What is the Deal with Trail Talk?
One of my areas of solace for many years has been running in the mountains. I’m about a decade into it and I continue to be humbled by the power of the unknown. There are no guarantees how I’m going to feel, what obstacles will present themselves, or whether I’ll get back home in time for my family not even to know I was gone. But during Covid, the trails have taken on an amplified presence in my life. It has not only been my inexpensive form of mental health therapy, it has also been my social outlet (hey, I’ll take what I can get).
I have a few running steadies (don’t tell my wife) and together, this gangly group of dudes has all the makings of a joke you might tell at a bar. What do you get when you combine a health insurance executive, a divorce lawyer, a finance guy and an entrepreneur on a mountain trail? Trail philosophy of course. And in our little bubble, we protect that sacred space under the guise of confidentiality that we call, “Trail Talk”.
I got approval for this very rare post to lift the cover off our most recent trail talk. I don’t want anyone to think that this is elevated intellectual banter by any stretch. It is generally pretty light and funny and a good distraction when slogging up a mountain. So here were our recent trail talk topics:
What is one thing I can celebrate with you this week? I like asking this question because there is always something to celebrate and it’s fine to acknowledge small and big victories. Usually these are work related, but hey, Graham just got a dog and Dave finally had his power come back on after three days. A divorce (not his) that was going marathon status resolved for Blake and that gave him some relief on a recent getaway with his family.
Why didn’t we buy bitcoin? Oh this was a good one. Dave proceeded to share how his nephew is killing it playing the crypto game. We talked about it like we had any understanding of what we were really trying to justify. And yes, we got off the trail and put a little more money in our Coinbase account.
Death. Well, yes. I mean we’re in the dark on a trail with our headlamps on. It only seems appropriate we would talk about death, our own or others. What prompted this one was a recent article about a shooting near Tiger Mountain in Issaquah, WA. We agreed that we wouldn’t tell our spouses about this or any future trail talk would be sunk. But what really made this conversation real was that about halfway up the mountain, Blake says in his very stoic fashion, “Hey, I’ve got one for you guys. We had a dead person in our house last Wednesday.” “What?” I said. “You are only bringing this up now? What is wrong with you?” He proceeded to share that a longtime housekeeper had been in his house while he was out of town and died from cardiac arrest and wasn’t found for three days. It’s a sad story as this individual didn’t have any close family. There was tape all around my friend’s house which certainly raised the suspicion of neighbors. So we talked about that for a bit and moved on.
The importance of wet wipes. Remember, this is trail talk. It’s confidential in nature (you know, the whole “whatever is said on the trail stays on the trail” thing). But we got on this topic because my buddy Dave has no hesitation dropping his shorts off the trail and going #2. “What are you using to wipe?” I inquired. David said, “Ferns make incredible toilet paper.” Blake proceeded to share his own story about the power of using compostable wet wipes at home. “The best thing that has ever happened to him,” he said. I then shared that I went to the doctor last week and that I’m a hard wiper and that my doctor, coincidentally, told me to use wet wipes as well. “Small world, right?”
Why air fryers are amazing. Okay, I said it and it’s true. Come on, work with me here. This is the smartest little invention ever. So much possibility. I am convinced that air fryers have brought families together in ways they no one every could have imagined (think air fryer parties). But just when we are going all in on air fryers, Dave starts talking about his commitment to probiotics and prebiotics and how he is a machine and that he can work food through his system in like 5 hours. It all comes back to poop at the end of the day. Everybody poops.
What the F**k happened on Wonderland. We then spent some time, as we usually do, recounting other epic runs, successes and failures. We spent time diagnosing why we didn’t finish our loop around Mt. Rainier last summer. We talked about nutrition, not being hardened enough to take on that loop, the rigor of the stretch from Longmire to Mowich, and how Graham met his maker and needed to get the hell off the mountain ASAP. It’s always fun to recount these experiences. They live forever.
And of course….silence. Trail talk is also a lot about not talking at all. There are long stretches where we are running in line and no one speaks for 30+ minutes. We are just in our heads, slogging it out, trying to listen to our bodies, appreciating the gift of being out there, and just hoping it both lasts forever and ends as soon as possible (yes, you can hold both of those truths). Fun, right? Running with friends where you don’t feel like you have to make conversation is the best thing ever.
So there you have it. This is a rare, inside look at Trail Talk in all its glory. Sometimes it’s better than this. Sometimes it’s not. You never know what you’re going to get as Forrest Gump reminds us. But what I will always get is the gratitude that comes with having friends who share a desire to push their limits but not take themselves too seriously. These are guys that have their own lives, much of which I don’t know anything about. But when we get together, under the darkness of the early morning, put on those headlamps and move on the trail, it is just us and little Trail Talk.