Episode 220: The 20,000 Mile Thru-Hike

A lot of people think this whole barefoot thing, I'm gonna lean on your, yeah, this whole barefoot thing. It's fine if you're like walking around the town on the other side, maybe going for a little run or a little walk or a little hike, but maybe you can push much further than that. Don't say anything yet. We're gonna find out more about that on today's episode of the movement, the podcast for people who like to know the truth about what it takes to have a happy, healthy, strong body starting feet first.

So those things at the bottom of your legs are your foundation. We break down the propaganda, the mythology sometimes the flat out lies you've been told about what it takes to run or walk or hike or play or do whatever it is and do that enjoyably and effectively and efficiently. They're saying joy don't answer us a trick question, because if you're not having fun, you're not gonna keep it up. So do something you enjoy.

I'm Stephen Sancien from Zero Shoes and I call this the movement movement podcast because we are creating a movement, we involve you, and we're about that in a second, about natural movement, letting your body do what it's made to do, not getting in the way. And so what you can do is really simple, chatter website, www.jointhemovementmovement.com. You'll find all the previous episodes of which there are quite a few. You'll find other places you can find us on social media, you can find other places to find the podcast in general, if you don't like the way you got it now.

And you can subscribe to find out when new episodes are posted. And that's the gist of it, you know what to do. Leave a good review, give us a thumbs up on YouTube, hit the bell icon on YouTube as well, whatever else you have to do. Just look at the drill, if you want to be part of the tribe, just so strong.

I like that. I like that a lot. Bethany, do me a favor, tell people who the hell you are and what you're doing. Hi, my name is Bethany Hughes.

I've been working with Zero since what? 1943. Yeah, since before, either of our foundings. Right before the war.

So we're gonna ignore you people and we're just gonna chat. But here, no, tell them who you are part and then we're gonna have a conversation that looks like we're ignoring them. Okay, I am Bethany and Hughes. My trail name from the through-hacking community is Viget, and I am the founder and leader of the Heratacy Expedition, which was an 18,000-mile-plus expedition to connect the length of the Americas, telling the story of the land and its inhabitants.

Before we jump in, you want to explain the whole trail name thing to people? Because a lot of people are not hit town that goes. Okay, fair enough. Pretty much I found around the world any outlying community or folks who faced a lot of adversity together tend to adopt their own separate names.

I think it's the name that kind of rooted in the military guys would do that. And that was a large influence on the through-hacking community. Early on, those were the folks going out there to process through their bodies. And so then through-hacking took on that tradition as well, that we give each other names based on their characteristics.

Or I got fidgeted and thought I didn't see about myself, and this whole new community was one of the first things I noticed. You're really fidgeted. And I'm like, no, I'm not solid. And so once someone gave you that name by noticing that, did that change how you were behaving?

Did you stop or increase your fidgeting? It wasn't an immediate thing, and I definitely shaped against the name for about the first year or four towns. But I'll come. Because I was young when I did my first three-hacking in my early 20s, and for me it was now I'm grown up.

And it was a little childish name, and it didn't encapsulate how mature and fully evolved it. And my plastic Tupperware, and I stole it from my mom's kitchen. Yeah, that's about 20-something person would have. I'm so mature right now at 22.

Exactly. And then it was three towns later, and the people who had evolved into my trail family, they were all experienced through hikers. And they were sitting outside of a pub like Eatonburgers, and there was a big storm coming in over the mountains ahead of us. And I had just been having my to-do list.

I'd done my laundry. I got grocery shopping. And I was like, okay, now we eat. We leave town, right?

And they're like, you are the worst fidgeter. So finally that was my next step. I was given to me the first night before I even started hiking, and I was unpacking my bag at nighttime in a room full of through hikers trying to get ready to hike. And then I refused it, but then a month later they were like, no, you're fidget.

When the elders of the trail speak, you listen. I like it. But now it seems that you've grown into beyond it in this interesting way. Yeah.

It's been an interesting journey, and I think the thing that's really wrapping my mind up right now is just realizing that growth is not so much linear as it is cyclical. And then to have been through a cycle enough times to the first few times you cycle through something, you're like, oh, no, I'm back here. I thought I'd grown beyond this because we want it to be a linear trajectory. But then you realize you just have to come back into orbit pretty close to some of those same worries that you learn at a deeper level.

Because I think at this point, with like over 22,000 miles underneath my soles, it's disrupted me from the attachment of counting up miles as a way of counting up identity. And even in the throughhaking community, I think that throughhaking is an incredible inward journey. And also at some point you break out beyond that and you realize that there's value in any kind of way that people can find their meditative speed. So that's a great segue into this question, if I'm lucky.

So for many people, they may have heard the term throughout you, but don't really get it and don't get what the appeal is, frankly, because it just sounds especially some of the hikes, like it'll hit me in a second. I've been really bad with names lately. It makes me, not only does the fact that I can't think of one make me crazy, but when it pops into my brain out of nowhere, it really makes me question any idea about free will. Anyway, some of these things are torturous and some of them are a little more casual in between.

Can you describe just for people what and why about throughhaking? Throughhaking is an endurance sport. I think one of the loosely agreed upon concepts is any mile that's 500 miles or longer than the throughhike is, again, during definition, that are done in one single stretch or within a calendar year that you cover the length of one of these trails. And that's become somewhat codified, like in the US and Europe, and then all around the world, there's also long trails popping up, but maybe a little bit looser structures because there's more moving parts to it.

So some of the classics is a crestray, a compilation trail. Yeah, continental divide trails, the one that runs right through our home here, but like the oldest one, I think was the long trail, the early clever naming, but we have 11 national scenic trails in the US and other countries like Canada are starting to get on these ideas to create and protecting these spaces because there's this sister to it as humans find ways to ground ourselves and walking long distances as usual with the human ways that we have to experience it in order to value it. And in that, and realizing we want these corridors to walk, we're realizing animals need this too. Like the graysley bears need these and actually in creating and cultivating these trails, we're creating and cultivating wildlife corridors like the Yellowstone Yukon route.

That's interesting. And so how much of the trails are, well, as I said, how cultivated are they on a scale of not at all to you may as well be one. I think it depends on which trail you're on. I call the Colorado Trail the red carpet because it's so smooth and it's beautifully maintained and it's well loved.

And then there's other ones that are still in process and then there's other ones that the North West trail that there's still a lot that overlaps with roads, which, you know, when you go back in history, or particularly for me, you're getting to walk a link to South America and ancient income roads so well built and then they're layered over and they built highways over the top of them. And of course, you're a friend of the cow code history be buried in that way. And then you realize 500 years ago, these folks are just such good architects and going through Mexico, again, I was looking at the UNESCO maps of the white, the Ayoblamco Mesa, which is really kind of some of the oldest remnants of like humans cultivating food in the Americas like some. And I just realized that Mesa was like an old time like mall and the people, initially were walking across that same path that right now is a highway that goes over it.

