Jenny and Erin

If you’ve been reading Jenny-and-Erin this last month you know that Erin and I have accepted a dare to walk 15 of Minnesota’s 19 state trails by November. Let me begin by saying we are not a long distance walkers…yet. The longest I’ve walked in a day was 13 miles and that was because I got lost. By the time I arrived at my destination, completely wiped out, my boyfriend had started driving around looking for me. Oops. So, while I’m still not actually sure why we accepted this dare (okay, a little wine, a nice dinner and a lot of laughing were involved), we will find a way to do it. Erin and I aren’t exactly known for backing down from a challenge. Between you and me though (Erin, close your eyes for this) I’m more than a little overwhelmed and have yet to decide whether this entire thing makes any sense. Have we bit off more than we can chew?

Why are we walking only 15 of the 19 trails you may be wondering? We’re pretty crafty negotiators. After a little stalling and a quick glance at the trails we negotiated dropping 4 of them, each of which are each longer than 125 miles. With these huge trails off our list, we are still up against a very daunting task – the remaining trails total 554 miles.

The endurance portion of this challenge is key, and not just in terms of walking. Most of the trails are not close to where we live, a few requiring driving 5 hours just getting there. And after the drive there won’t be time for messing around. Nope. Straight to walking we go! Some days we will be walking over 20 miles a day, and a few of these with backpacks on. Three of the trails require backpacking for a week. Erin’s a camper, I am not. I like hot baths, air conditioning, beds with lots of pillows and toilets that flush. Instead I’ll be lying on the ground (after walking 20 miles remember), without a shower and surrounded by wild animals. Lovely. In my defense I follow a strict policy of no complaining once I’ve committed, ask Erin.

Okay, enough of the stuff that I’m not going to like, here’s what I’m excited about. My biggest excitement is the accomplishment. The very act of walking all of these trails, completing the dare and sucking up the parts I don’t like (camping, being sweaty and dirty and did I mention snakes?) will be life-changing. I am excited to see the beautiful scenery (one trail for instance has us walking through waterfalls), having time to think away from cities and getting in much better shape. Oh, and a nice tan and sun-streaked hair. My biggest hope is that this will be similar to other traveling I’ve done where we’ll meet a variety of interesting people on the trails and maybe walk with them for a day or two as company. And maybe have a few marshmallows over the fire. That is if they’re not deemed to heavy to carry. Well, Erin?

This week we are finalizing the details, making arrangements to be gone for lots of long weekends and a couple of entire weeks, finding people to watch pets, explaining to loved ones one more time why we’re going to be gone nearly every weekend, etc. Who knows, maybe friends and family will even join us on some of the shorter segments? Either way, we’ll keep you updated on our progress; what we’ve seen, where we walked and most importantly what we learn. Oh, and if you are hikers or campers and have any advice it’d be great if you sent it our way, either via a comment or email me directly at jenny@jenny-and-erin.com.

Wish us luck and good weather! Oh, and you can check our progress on the sidebar.

Remember Murphy, the Murphy of Murphy’s Laws? The guy who throws cold water in the face of die-hard optimists and earnest workers everywhere? Well, last week I became very familiar with one of his laws: “nothing is ever as simple as it seems”. Erin and I accepted a dare to walk 15 of Minnesota’s 19 state trails this year. Well, we made a mistake. We failed to clarify exactly what constitutes walking a state trail. Funny thing though, this misunderstanding wasn’t with the person who made the dare, but with Erin, the very person I’m going to be walking with!

First, let me bring you up to date. Erin and I have been meeting to walk 3 miles almost every day at 5:00 a.m. since mid-March. Our training kicked off with a near-death experience, okay maybe this is a slight exaggeration, and has continued with regularity since. Click here to read about that horrible day. We have trudged through snow, rain and strong winds. There have been a handful of very cold days we have opted to not walk (see we’re not total dummies). The mornings have slowly transitioned from cold, dark and silent, to sunrises filled with emerging life – birds migrating, plants budding and people coming out of hibernation to start their early morning runs.

