Jennifer Pharr Davis - The Pursuit of Endurance: Harnessing the Record-Breaking Power of Strength and Resilience

If you cant beat them, you dont have to join them.

Warren Doyle

I stooped over a thin stream seeping past clumps of dead leaves and earth as thick as coffee grounds. My hands were grasping my shins and my eyes were filled with tears.

I looked up and found myself directly in his shadow. His full beard and round belly absorbed the rare rays of light that penetrated the canopy above us. His presence was unmovable, overbearing yet completely mute.

Why doesnt he say anything?! I thought. Why wont he try to motivate me or at least place his hand on my shoulder to comfort me? I wouldnt be out here if it werent for him.

Id already hiked the entire Appalachian Trail (AT) twice. But this time it was different. This time, I was trying to become the fastest personmale or femaleto travel the 2,189-mile footpath. I was aiming for a fastest known time.

It was day seven and I had already traversed almost three hundred miles of the unforgiving yet alluring terrain. Mainethat dark, full-bodied beautyhad taken more than her fair share out of me. Now, just a few miles into New Hampshire, I was exhausted, filthy, and crippled by shin splints. I longed for a quick, dignified end to the shooting pains, the relentless discomfort.

My current audience wasnt hiking with me. Instead, he had come in by a side trail to check on my progress. I couldnt decide whether I was grateful or angry to see him. I vacillated between crediting him with my progress and blaming him for my near demise. At least his presence gave me a reason to catch my breath.

Through heavy breathing and repressed sobs, I asked him, How do you know when to quit?

There was a drawn-out silence. Just when Id convinced myself he wasnt going to respond, Warren said, Theres a difference between quitting and stopping.

I looked up at his backlit silhouette, then I returned my gaze to the ground. Next to his thrift-store sneakers, he had displayed a selection of vending machine junk food and neon-colored sodas. None of it appealed to me.

Finally, I let out a deep breath filled with congestion and unreleased emotion, picked up a purple vial of synthetic energy elixirthe kind of unregulated ooze they hawk at gas stationsthen continued hobbling down the trail. Because we knew that if I stopped, I would be quitting.

I was a week into my record attempt on the Appalachian Trail, and with just one-seventh of the trail behind me Id already wrestled with the greatest hurt that I had ever felt. The pain from the shin splints was sharp, stabbing, and hot, but the ache of covering nearly fifty miles a day was widespread, dull, and throbbing. It was an all-encompassing agony. I doubted I could make it to the end of the day, let alone the end of the trail. But with Warren by my side, I felt pressuremostly positive pressureto keep going. We were two people who shared the same questions.

What was my capacity for endurance? Was it good enough to set a fastest known time? And could I outperform all the men who had come before me?

Because I could still drag one foot in front of the other, I knew that I had not yet found those answers. Warrens watchful eye held me accountable to this very personal and painful scientific query.

A week earlier, I had set off from the summit of Katahdin with a spring in my step. I descended just over five miles on a steep, boulder-strewn path to meet Warren and my husband, Brew, at the base of the mountain. Lots of folks wished me well, or said they believed in me, but these were the only two men willing to drive to the heart of Maine, a place filled with blackflies and bogs, to begin this experiment by my side.

With each road crossing Warren and Brew marked my progress.

You made it here this fast, said Brew.

You are this far behind the record, said Warren.

You have this far to the next road, said Brew.

You should leave now to get there, said Warren.

After hiking 150 miles in three days, our team arrived at the banks of the Kennebec River. Trying to use every minute, I decided to ford the river. Alternatively, I would need to wait one hour to take advantage of a canoe ferry. Steered by a seasonal employee of the Appalachian Trail Conservancy, the canoe ferries afford hikers a safe, mostly dry, transport across the dam-controlled artery.

Warren had crossed the river numerous times on foot, so I followed his sturdy calves into the water. His strong legs moved sideways against the forceful current until they disappeared. Then his waist waded past the white ripples on the surface of the water. Soon he was immersed up to his armpits in the cold, flowing channel.

I kept my eyes on Warren and struggled to keep my toes anchored to the large, smooth stones at my feet. Breathless from fear and the chill of the water, I tried to stay in his wake. My sports bra changed from a light purple to a dark violet as I forged deeper and farther into the river. I listened to Warren as he voiced a steady and concise refrain. Feet down. Feet down. Feet down. I repeated the chorus in a murmuring echo, hoping to drown out the profanities swimming through my head.

I noticed goose bumps on my skin as my stomach muscles rose above the surface of the water. Soon my thighs slashed through the dark grips of the Kennebec, and after a harrowing and invigorating twenty-minute crossing, I stood dripping wet on the opposite shore. My eyes turned to meet Warrens approving gaze. I smiled and let out a half whimper, half giggle. Warren responded with a deep, bellowing laugh. Then he struck a pose and shouted, I may have the face of a sixty-one-year-old and the belly of a couch potato, but Ive still got the legs of a WILD RIVER MAN!

Here stood my ferryman: the person who had taught me the difference between stopping and quitting, the man who believed that I could be the first woman to set the overall record on the Appalachian Trail, and the individual who showed me how to keep my feet down and not get swept away by the current.

The year 1973 marked the beginning of the end of the Vietnam War. It was the year of the controversial Roe v. Wade verdict in the Supreme Court. The Watergate scandal infiltrated the ranks of the White House.

Warren Doyle was twenty-three years old.

He was aware of the civil unrest and he was becoming a proponent of social justice. As a child, he had witnessed his father, a veteran of World War II, struggle to find work and support his family. As an undergrad, Warren spent a summer volunteering in the mountains of Jamaica. Most of the locals there lived in corrugated metal shacks. When his mother came to visit, he refused to stay in the hotel with her. The disparity between the wealth of the tourists and poverty of the natives was so unsettling to Warren that he preferred to spend the night with the homeless street kids rather than sleep on clean white sheets.