So it's like we've changed, but also we haven't changed, we'll have the same needs. There's a guy in that, you know, have you ever been to a place called a chocolate in Santa May? You like it? So some of those ruins they found that were big or were pots had remnants things with cacao in it.

And so he basically he refers to himself as a chocolate historian, to which my wife said, if I know that was a major, but I'll put it in mind. So he recreated these recipes from these archaeological digs and what they found. And they're some of them are amazing. Most of them have no sugar.

That was not thing until chocolate broke back here. But like very clever things. And there's a lot of those had dominoes pizza, which was shocking for everybody. And you can get to those ruins in 30 minutes or less, or they have to keep going down that road.

So no, but that's the part I have mixed feelings when people say it's so amazing how intelligent these people were and they built these things so well, they last forever. Yes. And they have nothing else to do. So there was a lot of, there was hundreds of years of experimenting and figuring out when you didn't have television and podcasts were very low quality.

Yeah. Exactly. And it's really a shame with what's happening now, of course, with more tourism. They become more and more degraded and become more limited.

And you can only handle so much. The other part that I find interesting and you've gone through some of these is when they find like a city underneath whatever is now like, how did that much crap pile up on top of what was a city? So now an entire city is underground. It's one of those things that I never looked up as an archaeological whatever, but that just seems so crazy.

Imagine in, I was going to say, imagine at some point in the future, people have to do an archaeological dig to find New York City, but that's well planted. Yeah. So maybe that was a document in the future. No.

So that's your first to invite. It sounded impossible. I'm going to circle back to an earlier question. What is the attraction to through Hiking?

I think that there's a component of it that just one could jokingly say, like, masochism, right? And the other part of it is that there are so many comforts and so many layers of questioning around us in life today that sometimes it's easy to become separated from what is the truth of things. And I'm the kind of person who would rather feel the rocky ground beneath my feet and see what is happening in the world in an open way. And after so much when I grew up in Latin America as a kid and was raised in the communities and running around where you didn't get shoes until you were like 12 years old, we had them because we were the white kids.

But there's a kid had one shirt and that was a clothing until like middle school or higher and it changed. But then missionaries would come in and be like, oh, here's shoes for everyone. Nobody actually wanted shoes. In fact, we didn't need shoes or other things.

And there's a lot of components of that, like working in like being raised in the Christian industrial complex in that capacity, but like a child of it. So I had time like with the people who were living very close to the land and we moved back to the US and I started to feel really separated from it and going through high school or university and worked on the cattle ranch. And that was a way of I just realized I knew the one set of limbs like distinctly in the soil and that can help keep things around straight. So after college, I was running slow docs in Alaska and I heard tell of.

As one does. This one. Yeah. When the other options appearance were like, here's the state department internship we got you and I was like, Oh, I have to go somewhere with no self or no stuff.

I'm done with Glacier. But it was up there that the idea to through height came and then once I began through hiking, I found it a way to ground myself in the reality of the world around me and to be moving at a pace that felt consistent enough for things to make sense and like for me, I think that's the thing that has branched out since post her Odyssey. Because there was times on the show when I was running with my backpack on because I just wanted to get to get to 10 minutes earlier, but it's going to hurt so I may as well hurt a little bit more. But then over time, I think like with age moving through, yeah, you find that like meditative rhythm and then it links back to that bigger picture stuff.

I'm like the historical component of it. Like one of the difficulties of coming back from her Odyssey is like when I was on that expedition, it was human powered movements like the fastest one went with a bike. It was between three miles per hour and like 15 miles per hour is like a noticeable difference. Oh my God.

Then I jump into this world where I just got off of a plane coming back from Thailand and hopped into a train and then got into a car and it's so integrated into our days we can't even conceive of a life option otherwise. But I have been privileged that opportunity to live outside of that and to live at a slow travel pace for long that I can physically feel the difference. And since I see people in their lives and in their daily lives, I'm making the effort to ride their bikes to work or probably like giving time to walk places and you realize that reduces your stress because you don't have to find parking. So it's a big notion of coming back around to some of those fundamental ways and making progress and a lot of that has to do with the fluidity of it and being aware of what is around you and what is beneath you in terms of the ground until all of the lead of the other people around you especially during international lessons in question.

How much do you find? How do you find it differently if you're on trail here versus anywhere else? What's easy? I'm most of my experience walking around Europe was when I was studying at Oxford and so it was a lot of the footpaths and the toe paths and the thing that struck me the most coming from the US like my boy Scout background got my 70 compact ready for anything and then walking the bits of the Europeans who were only carrying like a small rock and like lunch and then they would stay at the Bothees every night and so I realized that those were built at a time when people were building communities within walking distance of each other and the US were so slayed out.

So I think that was like the most pronounced difference that I would say between Europe and the US. That's exactly the reason I asked is whenever I'm over there, it's amazing you just get from place to place, you can walk or bike and almost as fast as taking a car. These roads are often hundreds of years old and still doing fine or many of them are still there. The European certain parts of Europe just the general pace of life is different.

So I should imagine that when Europeans are on a trail different flavor than when Americans are on a trail different flavor than when aliens from Raja 5 or whatever it is. So that's part that I'm really interested in. So on that first through I was either the thing that kind of said oh yes to you or what was the thing that was a big surprise that you had to adapt or adjust to and really see if it fit with whatever you were thinking. That question even makes sense.

There's a lot of, it reminds me on a lot of different directions with different answers. The moment about it that said oh yes was that I had purpose and direction every single day and also within that there was space for me to go to the places that I needed to pursue personal growth. I think a lot in the modern day were how rapidly things move, access to put personal development to the side in order for professional development and the capacity that you were saying they didn't have a lot going on before televisions. So you don't have as much information input and I realize that I feel much calmer when I have a lower level of information input than when I'm trying to drive someplace and send out from that space my mind feels a lot safer and is able to process things more deeply and recognize this is what will lead to a personal experience and you get the satisfaction of completing a goal.

There's measurable as well. So it was that balance that really attracted me. I'm going to tell you where this question comes from. I was in Thailand 35 years ago.

I was in Thailand 35 days ago. I was in Thailand 35 hours. 35 years ago. And so I ended up on coast of that.

Did you ever go there? No. It was a tiny little island. And it's like typically only the locals go.

And my second day there, I'll tell a whole story. I was going to say I got really sunburned and then I had to sit under a tree. I got really sunburned because I was out swimming. And as I was ready to come in, one of the most amazingly beautiful women I've ever seen in my life comes out in the water and I'm going to stay in water.

