The Ten Year Walk

The final curve beckons, the eucalyptus tree just beyond. Another fifty yards to the fence. A few dozen steps more, and I can feel the smoothness of the gate handle beneath my touch. I take a deep breath, swing it open and step out. Three thousand six hundred and fifty consecutive days without a miss. Eleven thousand miles. Twenty five millions steps. I am overcome with joy.

It began with a New Year's resolution. It was January 1, 2011, the start of a new decade, and I wanted to pick a goal that was suitably grand. The book I happened to be reading then was called Younger Next Year, in which the author made the case that there was no perfect exercise program, just the one that you enjoyed enough to make a regular part of your life. I had been a miler in college and a marathoner in my twenties but it had been ten years since I had last laced up. I knew I enjoyed the outdoors but wasn't confident that my knees could handle hard pounding on a pavement any more. Walking seemed much more do-able. And I have generally found it simpler to do something seven days a week instead of twice or thrice.

Jerry Seinfeld once wrote that the secret to his success as a comedian was that, rain or shine, he forced himself to sit at his desk and write jokes for an hour a day, irrespective of how creative he felt. For the muse to visit, it needed to have space and know it was welcome. At the end of the hour, he would carefully draw a box on his calendar and check it off.

If you are able to able to tick off thirty such days in a row, your mind will be loath to break the pattern. Before you know it, you will have started a habit. I pulled out my Sharpie, carefully marked the wall calendar that I had been gifted that Christmas and headed out the door to begin the first of what I hoped to be thousands of hikes.

We live close to Stanford University, which had made a generous gift to the public in 2000 by granting access to the trail that it had built on the hills behind campus. At the top of the ridge is an iconic landmark called the Dish. It is a parabolic reflector antenna that was originally built to monitor atmospheric conditions following nuclear weapons tests in the Pacific. It is now used as an astronomical observatory and to communicate with satellites.

I picked the Dish Trail because the Alpine Road entrance was just five minutes from home. Up and down the hill was two miles, a distance I could slip out and walk even on a busy work day. The entire loop was closer to six, a distance that lent itself to inviting friends to join me in hiking on weekends. In addition to the joy of conversation and catching up, there was the magnificent view of the Hoover Tower on the far side.

The checkmarks paraded on, first a single row marking a week, then a block marking a month, and eventually the whole top of the calendar a sea of green for the quarter. Multiple colored pens came into use to draw a festive flag to commemorate the hundred day mark.

I accommodated for travel by walking at least two miles daily in whichever part of the world I found myself in. I chose business hotels based on their being located in a walkable section of town rather than next to busy highways. That summer, while on a family cruise, I circled the track atop the Enchantment of the Seas two dozen times each morning before breakfast. And in the winter, after an entire day spent on a Transatlantic flight, I found myself checking into a hotel in the heart of Kiev at 10 PM and then steeled myself for a freezing walk past waist-high snowdrifts in Independence Square before the striking of the midnight hour.

The days are long but the years are short. The habit of a daily walk slowly became so ingrained that it no longer needed to be built into my formal planning for each day. It was just something I did, like brushing my teeth as soon as I woke up or having a cup of coffee with breakfast. In what seemed like an eye blink, the counter turned to a thousand. My family surprised me with a cake that evening.

By that time, my motivation had shifted away from trying not to break the sequence. It wasn't even about the exercise or health (even though it had not escaped my notice that I had suffered not even a mild cold in three years.) Instead, I was starting to develop a deep appreciation for nature all around me.

At the start of the year, the sky is all slates and grays, the frost glinting in first light. In a few months, the morning fog will clear and I can leave my sweater behind when leaving home. March means spring showers, rarely lasting more than thirty minutes and making for spectacular rainbows. By May, the sky will be cornflower blue and streaked with cirrus clouds. Later in the summer, it will have deepened even further to deep sapphire, a glorious backdrop to the jet trails of the planes leaving San Francisco, on their way across the Pacific Ocean. The distant ridges will be bathed in gold by August, when the bees will be fat and drowsy. And the fall sunsets will paint the western sky in a blaze of vermillion.