After exactly three weeks of walking we took on our first trail. This trail is 18 miles long; half paved and half unpaved. After finishing the paved section, the section we had agreed to walk that day, I was elated thinking we’d completed an entire trail. However, Erin insisted we were only half done. You see, my assumption was that we were only walking paved portions of the trails (this is what I remember agreeing to as I’m not much for dirt and mud), while Erin believed (quite adamantly I add) that we were walking ALL of any trail we choose, including unpaved portions and the loops associated with the trail (which are sometimes as far as 15 miles from the main portion of the trail). OOPS! After some frustrated words were exchanged it was decided…

We are walking all 15 state trails in their entirety, including every crazy little loop associated with them. What’s another 200 miles or so when we’re already walking 3 million??? Hey Murphy, lighten up, smile down at us as we trudge along.

Click here to find a great website devoted to Murphy and his laws.

This week Jenny and I began working on another goal, okay more of a dare… Walking. Yes, we all walk, but I’m talking walking in every mornings (getting up at the ungodly hour of 4:40 a.m.), to get in shape (goodbye love handles) and in my case (and much to Jenny’s despair) to identify flowers, trees, birds – you get the picture. The aforementioned dare entails walking 15 of Minnesota’s 19 listed State Trails by November 2007. I can’t begin to say how many miles we are talking. Yes, we’re definitely a couple of suckers. Oh well – off we go!

Our first day of walking was two weeks ago. Boy, no one ever said training was easy. I woke well before sunrise feeling surprisingly alert. The outdoor thermometer read 22 degrees Fahrenheit (which we later found out wasn’t exactly the case), fair for this time of year. Jenny’s morning hadn’t started quite so smoothly, beginning with a fall on the ice; bruising her knee and dampening her enthusiasm. Maybe we should have taken this as a sign, but as neither of us wanted to be the one suggesting we quit, so we put our best feet forward and began.

The walk started okay, considering it was still dark and the pavement was like a skating rink. So instead of a walk, I would say we did more of a shuffle. We noticed there were not many people out, but we naively assumed people simply weren’t as motivated as us. All was fine, although we were moving pretty slow. Then the wind hit. And I don’t mean a breeze or a few gusts, I mean a sheer, bone chilling, take your breath away, 20 mile an hour freezing wind.

We both grew up in the Midwest, so we are no cold weather wimps here, but it was COLD. For the first few minutes we tried to stay positive, relating how the difficulty in the walk is synonymous with life and the challenges we face; however, there is only so much you can do when you are freezing and it is a 40 minute walk, or shuffle, back to your car.

My mind went into overdrive and I wondered aloud what it would be like to freeze to death, earning a quick laugh from Jenny. I used to believe this would be a tolerable way to die, akin to getting a little cold and then falling asleep. Wrong! It would be painful and horrible. So mark that off my list of okay ways to go. Before you write me off as overly dramatic, let me mention not only were we cold, neither of us were exactly dressed for the weather we were encountering – Jenny was wearing very thin gloves still wet from the day before.

I could tell we were both getting desperate (and to be honest, a bit scared) when we broke into uncontrollable giggles. This was not a good sign – neither of us are gigglers. But, there was nothing we could do, we calculated a call on our cell phone would take the nearest person 30 minutes to get to us, same with a call to a cab company, there were no stores nearby, nor people either. So we kept up the treacherous black-ice shuffle walk, giggling, and trying to fight back the excruciating pain. We finally made it back to our cars, me with incredibly numb and pained appendages and Jenny positive that she had frostbite (and a bit of imagination).

As we gingerly climbed into our cars, the voice on the radio announced the wind-chill was 20 below. People die in weather like this! No wonder we felt like icicles. Regardless, even as we got into the cars we agreed that this was only the beginning. Jenny did make an official rule that we would stop if someone lost a limb (thanks) while I swore off walking anytime the wind-chill is under 10 below. So, we are meeting again tomorrow, hopefully under more favorable conditions!

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