And I'll give you the rest of the story for the fun of it. So we're swimming. I said, what's your name? She's like, yeah, and I literally had to resist from saying flock.

Yeah, I heard that. But anyway, she's a Danish woman with a bunch of Danish people. It was like, but anyway, I got massively sunburned and it had to spend the next couple of days just sitting under a palm tree because I couldn't really do anything else. And I watched my brain slow down.

And it was very interesting. Unlike anything I've ever done, like meditation courses, like whatever, it was like, but at the same time, I could sense that wasn't like I was getting less information. I was just getting different information. So it was the same processing speed in a weird way, but at the same time, a whole different pace.

It's hard to write ourselves that you're nodding your head. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's exactly the thing that we are all benefited.

We all benefit from touching in our own lives. And I actually just came and I got to do a 10 day silent meditation retreat in Thailand. That was one of the objectives of going there. And it was interesting, we weren't even talking and realizing a lot of us were trapped to do it there because it's one of the ones that like, there is no film, there is no technology, there is no connection to the outside world.

And when we can cultivate those spaces as well as have the grit and courage to step into that space, it allows us to ground in the situation that is, which I think is like set up the firm foothold for the launches that we're having to make. I see a lot of things shifting, like having been out in the woods and then coming back out in the woods, you're very aware of the climate shifting and talking to people who lived on the same mountain for generations or at least 30 years. In the US, we move around so much, but in Latin America, the same family will occupy a valley. Yeah, same house or they just, or it's there's mom's house, that's mine.

Here's like my brothers. Exactly. Like they've been watching the climate change and the extremes become more extreme and socially coming back into the larger construct. I'm seeing that same thing.

People are either gunning the engine, working their opportunities off and then they go on vacation and they just cranked, they don't even go through neutral. They just like slam on the e-brake. And I think that's one of the things that I don't think you realize how much it knocks us off kilter, how much we can bring one extreme to the other is to this moment to slow down and to experience that swing at a natural pace. Whether it's the gate of your feet when you're walking or you're running or in your life in general, it's that slow travel concept and letting it seep into your body and nobody's going to understand it unless they experience it.

Yeah. To that point, you used a word that I had to look up. Wasn't the Canadian vacation? Yeah.

After we're done, you can tell me how that was a little unclear. That's a whole other word. 35 years ago. That was a big one.

Although that was, let's say the vacation was cut short by an event and this is going to be the shortest version of the story. I ended up in Beijing on January, sorry, on June 3, 1989, and so June 4 was the kind of square measure. And I got caught in a shooting spree and held captive with six guys pointing machines. I had a long time to decide which one would have the honor of pulling the trigger and apparently they've none of it.

And I was actually literally thinking about this morning for no reason. I was thinking, if I had to do a talk about this, I'm just shocking this coming up. The fundamental experience, the most important part of the experience was after I was there with my best friend who had been living in China for about a year at that point. And we were just going to find out what had gone on the night before.

And the process got caught in the shooting spree, got captured, et cetera. And as we were leading, I had this endorphin rush. Imagine you're in the ocean, you're facing the beat and you feel the undertow pulling up behind you and you're trying to keep your balance. And then you know that there's a wave coming beyond how big and then you get slammed by this wave.

But the wave isn't slamming you. It's just filling you with bliss and relief and every positive thing you can think of. And my next thought was, wow, if this happened every day for every couple of days, for a month or something, if you're in a war situation, I don't know how you would be able to come home in any way where you'd be sane or in any way be able to tolerate someone saying, honey, fish washes broken and not want to just lose your mind and how we got up on that. But anyway, the vacation was a little less vacation even I thought.

At one point I found myself, I'm not a drinker. Two weeks later, I found myself having a lot of drink for about a week. And then I went, that's interesting. That was the end of that.

But yeah, it was pretty wacky. I think that's the difference between vacation and between travel. And that very much goes to the heart of what I have come back from horodicy with in terms of slow travel is that vacation is one of those cultivated experiences where you do bali, do patagonia. And hearing people speaking that language very much is that, okay, I've gotten it and I've gotten it and I want these experiences and I think that travel is more of you make yourself vulnerable.

And it does what I think circling back to the through hiking idea and what kind of people through hike when I first started through hiking in 2010. It's a broad generalization. But also those of us who are out there got our own stuff going on. And one way to make it to say it is we're all broken.

Many of us are like recovering from trauma. A lot of them are just coming back from military. People are dealing with PTSD, CPTSD, like the even today, like the queer community and folks like on identity journeys. And in my own personal journey is an empath.

It's been stepping away from people that I was able to be like, oh, this is who I am, not who I am in reflection to others. But in that space, if I can use the word broken, but instead of broken, those are cracks in you and curiosity is another kind of crack in you. And those are where the grit of life and other people's beliefs that get in and the new fusions grow out of it. And I think that's one of the critical parts that sometimes vacation lacks that travel affords us a chance is to be broken open and have new notions planted into our new visions.

Like when you know that you can be gunned down, I've also had like life differently. Yeah, I like to say, I don't recommend it as a personal transformation technology. It's very effective. It's one that more people than one has experienced.

Absolutely. It's part of the flip side of that, which is that when there is a war, and I'm not trying to minimize this at all, but people can't even contemplate or even entertain the idea that there's a way to survive in those situations where there's a certain kind of weird normalcy. And like when the whole tournament was happening, we just knew these are the roads you stay off of. And you stay off those roads, everything was completely normal.

Yep. And the travel versus vacation, I really love that. And because I was thinking about that the other day, in part because I'm a married person and my wife and I have different agendas about how much energy we have to spend doing various things. And I was just not be moaning, but thinking, I'm going to have to at some point, when we have time, assuming there's a first time where we have the ability to do this, say, I'm going to just take off for four or five weeks, because when I was in Asia, that was my fundamental thing is I'm going to land somewhere and then something's going to happen.

I don't need to figure it out in advance. I'll look lost. Somebody will say, can I help you? And next thing you know, I'm having dinner with this family.

And that's just less likely to happen when you're a couple, frankly. Yeah. And you traveled as a couple. How's that different than traveling solo?

Yeah. It was interesting because across Latin America, I had to most just South America with one other woman whose name was Lauren DeEun Reed. And they would, it took me several thousand miles to figure out because they'd be like, she's them. I just love that.

It took me several thousand miles to figure out. It's me thinking things all the way through. But there's a, it's them, yeah, hum the song that's like you're traveling alone. And they just kept on repeating that and I immediately went into that like white woman defiant space and then being like, obviously you don't understand what there's two of us.

