Small Success Thursday, maybe don't climb every mountain

Went on vacation this past week, so blogging has been lighter than usual.   However while on vacation, we hiked up a mountain.  The guide said the trail could be described as "Moderate."  Moderate sounds so reasonable.  Surely we who are not totally unfit can handle a "Moderate" trail.  Moderate sounds urbane, rational, modern, smooth. 

Moderate is a relative term. 

A 1.9 tenths of a mile trail all uphill, with the fording of a bog and a dried but muddy creek bed, scrabbling across rocks holding onto nearby saplings, I submit is not moderate unless your family tree includes antlers, or at the very least, hooves. 

Even the dog dutifully marching up the seemingly endless "stairs" looked more than happy to sit by a rock while the humans recovered.  Every person we met on the trail groused about how "moderate" the path seemed to be. 

At at least three points going up, each of us considered quitting.  We goaded each other on, saying, "We'd feel bad if we gave up." "We needed to prove we could."  and "We'd be disappointed."

Two and a half hours of sweat later, we arrived at the apex, and were told by a local attempting to craft actual stairs out of rock into the path, if we wanted a good view, we'd have to go another 300 yards.   We sat and ate our fruit and granola bars and nutella and rued we'd not brought more food.  The view of sitting seemed pretty magnificent to me.

The trek back took considerably less time, but introduced us to reverse muscle pain, as the hind muscles felt over taxed the same way brakes overheat when going down hill too much.   We'd been hiking a moderate trail for what ultimately turned out to be five hours.   Getting back to our cabin, we collapsed for what we'd hoped would be two, but turned out to be four hours.   I'd say we felt moderately tired, if moderate means what it meant when we experienced the moderate trail. 

After the nap/recovery, we joked, "It's a good thing we persisted, or we might feel bad."  and, "Wow, this hurts, but at least we're not disappointed with ourselves."  It hurt to laugh.  After considering, maybe every mountain doesn't need climbing and conquering, we declared ourselves wisened by experience and called it a day.

Happy Small Success Thursday.  Next week, I'm taking on molehills.  Much more manageable.