I want to explore this subject more, but here, now, I want to quickly jot down a memory impression before it vanishes from looking at it too much.
There was a moment on the trail in which I felt myself fainting, veered off to the left, spun down on my seat to a rock of chair height that happened by great fortune to be there, felt that whoosh of grayed-out tunnel vision that precedes a blackout, dropped my head down between my knees and panted, hot, dry, eerie light bright under a thin cloud layer that did not hide the sun’s location, and I counted up until my wind came back.
I looked up and had no idea where I was or how I had gotten there.
About five miles north of highway 34 on the Pacific Crest Trail was where I was. It was one of the early long ascents up over a ridge in a desert. I found it teeming with life, geologic fascination, and startling beauty. Tough, rough landscape. Hard to move through in any direction! Either it was convoluted ground or sharp spikes on too many plants. Deadly! I loved it.
But for that moment, I was in total confusion. I gather from that that I did pass out for at least a moment. And when I came to, I had to figure out where I was. It was a creeped out terror instant! Serious! I was going, “What the fucking fuck?”
That reeling feeling of total disorientation lasted hardly more than a half-second, but I did then at that time feel like I had been dropped onto a new planet and stuck in some body that had a back story, education, languages, associates, memories, and of course, skills, and I was to take on all that on again in a flash?
That is what it felt like, crashing back into… me?
You can see why I wanted to catch that impression.
It was a fascinating experience; however, after that, I felt too tired to push hard. I knew then that something was somethingly wrong in a way dangerously new to my experience with that bit of frail meat body.
Damn thing was actually conking out and falling over on me!
It had been pretty reliable as bodies go. I thought I had many more years left with it. That revelation was also part of that waking up in a strange land. It was a sign that this run had a possibly closer terminus than previously anticipated.
So I must retrain if I am to rewrite that future, and rewriting an early demise is indeed the action I do, now, here, off the trail for a minute formulating new practices and policies to keep the endurance enduring.
Cheers!