And then it took one woman and she's literally being like, you have no man with you for me to acknowledge that is what they were saying. Wow. And there is that perspective and it says as two women traveling together, it was an interesting people see the risk that it presents. And also I think that many of us don't understand what a strength vulnerability is.

Yeah. And like being exposed to being able to feel the ground beneath your feet makes you respond to it differently than if you have all those like layers of like cushioning. And that's one of the things I see in through Hiking in the US is big trail families. Now these are groups of people who like travel all together and having watched how the thriaking community has changed since I started to now it's like there's much more of an industry around it's like they can call for it.

They can call for it. Uber ride to pick them up. They don't have to stick their thumb out and wonder who's gonna pick them up. You can book your rooms in advance.

So you know, you'll have a place to stay and it's I think whether traveling in a couple of traveling in a large group and any point that you become like a self sustaining unit that very much goes with our ideal of the independent strong loner and also it closes you off to a lot of those opportunities for connection. I wonder and I think about that and how that has would change for me as a now just about to be 62 year old person versus 29 year old person. Was it 29? I don't know.

27. That's 27. And the thing that I think of is the number of times where I was so out of my depth and I didn't even know it or I didn't know what to do. Actually, once it's not in my head, I was trying to leave India and I didn't know that there was an exit tax and I had spent all my money by that point and the plane that we were gonna be on was like 12 hours late, which means on Indian time, completely on time.

And probably early. And I'm just sitting there like bringing out like I don't have to get out of here and somebody realized this kid was in trouble and said here I'll take care of the exit tax. Probably not enough money for dinner come with me. And I wonder would that happen if I'm this guy now and maybe but maybe not.

And with your time, how long have you been doing this? So we started walking from which I are Argentina in 2015 and we paddle the canoe and we talked to the uptock of Canada. It was August 22nd, 2022. That's not enough necessarily for you to see the difference between how you might be treated by people as a much younger person versus wherever you are now because you're still a young person.

But and again, I may be completely making it up, but I'm very curious how would it be different be out of my own getting lost somewhere versus when I was a little kid. For the context of what I have accomplished, there are only a handful of other people who have been able to find record of having done this exhibition. George Megan, a fellow named Kargo and there's a handful of us who walks the length of South America and the majority who've done it are men who either done it alone or there was one couple who walked the or a pair who walked the length of South America and being a female. Up until right at the end of the expedition, I had thought that we were probably some of the only women who had done this and then a kind of book from a hundred years ago that mentions like during the Soper Jet movement, exactly a hundred years ago.

And it took her seven years to walk from each other. I've only found one mention of it. It's like my as I'm working on my own memoir, like this is like my side passions, like trying to track down some records of this trail mama that I have. But largely my context has been like with other men.

And I think one of the differences is a perception of risk that we present as women. I believe that we were invited in to spaces a lot more often than any more intimate spaces. Like we're welcomed into like kitchens because we weren't perceived as a threat as much as a large white guy. And also we had to have just different boundaries and caution in place.

And like our safety procedures, I think began earlier than most men would know how like people aren't doing danger in their mind. Danger starts when there's weapons in my mind, like you made a series of decisions. If you got to a point where there's weapons, a series of decisions led to that point. And as a woman like who grew up their culture, you just know how to or grow up anywhere.

I usually learn how to make those calculations earlier on in the process for safety. This is something that I don't think there's any man who says, I was going to say something that I'm going to be doing back. No man can appreciate what it's like being a woman and having to have that sort of situational awareness. And the backtracking is that when I lived in New York, I was in a couple of weird situations where I had I realized that I had gone one step too far.

I'd imagine having to have a different sound of situational awareness. But for the luck of the draw, I didn't have to develop that. The situation was I ended up in this one as a pathring arm. Maybe it's a way in the West Village where typically a lot of gay men and a bunch of kids from New Jersey came in.

This is back in the early 80s where fag bashing was a thing where a bunch of guys would come and try and beat up a bunch of gay men. And so I'm in this subway station where a bunch of guys show up at baseball pass and I look the other way and it said, get in. And I'm running towards a brick wall thinking it's a brick wall and see what happens then. And in the New York, you develop a certain kind of awareness stuff.

But it's just not the same as when I know a number of women were asked on a scale of one to 10, 10 being totally safe and one being not safe at all. How do you feel anytime you're in a parking lot? And it averaged around two. I'm going to say three.

Yeah. And no one can understand that. In traveling, I can tell you, I can tell you, I can tell you that traveling is a woman whether you're alone or not. There's a different kind of awareness.

And also I can imagine in certain circumstances, people are aware of this and want to be more protective earlier than in a way that they never would have been. Yep. And I think they're again, it's like in the situations, it's being able to ground within yourself. One of the things that I really appreciated about Heratasy and about having been a woman who had done this is that you do have those senses.

And I believe that there are, as with traveling, as with barefoot travel, there's a lot of skills and resources and understanding that we have that I think we've just forgotten that we have. Once you've been out on travel, long enough, you can smell water. And so these instincts that we counted on, I think have been wanted by all of them, like cushioning around us in our daily lives, does start to peel away as necessary. And they call this baby sense, but for me, it had been doing some work before going and grounding in my own body and just knowing like where my body different alerts are of sadness or like frustration and danger was always like a, like the baby hairs.

My baby hairs would still try to learn and having been a woman in the first world. There was, there's a lot of emphasis on being likable and being polite and giving people the benefit of the doubt and the Christian upbringing, like second chances is very important. And I really appreciated traveling with another woman in foreign countries because there wasn't that you have to justify yourself. If I was like, we're not walking down that alley, they don't have a good reason, but the baby hairs are telling me that we just didn't walk down that alley.

Being able to make those decisions earlier on to mitigate risk was important. And then circling back to the fascinating story that you shared in terms of like, as soon as we process things after the fact or there's latent blowback from it, by the time we were getting up towards Northern South America and like Central America or the machismo is, it takes on a different tenor. Yeah. I think there's more border crossings and borders are always the most dangerous part of any kind of travel.

As you've learned in India, that's always the risk is and there's always a high level of anxiety that's going to come around that. But that was where I realized all of my frustration of side stepping and smoothing my way through my chief expectations was starting to come out and it was really, I want to say ugly, but instead I was carrying out, I was getting really upset and like trying to exert my own authority and empowering situations that was not ideal because at that point we were in the middle of the Darien gap. And there's a lot of, there's a lot of large weapons in there and there's a lot of different military and there's a lot of people just trying to do their own thing and we've learned very much, you just mind your own business, like what's in your backpacks and your backpacks with in their backpacks and their backpacks but with the military, it wasn't like that. And then along the, it was along the Costa Rica and Nicaragua border, it would be something I'd been having it out with a head of this like military outpost because I just paid several, but each outpost you bought the Minnesota or basically it was a nice word, we just called it lubricating.

