The hiker at Buckeye Gap probably wouldn’t agree that you could revel in beauty while also struggling in pain. I didn’t feel like lecturing him, but I had a bit of experience with doing exactly that. He also probably didn’t know that I was moving at three miles an hour, no faster than a strong thru-hiker, not at the ten-mile-an-hour pace he likely imagined runners kept. Would he have understood if I’d told him that, though man’s soul finds solace in natural beauty, it is forged in the fire of pain? That if I wanted to find real peace, I had to pass through the crucible of fifty-mile days?
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