The wildlife follows the seasons. As the earth shakes itself out of its winter torpor, the squirrels scurry about with the nuts they have saved in various nooks and crannies of the trees. Spring sees entire families of deer emerge into the meadows, vigilant to the presence of a coyote circling in the undergrowth. Bluebirds sit on twigs and trill. Later in the season, herons glide gently onto the fields, hunting for insects to sustain them on their northward journey. By late summer, I will learn to gingerly step around the gopher snakes sunning themselves on the gravel. In the fall, I will marvel at the speed of the tarantula scurrying ahead to avoid me. I will see a mountain lion in the wild for the first and only time in my life, barely able to register his speed and too stunned by the encounter to pull out my phone. In October, I will learn from the California Field Atlas that a group of starlings in flight is called a murmuration.

By Year Five, I have been accepted into the ranks of the regulars, worthy of a nod when passing other walkers that have fallen into this same addiction. I pass twins, as striking as an Arbus portrait, on their first ever walk up the hill and chat with their mother Mikayla. Later in their lives, will they remember this day of inculcation?

I build a friendship with Ronaldo, who is eighty years old but spry as a jackrabbit. He takes me off-trail, scrambling through tall grass for a mile to show me where the true peak has been marked by an unknown surveyor.

I came across Larry doing push-ups at the top of the trail. The hard ones, where you keep your legs above your head. As I pass him, I joke that I couldn’t do three of those. He says: "My man, all you have to do is start with one."

He catches up with me and we walk the rest of the trail together. Every half-mile, he stops and does a hundred more. By the end of our walk, he has completed a thousand.

He is a former football player (University of the Pacific, Atlanta Falcons.) Works as a trainer now.

As we bid goodbye, I ask him how long he has been hiking the Dish. He says forty eight years. I tell him that he doesn't look forty eight years old. He says he is sixty six. When I get home, I put my feet up on the window seat and do a single push up (I am now up to a hundred.)

I become deeply aware of the symbiosis between water and landscape. The San Francisco Bay Area has just two wet months, December and January, but this brief period is key to nature's reawakening. Without the rainfall, there would be no green shoots peeking out of the fence post at the top of the trail. No sparrows bathing in the shallow puddles, no poppies heralding life anew. But in a relentless cadence, season follows season, and before long, the trees are bare again and the December storms leave the sky in angry shades of cobalt and gold.

For most of my life, I have paid no attention to trees. They were just there, part of the backdrop, not worthy of attention. But I find myself fixating on a particular California Oak. It is the same tree, yet minutely different depending on time of day and the season of year. Completely naked in January, every branch in stark relief in the blue winter light. By April, leaflets have started to emerge, matching the lush green of the grass below. By late July, the summer heat has dried out the land cover and the leaves on the branches wilt limply, as if in a daze. In October, its silhouette is backlit by the greens of Windy Hill, the thin blue line of Skyline Drive and the smudged salmon of the setting sun.

Despite decades of trying, I have never been able to sustain a meditation practice. I have been to Tassajara and read Ten Percent Happier and loaded Calm and Headspace on my phone. Nothing has ever worked. It took me a long time to realize that I had been looking at it all wrong. Walking is my meditation. I have never came back from a stroll where I have not felt re-energized and rejuvenated, ready for anything that work and personal life throws at me for the rest of the day.

I round the top of the hill to be surprised by the sight of my wife and children. They have climbed the hill this morning along with two close friends to celebrate this tenth anniversary with cupcakes and champagne. It is a moment of utter delight.

In the chatter during our joyous descent, my mind went back to the anticipation with which I had imagined this day. I had expected the fulfilment of completion, of course. But what about the puzzle of what to do tomorrow? Should I move on to some other goal, mark this one as complete?

I realize that the calendar was just a construct that I had thought necessary to impose the discipline to go out regardless of whether it was a scorching day or a stormy one. If what you do is meaningful to you and a true reflection of who you are, you will have no need for an external marker. You don't stop your effort just because your company has gone public. You don't stop writing just because you have gotten a book published. You don't stop parenting just because your child has graduated. The work is its own reward.

Of course I shall go out to the Dish tomorrow. And the day after. And the day after that. There are still breezes to feel. Woodpeckers to watch. The play of light to sink into. Sunsets to marvel at. There is no finish line.