And I decided to dig in and carry out in that situation and then I went down by the river to sit there and calm down and one of the under guards who had been pretty sympathetic came over and I was just in my crabby headspace and then I was just like, how many people die in this jungle because there are a lot of people crossing the river and it's, they called the lung of Central America but he was like, all right, how many murders are there? And he was like, well it's not a murder if there's nobody and there's a lot of crocodiles in this river. Wow. And that was just one of those moments when you're like, when there's people debating who's gonna pull the trigger where you have that moment and you just really drop into this deeply human space.

Everything is very clear, very fair. Yeah. And then that can be doled over time but it never leaves you. No, in fact, back up to my story, just to the fun of it, the part where after trying to run away and then having weapons going behind us, which is weird thing in and of itself because I'm having weapons fired and it's like popcorn.

And so part of my brain is going, hey, that's like popcorn. Shut up. And from the time that we got captured till the time we got released, I've never been more lucid in my entire world. And everything was very clear.

I really only had two thoughts, keep John in my sight. And I want to know if I'm dying. I want to have one second where I know what popping in my head for the same thing was this Buddhist idea that your last thought determines your next rebirth. So literally I was going, hope I get a good one.

Yeah. Seriously, that was like the thought. I want to know. Hope I get a good one.

And whether I believe in that or not, that's what was popping. That's very entertaining. And then a whole bunch of jokes. Like as we're running away from the weapon from the bottom of the weapon fire, I've been thinking, God, if I get killed here, my parents are going to be so pissed.

And which I thought was good. And the next was I can't believe I got John into this because it was my idea to find out what was going on. And my next thought was for 27, 26 and a half years, I've been denying my Jewish heritage and hearing on my last thought might be killed. And there was a couple others that were very entertaining.

Okay, I'll be that as I make a big question. There's two that pop in mind. Here's the easy one. Have you watched any of the Ewan McGregor documentary or everyone called them, they needed a long way down, long way round, long way up, you're going to kick out of them because he did a long way up from Sub-Merida all the way into, I think, this morning, but our motorcycle's on electric motorcycles.

But I haven't, I imagine there's going to be some parts where you're going to go, I stop there, you might get a kick out of it. So I've grown it, they had all support crew and everything. There's still a bunch of moments that were really hairy, even for two guys on motorcycles, with a lot of protection. One hand time.

But the big question, I want to talk to be about just the adjustment period getting on the trail and then getting off the trail. Because I literally can't even imagine what that would be like. I bet that there's two journeys that would be happening simultaneously going on trail. And that the process of getting on trail, my mind, would be further along in the process by the time I was physically moving.

And then once I was on trail, it was about six weeks until your body really just breaks in and it's okay, this is just what we're doing. And then after about two months for me or so, then all of a sudden like food stops being food and it starts being a unit of energy. And I know how much I can get off, I know how many minutes based on the kind of terrain that I can get off of. When I first started thinking Snickers Bar was my like primary unit of measurement.

I could get 45 minutes on like normal terrain, 30 minutes on pushing it to rain. So my own person makers, I was pretty much like my early man. And then as I've grown, you know, as I've grown through hiking and getting to do it in other countries, you also begin to recognize food deserts. And for example, traveling across like the Bampa down in Argentina or the Altebrano and Bolivia and Peru, where you see local women feeding like tricolor corn that they grew, they're feeding that to their chickens and then they're feeding like bleached crackers to their children.

And you can even like when you go through the little stores and you pick things up, they're super light. Everything is like really light, but it's packaging. So that means it's developed. It's better and having a conversation with a quinoa farmer and her room, like the price of quinoa drops so much I can hardly afford to pay my family.

So like, why don't you just keep the quinoa and she was like, that's for selling. There's a concept called mental accounting. And that's what it is. Like the easiest way to spread mental accounting, if you were walking down the street and found a hundred dollars, the question is, would you put in your bank account and treat it as like income or would you blow it as it was free money?

And so there's the free money account and there's the regular money account. If people do it all the time in ways that seem crazy. It's like, I just bought two pairs of pants in a month ago. It's the first time I bought clothing in five years because I just don't get a shit.

There's other things where I will spend money on. Actually, my favorite mental accounting I called my wife and I said, I think I'm having an issue about money. She's wise of it. I just want some apples and three dollars a panel.

Normally I wouldn't pay anything more than two dollars a day. Something's going in my head and that was our joke. And that's been a big, well, mental accounting is something for selling. And it makes complete logical sense for them, not for you.

It's another way of seeing the world. It's logically consistent. And you've also framed really well the expansive moments. We both talked about our own personal experiences of really extreme ones.

And then there's a smaller, not a starting one, what's going on with the price of this thing. And then you're actually like the person from another culture and they have a totally different way of breeding. Like learning how to like hand money entirely under even like navigating like confusion, hierarchy, when I was going to Korea and being like, okay, there's a room for your like Western, like your Western feminism is very much a thing and you are in fact picture perfect for that. And so you need to like, but those moments are like the richest ones and you just have to realize it's gonna be in that moment.

You're not prepared to learn, but if you just put a little marker in that you can come back to even 35 years later and you can connect it to another experience that you had. And it's that red crown trail that no matter how far away our daily lives might take us from what this experience says, you can always come back to those and they'll be waiting for you once you do have time for that foreign word. It's one of the things that I find so weird about that for me personally is that Mr. Dunne is when I'm in China, I'm either on my own, where I have one experience or I'm the Western businessman and I don't do code shifting.

I treat everyone like their friend of mine, which causes all sorts of problems in certain contexts, certainly in that time. I learned it to barely to play the role and I find it very bizarre and silly and crazy, but also I recognize that's what is expected. That's what has to happen. It makes total sense.

I'm certainly not perfect at it because I find it so weird. But that's again, stepping in and trying to get out. When we were in my way, I went to India 15 years ago for friends wedding and it took us a while to recognize who we are and what we did in that same sort of way. In this example, we were staying in an area where there's very few white people and there was a couple of kids, so therefore very few beggars.

There was a couple of kids who came up and were asking for money and after the second day of this, I said to them, so look, here's the deal. I'm not going to give you any money, but if there's anything you want to do, anything that would be fun for us to all do together, I'm your guy. And they thought I was crazy until two days later and then they went, let's go. And the way we met, and it took everyone else in the traveling quite a while to get hip to the idea that we can't use our Western way of looking at things in a place where it's a whole different world view.

There are people who are literally living in some combination of cardboard boxes and that was their home. And I'm not saying it's great, but they were completely content with that's the way it works here. Your home is a thing of cardboard boxes and here's where you go for this. And it's a hard one mental shift.

