so I can drop into a grand adventure at any time. Here was the grand adventure.
The day had started the way the best days do — with a good omen. Sun on the Oregon Coast is never guaranteed and always feels like a gift. When we turned onto Cummins Peak Road at Cape Perpetua and began winding up 500 feet of switchbacks along the cliff’s edge, the sky was wide open and brilliant, the Sitka spruce and western hemlock rippling down the mountainside below us in every shade of green. My spirits were high. They usually are when I get my family onto a trail. The resistance that precedes the trailhead always gives way to something better once we’re actually moving through the trees.
We entered the Cook’s Ridge Trail from the East Trailhead at the top and headed downhill, and within minutes the forest had done what forests do — it quieted us. Brent found a walking stick of unknown origin and claimed it as his own. Wyatt ran ahead. Poppy spun as she walked, leaning back to take in the full cathedral height of the trees overhead. I reached out to part a curtain of cedar branches as we passed and felt something in my chest loosen that I hadn’t noticed was tight.
At the trail junction, Brent wanted the straightaway. I wanted the longer, snaking Gwynn Creek route — more miles, more forest, more of everything. I made my case and he acquiesced, and it turned out to be the right call. The Gwynn Creek Trail was the kind of trail that makes you stop talking without deciding to. Ancient old-growth Sitka spruce and western hemlock, some of them 300 to 500 years old, lined the path in a silence so complete that our footsteps were absorbed by it. The four of us moved through that forest like we were guests in something sacred — which we were.
I fell to the back of the group and stayed there, watching. Brent called out every fungi variety he spotted. Wyatt, for his father’s sake, did the same. Poppy shared fragments of the story she’s been writing, her voice drifting back to me between the trees. I took mental videos of all of it — the kids slipping between mossy trunks, Wyatt shimmying out onto a collapsed log that bridged a gap in the trail, light falling through the canopy in long shafts that made everything look like a painting of itself.
I also took real photos, which is its own complicated act. There’s a particular foolishness in holding up a phone to a 400-year-old tree, knowing that whatever you capture will be a flat, two-dimensional shadow of the actual thing — no cedar scent, no creek sound, no cold air on your face. And yet I kept doing it. I needed the bread crumbs. Someday these moments will go foggy at the edges and I’ll want a way back in — something to pause over long enough to remember not just what it looked like but what it felt like to be there, together, on that particular Tuesday in March when the sun showed up and we followed it into the forest.
By the time we reached the bottom of the Gwynn Creek Trail and connected with the Discovery Trail, we had covered 5.77 miles. The family was done. No one said so — there was no complaining, which is its own kind of grace with teenagers — but I could feel it in the quality of the silence. That particular focused quiet that means are we there yet without anyone having to say it.
Wyatt spotted the trail sign first. One mile to the Visitor Center. And our car was 4.25 miles past that, all uphill, back the way we’d come.
I did the math. I considered the options. And then I made the call.
What I didn’t say to Brent, standing there at the bottom of the trail in my hiking boots and jeans, was how much I was looking forward to it. Not in a punishing way — not in the way that confuses suffering with virtue — but in the way that comes from knowing your body has something in reserve and wanting to use it. I had been training for a half marathon. My long runs were sitting ten to eleven miles. I was not undertrained for a four-mile uphill jog through a coastal old-growth forest. I was, for perhaps the first time in exactly this kind of moment, prepared.
I set off slowly, letting my heart rate spike and then settle, finding a cadence I could hold for a long stretch. I hear Wyatt shout “I love you,” as I jogged away. My legs felt heavy. I spent the first few minutes enumerating my failures. Then I let those go too. The trail was steep and the boots were wrong for running and none of that mattered. I passed a fallen log and stopped once to lay across it, looking up through the canopy the way Poppy had done at the start, before moving on. Near the top I passed a man coming down — the only other person we’d seen all day on the Gwynn Creek Trail.
We exchanged a few words and he told me he used to love trail running. Can’t do it anymore. He said it without bitterness, just as a fact, the way people state facts they’ve made their peace with. I thought about that for the rest of the climb. About how the body’s capacity to do hard things is not permanent, not guaranteed, not something you can defer tending until later and expect to find waiting for you. About how the window for this — for dropping into a grand adventure, for running uphill through a forest to save your family from your own enthusiastic miscalculation — is open now, and will not always be.
I glanced at my watch when the car came into sight: 2:24 PM. Just under an hour and a half after leaving the family at the bottom. With a last burst of energy I picked up my pace, reaching out to tag the car like bursting across the finish line. I dropped my water bottle at my feet and stood taking in my surroundings, noticing that only the trees bore witness to my feat. I folded forward at my hips, dangling my arms and let myself hang there, gently swaying as my lower back released the tension that got me uphill. I climbed behind the wheel, feeling euphoric and hungry enough to hallucinate a halibut sandwich. The car grumbled to life as I started the engine. With the windows down and my elbow resting on the door, I retraced our drive down the windy road overlooking the steep ravine I had just jogged up. A wave of gratitude washed over me. I had done it. The hard part was over. My feet ached a bit and my cheeks glowed red from my inner fire, but I was feeling great all considered.
When I pulled up to the Visitor Center and gave the horn a couple of friendly honks, Brent climbed into the passenger seat and looked at me with a mix of curiosity and gratitude.
“Good work. Everything ok?”
“All good,” I said. “The stretch we did together was the crown jewel. I’m so glad we hiked that part together.”
“Me too.”
I pulled out onto the coast highway, pointed us toward town and lunch, and felt the particular satisfaction of a body that had been asked to do something real and had answered. Not perfectly — wrong shoes, wrong bra, no snacks, a map I should have read more carefully. But ready. Capable. Present for the adventure when it arrived.
That’s why I train. Not for the race. Not for the number on the scale or the metric on the app. For this. For the moment when the situation calls for something extra and I have it to give.
For the days when the trail is longer than I planned and my family is waiting and the only way through is to run.
The Now Years publishes every week. If this resonates, share it with a woman in your life who is ready to start living on her own terms. Don’t keep it to yourself.
Love this, Katie! What a beautiful reflection on the amazing things our body lets us do. And, a very thoughtful way to start the day. Thank you!