Snowshoeing Uphill When You're Out of Shape and Mentally Ill

and what I mean by you, is me.

First challenge: Bending over to strap those babies on your feet. You might have to hold your breath while persisting with this struggle, and if you don't have to, it must be great being perfect.

Second challenge: Trying to get up the three foot snow bank with those babies on your feet, and not falling backwards onto the road and into oncoming traffic.

At some point, later, you might fondly remember this as "seemed like a good opportunity" to end your suffering. But now you’ve got to focus, utilizing every shred of strength your short pathetic legs have to compel yourself up on top of the snow land that you will be trekking across because you agreed to it.

Everything is so lovely. The sun’s rays shine down upon the snow covered leaves, branches, and your sweaty head. Yet, you congratulate yourself on your correct choice of clothing layers. Its like you were born in the winter wilderness.

You reach the bottom of the hill that you must climb up, and notice, chuckling to yourself since your partner is a mile ahead of you, that its pretty darn steep!

Third challenge: Plodding upward, your legs are surprisingly limber. However, just halfway up — probably more like a quarter of the way up, you feel your heart beat against your lungs in desperate protest to escape from your throat.

Stopping what seems like every nano-second, you carefully calculate how long it will take to reach the top and then to the end of your trek. Your eyes roam over the landscape. First priority is shelter, then making a fire...

You finally make it to the top. The flat land is a tremendous relief. You feel like making snow angels, but intuitively decide against it due to a suspicion that you won’t be able to get up off of the ground afterward.

Fourth Challenge: Why are there so many darn hills? Why did you agree to this? Why can’t you breathe? How did you become so sedentary? Suddenly, being lost in this frozen wilderness seems justified, you lazy slob.

You love cocoon living but your body does not.

You love to decompress on the couch with a book or some writing nonsense, but your body continues to accumulate mass of the wrong kind. Until your snow pants don’t button. Or zip. And you convince yourself that all you ever really need to wear are sweatshirts and yoga pants, because, comfort!

Fifth challenge: You approach the top of the steep hill, making a visual appeal to the trees aligning the trail, “do not break me”.

You progress downward, legs sideways, toe-in the snow. Several times your shoe slips from its tenuous grasp and slides further ahead of you. You’re now demonstrating the snowshoe splits. Except part of you is sinking into the ground.

Your arm is completely submerged in snow, then your knees buckle and your face hits the soft white crystals. You don’t know what this is demonstrating, but its fairly ridiculous. There you are, kneeling on the side of the hill like you’ve lost something. Probably your dignity.

You wonder what it would feel like if you rolled yourself into a ball, like a ham tied in string, and careened down the hill.

Sixth challenge: Eventually you find yourself at the end of this trek. You’re feeling a sense of delusional euphoria, having accomplished this physical feat. As you head straight back to your dumpy cocoon, you recognize that an even greater challenge awaits you.

Just whatever are you going to do tomorrow?