Yes. Not impose your ideas on what's wrong. How to decentralize yourself from your own experience is one of them. Or lack your own.

Yeah. And the capacity learning the capacity to do that is its own thing, but particularly when you're in someone else's environment and that reality is having with your areas with like heavy gang presence or heavy military presence or a lot of that. You just learn what's your business and what's not and how to move through those spaces. And it's the richest space for personal development is letting yourself be uncomfortable and like trying out like standing in another position like, okay, fine, I am the businessman.

Like for me, I love so much the through hiker that like the grungy, oh, I haven't showered, then you go out into the sample and you like meet the idea of something out just like they're out there at five a.m. and freezing cold water, cleaning themselves and bathing. You guys, okay, there's dignity in how clean you present yourself. I take it for granted because I assume I'm going to be able to have a washing machine to clean my clothes next day.

But that's not the reality for most people. And it was not the reality for us. Too much of South America. But it is in the spaces where you're willing to challenge your own perception of yourself to understand the local cultures that is going to be the experiences that change your life.

I'm guessing that this is happening where you were invited into someone's home and they are giving you more than you can imagine they have any right to give anybody. And what was that experience like because that happened for me once or twice. It was like, of course, I have an evolutionary kind of philosophical thing about why we do that, which is if you're in a community where you are just always giving your most valuable things when you're in need, somebody will do that for you. But even still coming from a, let's say, some of my Western perspective, what was that like for you?

What happened? Yeah. It actually felt really good for me having been raised in the community that I was to return to gift economy and realizing like how thin, how paper thin literally we have made exchange as people with money and like from the Western world. And it's like, we assume that if we can pay for something, it should be there.

And in many of these places, like it's not, you know, like we find it myself getting into these remote times. And that's Wi-Fi or then recognizing like things like hot water is a luxury or even clean water is a luxury and receiving so much generosity. I think in the US culture and through hiking culture, you know, we have this concept called trail magic and it's, oh, you're out there, you're putting your all into it and good things come to you. And this is also coming from a country, an environment where many people's needs are met and those people who are helping you because, like in our culture, it's almost like the giver gets to decide how much they're going to give.

And in Latin culture, it's the guests job to put down a boundary when it's too much. And so there was one point, for example, when we were a gout show had invited us in and he had made bread that was clear with his bread for the week. And I was watching him in the kitchen and he was taking his last piece of bread to give us seconds. And so then it's that balance of you need to receive their generosity, right?

If you don't receive the offering such an generosity, then that's almost a degradation you've heard feelings. You need to be able to receive and also you need to be able to say like, when isn't it going to be watching, which are all things that we have not learned because we've streamlined interactions and exchanges, but gift economy is much more cyclical and about and then part of the gift is I am observing your reality. Yeah. And so it's dangerous to take the sense of entitlement of endurance sports in North America, whether we're talking about backpacking or bike packing, or we're just used to being celebrated for exploring like this extreme of human exploration and body and self and ground.

You're going to places where people do have nothing and would give you literally everything. And then talking people at either extreme, like the two places that I found the most prevalent was far south and down to Patagonia and then far north going up towards the Arctic. I had a really interesting like the larger latitudes and I think direction and people having no need and no challenge, places that they're like, of course, we're going to help you. And like for example, talking to some of the Inuit folk and then trying to explain like we put it, we'd finished like they put us up for a week.

It was just an amazing experience getting to spend time with them. And after a couple of days, I understand when they just kept me like no generosity is part of our culture. And so really is that being able to receive the generosity and also reciprocate in a way instead of just being like, Oh, I deserve this generosity because I got here. I'm so cool.

I'm here. It was really humbling and then finding ways to give back is one of the things I think those of us who have the fortune of being on the like front ends of these waves of change. Like, you know, so the first to create some of these trails or take these trails, you get so much generosity and you write about it on the internet and then everybody else comes looking for that as well. If we don't understand what we need to bring to give back, then after a couple of rounds of it, people are burnt out and they saw a lot of that in central America, for example, where like generosity has been taken for granted, overstepped and now people are terse about it.

And then soon guns are coming out. So it's a process and you get to decide which way your one body weight worth will like weigh. And I would say bring gifts and give time. We were late and I went to Cuba last October, when we've been bursary and people said to us they have nothing.

So bring what you can. And we brought two giant double bags full of medicine, snacks, shoes, and brought a lot of shoes to give away, which is really fun. And people could not have been more and great. And it was of course delightful that we were able to do that.

But we also had that weird thing we had to go through was where they're rich tourists, which we didn't like until a few people said to us, this is how our economy is working and we're going to work for you. We would have literally nothing. It was like, oh, then I'm thrilled that I can do this. And again, it was getting out of our American sensibility of how you're just how everyone described that in that situation.

Anyway, changing topics. What have you noticed that's changed both internally or externally about your body during all this? Yeah. It's so I've been really intentional in the time after completing Heratasy to give myself this.

I've given myself, I laid out a timeline of about two years to give myself this recovery period, having somebody in the military and having talks to these guys who've done these long hikes. Like, A, mentally has been a really interesting struggle. The easiest way I could put it is like you bring without the strict formulation of like schedule and constant new information, it gets, I just call it mushy. Yeah.

But like my capacity to retain the, both the storage and the access to that storage got really loose and all those became really permeable when it was on trails. So being able to like get back, gather back words and remember to get to the point, I've been telling one story in circles for seven years to myself. And so coming back into these sort of opportunities, like have a linear conversation has involved a lot of retraining my brain. And then there's the emotional component of recovery.

And I'd say part of that has been as I'm working on memoir and recognizing what I would need in an agent, but going through the memoir has been a lot of emotional journey in terms of being like, okay, you are way more danger than you knew most of the time. And when you're in the moment, when you're in the moment, you tell yourself to start, you need to get through that environment. And then once you're safe, someplace else and you look back on it and you're like, holy cow. So the mental journey of like recovery has been aided by things like meditation and seeing still the emotional, there's fortunately there's a lot more resources in the US than in much of the world.

And physically, I would say food, it took me about four months to resume eating for pleasure. Like to sit down, like it was as physical as after so long of this eating, like cooked over your bowl and just trying to get the calories in you as quickly as possible so you can get to sleep as quickly as possible. And we're back to my like little being trained, how do you lady and let me put your fork down in between each bite and actually chew your boom. Wait, what?

Wait, hold on, can you put a sandwich down? Once you start, seriously, I've been asking people this. Yeah, I do. You have to.

I am unable to do that. Literally if I'm picking up a sandwich, it's gone. I can't put it down. I still can't drink a normal amount.

