Exhaustion Reboot

Exhaustion Reboot

John Paul Derryberry

I slogged through the last 6.2 miles of the marathon in Duluth, Minnesota. I sat utterly exhausted, with no energy to move another step. My wife looked at me and asked if there was anything I needed. My only reply was hot dogs, just hot dogs. I have no clue why hot dogs were my craving, but I do know it was the only two words my brain could string together. I wholeheartedly believe that, to any question I was asked at those moments, my answer would have been, hot dogs.  The last backpacking trip I took, we traversed 9 miles on Saturday and had hoofed it another 6 in the morning to cover 15 miles in 24 hours while carrying 40 pounds on my back. We stopped at the correctly named Picnic Lake for lunch. I again found myself exhausted and dreaming of hot dogs. The view was everything you could imagine and all the reasons we backpack. Yet, I turned my sleeping pad into a pillow and laid out on the hard ground and just stared up the blue sky. I was too exhausted to bother with the view at that moment. 

I laid there thinking about the connection between exhaustion from a marathon and backpacking. It occurred to me that our brain's inability to think about much at all in these moments of woozy tiredness is essential. I stretched out on a rock-solid piece of dirt, and it felt like the king-size bed in the best room in Vegas. I chewed on a bar and a couple of chocolates pretending they were ketchup, onion, celery salt-covered steamed hotdogs in a warmed bun.  I was fully present in the moment because I was too tired to think of anything else and so happy to not be moving at all. I dozed in and out of an afternoon nap after finishing my lunch. A small amount of breeze off the lake reached me through the trees. At those moments, I wouldn’t have minded staying in this spot forever, frozen in this place where only simple thoughts could cross my mind. I scrolled through the pictures on my phone from the last year and smiled at my girls, my dog, my family, and my life. 

Something happens to our brains and body when we allow ourselves to get that fatigued; something unusual, the worries about life, our mental health symptoms, and anxiety about whatever cannot penetrate the fatigue. It’s like our brain, and its thought patterns scream mercy and give up running every bad scenario a multiple times a day through our heads.  It’s almost an exhaustion reboot of our whole system. The reason we feel so refreshed after this physical exhaustion is rooted in this process of putting our mental and emotional health in a place where it has to turn off for a couple of minutes. We are free from our anchors. The moments of dropping that type of metaphorical weight can be life altering. 

An hour passed too quickly, just like the recovery period after a marathon and our time finished at Picnic Lake. We must move on to make our timetable for the trip. I don’t mind strapping the weight back on, because of the rebooting of my thoughts and feelings. I’m neither stuck in the past or yearning for the future. I found myself entirely at the moment. I breathed in the best fresh air, realized how great life is anchor-free. I just needed someone to air drop me some hot dogs.