The Thru-Hike of Misery
Out There
Willow Belden
4.6 • 608 Ratings
🗓️ 3 June 2021
⏱️ 30 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
When Paul Barach embarked on his first thru-hike, he was expecting a life-changing experience. The Shikoku Pilgrimage, which traverses Japan's most rural island and takes visitors past 88 Buddhist temples, promised to be a spiritual and meditative journey, as well as an epic adventure.
But the reality wasn't so nice.
On this episode, Paul tells the story of what happens when the adventure of a lifetime doesn't turn out the way you'd hoped. How do you make peace with the worst parts of hiking, when those parts never end?
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | All right, I am out for a bike ride and I am at a spot here where I can see three different |
| 0:09.7 | mountain ranges and I only know what one of them is. |
| 0:15.8 | And I'm always curious what the others who are. |
| 0:20.4 | This is exactly the situation where an app called PeakVisor comes in handy. |
| 0:26.8 | PeakVisor is one of our sponsors for this episode. |
| 0:30.0 | When you open up their app, it figures out where you are, |
| 0:33.3 | and then it shows you a panoramic picture of everything you're looking at |
| 0:37.2 | with all the mountains labeled. |
| 0:39.3 | If you decide to climb one of those mountains, you can also use their peak bagging feature to check in at the summits |
| 0:46.3 | so you can keep track of all your achievements and get inspired about next targets. |
| 0:51.3 | Check out PeakVisor in the app store. You just might love it. |
| 0:58.1 | Support for Out There also comes from a podcast called Out Travel the System. Out Travel the System, |
| 1:05.2 | which is brought to you by Expedia, is now in its third season. The show has a central mission to inspire and inform about travel, |
| 1:14.5 | which can mean anything from building your bucket list to taking concrete steps to take that |
| 1:19.6 | next trip when the time is right. The podcast finds people who are passionate about travel in |
| 1:25.7 | general, including a commercial airline pilot, a woman |
| 1:29.7 | who travels pretty much year-round, and a man who wants to have visited every country in the world |
| 1:35.6 | by the end of the year. When it comes to inspiration, out-travel the system is also giving a voice |
| 1:41.5 | to people who love their hometowns and want to share them with travelers, |
| 2:04.6 | or people who love lake or beach life in the winter. Take a moment to pull up your usual podcast player and pull up Out Travel the System. You can like and subscribe to get the latest episodes. Hi, I'm Willow Belden and you're listening to Out There, the podcast that explores big questions through intimate stories outdoors. |
| 2:16.6 | If you've ever gone on a through hike, you know how exciting it can be |
| 2:21.1 | to plan it out. The anticipation leading up to it, there's just nothing like that. You dream about |
... |
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