I like the first drink. I'm like, I'm told you. And then I have to gas afterwards, like I've lost my capacity to drink a normal person. See, it's that there's now I've gone to the doctor for the first time in 10 years and it turned out that, you know, between being 25 and being 35, your body changes a lot to being able to check back into it.

I mean, one time I got forced into a hospital in Mexico because I had to be like put on IVs. But beyond that, I had any kind of medical care or attention paid. And so coming back into that, I'm being like, okay, maybe intentional about taking care of my body. And how can I basically, how can I think it works?

My feet grew half a size and it's just, you took a lot of the impact girl and you like stood up to it. So I say, does it get the components of it and having time to show up for that journey has been a huge blessing and privilege because again, my male counterparts, it was all like rush off into the next thing within a matter of days. I'm just thinking about and literally it's a bare imagination of how one thinks about one's body when it becomes so much more of a functional part of your day than a thing that you pay attention to after your day in some way. And I mean that both like the technical thing of getting better at doing certain kinds of work, getting better at walking, getting better at whatever it is versus using your body.

I'm trying to think about this. So lately I've been doing this whole workout regime that I adore. It's ridiculously intense in a very short period of time, which is how I do everything in this printer is like sprinting workout. But it's I love doing it.

It has no inherent functional component versus if I was living in a farm bailing hay where I would have a different experience of what this thing that I'm carrying around underneath my head is for. And I just find that whole thing just very compelling is a thing that I've done things like what you've done where whatever you start out with, it's going to be a different experience certainly by the end of many ways. I mean, I mean, I really appreciate what the barefoot feet and the barefoot movement in general, being intentional and tuned in with your date. And that was something that carried over both in through hiking on the trail and then when I did a silent meditation retreat, sometimes we would do walking meditations, I called it, which I hadn't, I knew it was a thing because I did, but I didn't know it was a thing because I'm not plugged into what's going on.

It took like the cool words in the world. But even just things like tuning in to my gate and exploring, which is shifting it slightly, having realized like exactly how you're, what's your senior footprints enough? You like see how like your footfall is more than if you're walking in a mall where you don't ever see your own footprint. You look back and you're like, oh, like I walk a little bit pigeon toe or you kick your own instep each time you go through, it's just that grounding.

And then you can get, you can really slow your mind down by like just going into that pace and being mindful of like how your feet fall and then like intentionally shifting between them. That's one of the biggest things in situations like in any environment, if you feel like you only have one choice, you are in an inherently dangerous or risky situation. That's interesting. And so giving yourself control over options, I can make my footfall differently.

Like it's a really small way to exercise your influence over the earth. Like how, what footprint am I going to leave and how am I going to leave this footprints? Is a really empowering way to let your world get really small when you need it to in order to find safety. I like that.

And of course I have to say that it would work for that same idea of what's the feeling like when I do this 14 and a half years ago, then we wouldn't be here now. Because that was the exact experiment that I was doing is what happens if I try and move my body this way or that way. I tried every possible thing I could think of, which is a weird thing for people to do I discovered. Seem normal me.

But that was, and ironically for the way most people think it was paying attention to the foot that was doing a better job, the leg that was doing a better job, it got the other one to get with the program. So most people get really wired for paying attention to the thing that's even a problem. And instead of looking, okay, what's the not problem and learn from that and our brains are really good at doing that. If you pay attention to the part that's going wrong, it's just going to suck more and not patient in a good part and see where that's been hard earned.

That's a really powerful directional lesson, pretty nice. I'm trying to get my brain back online, get focused on what the wrong answer is. And that's like what I retain. And it's almost an intentional effort just as it is like with the football thing, being able to intentionally and electively shift your perspective, taking that exercise in moments that are not as stressful can be more stressful.

That'll send turns into a lifeline. Yeah. Since you brought it up, I have to ask for you to mention it's a shameless question to ask a less chocolate footwear shall we? Yeah, let's talk it.

I just said that was my opening gambit. Now you've got to take it from there. Okay. I come from the school of the half-hearted warrior that I think you need to try a little bit of everything and having options between things.

So in different environments, different footwear was applicable. And I started way back to the very beginning of that, finding approach shoes where I was working with you guys. And those were great when we were walking across the Pete Moss box. But as soon as we got onto the road, it just started gnawing up your feet across parts of South America.

Like a lot of road walk, you feel that jarring. And even if you walk on the same side of the road, all of a sudden, your gate has adjusted to the tilt. Yeah. Bizarre to look at my feet being not quite even.

And then Central America and in those open environments, it's weird to say, but the best way to combat trench butt is to just leave your feet exposed and like wearing sandals through those regions. It was also a big shift for me because I was looking at tent, but then I was around Central America or along the coast where water would come up and everything on the ground was trying to poke you and point at you and eat you. Yeah, I was like a hammocker. And I was like, that was that one very against me, American through hiker identity.

Like, hey, I'm like walking around and sandals with a hammock. What is this vacation? And then yeah, bike packing across Central America. There you do end up, we ended up doing clip list shoes, which is confusing because they're actually shoes that clip in.

So don't believe them. And that made a big difference in terms of covering that ground. And then I really appreciated by the time that I got to the Continental Divide Trail. I was all about, I call myself a Cadillac cruiser through hiking by that point because most acres will carry only like one pair of shoes.

Some will carry a pair of like camp shoes. So I was carrying a pair of like hiking shoes and then I carried the sandals for the end of the day. And I found that it became part of my ritual when I took my mid-morning break. I would take off my closed-toed hiking shoes and I would switch into my sandals and I would just walk with my feet out through the warmer part of the day.

And then I could just cross streams and feel impervious about it. And my toes felt a lot happier. Like you can just watch them doing their little thing down there. You're like, oh, they love to be out.

And then I found that going between two different kinds of shoes actually I extended the lifespan of the closed-toed shoes that I was wearing and be tuned me into my gate and maybe a lot more present in the spaces that I was. And there's the ultralight folks are pretty clear. You only want to have one pair of shoes. But I would also say it's linked to quality of life.

Yeah. I mean, we've had people on the Appalachian Trail who have brought sandals with them and then realized they didn't need their shoes. But my thing is you do what you need to do. It's like you're saying, you only have one option.

You're putting yourself in danger. Yeah. And it was like on the trails where you go up high like sometimes you're like going through the snow and the different qualities of the snow at different times of day and different things. And then the other weird thing that I realized I loved was cold plunging my fingers.

I didn't know I was that kind of person. It's a good one. It feels so good. And then the other part about Colorado is, so this is now beginning almost the beginning of April.

It's going to be a month until I'm jumping in 40 degree water because that's where it is. And it's especially because it'll be, we'll have 90 degree days and there's nothing better. And my friends who don't know that I had an old friend of mine come by and I said, hey, let's go down this creek. And I dove in and he dove in and basically skidded across the water.

I was like, why didn't you come out? So he's like bouncing like a rock was very entertaining. But once you get hit to it, it's delightful. And it's not seems like doing a cold plunge for a quote health.

But when you're out and about, it's a real thing. It's part of what makes you work and feel good and continue to be able to do what you're doing. So speaking of continuing, not really, if somebody was even going to even consider a through bike or what it would take to get to the point of considering one, what would you say to those people? I would say enjoy the process of getting there and preparing yourself for a journey is just as much of the journey as the journey itself.

And so not only give yourself the time to build up to it, but do whatever you can to create an intentional space once it's over to process it. Because one of the things that come away from this journey with is we don't learn from experience. We learn from honest reflection on the experiences that we've had. And sometimes we can't, if we can't come back around to it, like the first time it was such traumatic thing that it takes 35 years for the thought to be like popping up out of nowhere.

And then that's the way that works. And also if you can set aside that space and I'm seeing that effort happening a lot more, that I think is a critical component to getting the most that you can out of a through hike. The other one is expose yourself to people of a similar interest. That's actually what got me out to call a rado was I had through hiking and it changed my value system and I moved home to Kansas City.

The prevalent vibe was like, okay, and now you settle down and now you play by the rules. And it was like, high priority is having access to healthy nature right out my front door and being outside, be around people who I don't have to justify. Explain that to you. So that was what moved me to Colorado and seeing more and more people coming here and think craving that is showing that we're all wanting to come back to that.

So if you're feeling that in any way, I say, feed it. Works any last thoughts anything we missed? Oh, yeah, it was seven years since we could go on and on. If you can't encapsulate seven years and plus reminds them how or something desperately wrong.

I think what I would say is like revel in the simplicity of it. Let yourself get back to the basics and really appreciate the elements of things that are going into things, whether it's what's beneath your feet or what's going into your shoes, what's going into your food, that enriches an experience more than any amount of money that you could spend on anything. It's just being there for it and feeling it all the way through. And if there's an uncomfortable thing, if you can't look at that moment, you can look at it later, put a pin in it.

Like those are the valuable, those are the valuable times. I would say if it is uncomfortable, put a pin to come back and look at it later. Because if you take an ad face value forever, it's going to be ossified and problematic just to do the epilogue for my thing. After wishing on blah, blah, blah, it was I had a number of very traumatic experiences or we say this, number of things that would happen where I had a very unpleasant response, basically every Jew fourth and never ever play with each other.

Picture of the guy with his grocery bags in front of the tank, which this is a weird one. Because again, it's happened a long time ago. My memory is that we were in the Palace Hotel in some some reporter's room and watch that happen. I'm not sure if that's true because it's been so long, but I have a vivid memory of that again.

I started a book when I was in college. The opening line was my earliest child of memories or neither memories or my own. And I feel like that about certain things. It was I came back in the original Batman movie.

There's a scene where the young Bruce Wayne is his parents are being mugged and the mugger turns to Bruce Wayne points a gun at him, cut to a first person shot from Bruce Wayne's perspective where he's looking down barrel and gun and I ran out of the room. But so after a number of years, I really looked at the whole thing more carefully. And this is going to sound crazy for people, but I'll say it anyway. I referred to the whole thing as a traumatic experience.

But if I was really clear, the only time that it was in any way traumatic from the time that we realized, Oh, crap, we better turn around and start running to Oh, crap, they're shooting at us to get down before we hit by bullet to getting captured. People want to machine is that our head getting beaten a little bit, getting on our bike, the indoor rush, the trauma, the stress didn't kick in until I had the thought. I almost died. Yep, or I could have died until then, lucid, clear, blissful, endorphin thing.

But then that thought that's what kicked in the everything else. And once I realized that when I slowed the film down, I saw that frame, then the whole quote, trauma thing just literally disappeared in that incident. And it was just a good fortune. I had the invitation to kind of really look at the story carefully and remembered, Oh, that's one of his problems, not the event, that thought.

The reflection again, yeah, that's thank you for sharing that. Being willing to reflect on those experiences is a huge challenge. And I'd say there's three things I've been working through over the last couple of years, there's been three memories. There's your physical memory, like your body, when you feel your body respond to sound popcorn, right?

There's the mental, which puts us like words to it and it's like almost died equals this. And then there's emotional memory. Like what you remember. And I think that emotional memory has a lot more sway in some of these kind of environments than what we might logically want to believe.

And also doing like those raw points, like just to like to wrap up and bring it back to shoes and make it something like small, like when I'm in my barefoot, choosing, you feel like a sharp rock and there's like that flinching away from it. But then there's also that like when you when there's a big, beautiful route across the trail and you can make your footfalls. So it just like swears. And it says beautiful.

I think it's like accessing both of those kinds of memories are things that we can learn and ground in and keep coming back to you throughout our lives. Yeah. We're wired to pay attention to the difficult things because way back when those were the things that kill us, but we often forget the flip side. I got a story.

I'll tell you offline. It's takes that to extreme. But not really. Pass that on.

All that said, if people want to find out more about you and your journey and her Odyssey, tell them how they can do that. Yeah, absolutely. You can find our information at www.herdashoddac.org or on any of the social media platforms around Instagram, some of the YouTube videos, Facebook, and the way that I work, the best is being directly in contact with folks. I've been doing some consulting while I've been writing, helping advise folks as they prepare for their own off the beaten path journeys, or even just concocting audacious dreams and building things outside of the typical structure that will bring more light into the world or projects that I've been advising on.

So if you're building something, you need somebody to help you build that up and fortify that. We're here for you. Join the movement. There's who you need out there.

This is the first time I've looked in the camera and realized by sitting further back from the camera, yeah, you're a little bigger than me, but my God, it looks like a much, there we go. That's, no, no, no, no, we didn't do that sooner, but we weren't looking right in the camera. First of all, thank you. Thank you.

My pleasure. Thank you for having me. Pleasure. And for everybody else, thank you and reminder, go to www.jointhemovementmovement.com.

You'll find previous episodes. You'll find all the places you can find us on social media. You'll find all the other places you can find the same podcast if you don't like the one you're getting at now. If you end in sharing review and all those things to spread the word, and if you have any questions, comments, referrals, recommendations, complaints, whatever, if you know anyone who you think should be on the show, especially, I've been saying this over a year now, ideally, someone who thinks I have a case of cranial reorientation syndrome.

I would love to have that conversation. Either way, whatever it is, you can drop me an email at movemovme at jointhemovementmovement.com. And until next time, go out, have fun, and live life be first.