What Hiking the Narrows Taught Me About My Body and Fitness

Last month my family went on vacation to Zion National Park, and my father, my boyfriend, and I spent a day hiking the Virgin River Narrows. The experience was an eye-opening one for me.

I should say first that I’m not usually the sort of person who “lives in my body.” That is, I don’t spend very much time thinking about physical things, and instead I tend to focus on “heady” subjects–my thoughts, ideas, and emotions. Much to my detriment I’m sure, when I’m working on an interesting research project or wrapped up in a stimulating conversation, I often forgo eating and sleeping. Moreover, motivating myself to exercise is difficult because physical challenges don’t excite me, and the mindless repetitiveness of exercises like jogging and swimming and lifting weights bores me.

But the experience of hiking the Narrows made it next to impossible for me either to be bored with exercise or to ignore my body. The Narrows was truly like nothing I had experienced before. The complete “top-down” hike, which we did, is a 16-mile trek, along–and sometimes in–the Virgin River. True to its name, the Narrows is a narrow slot canyon, and, on either side of you as you walk, carved red sandstone cliffs jut up into the sky, sometimes as much as 2000 feet. In places the canyon is wide enough for small banks to form on the edges of the river, but in its narrowest points it is only 20 or 30 feet wide and the water reaches from one canyon wall to the other.

As I hiked, I found myself constantly bombarded with physical stimuli, stimuli that forced me to pay attention to my senses as I usually don’t: the cold of the water and the force of the current on my feet, the scratch of undergrowth on my legs, the magnified roar of the water and our voices as they echoed on the canyon walls, the striking contrast of the red sandstone against the blue of the sky above. The glut of beauty around me made me exhilaratingly aware of my senses and of my body.

To be fair, though, I should also admit that the hike made me uncomfortably aware of my physical limitations. I have bad knees, and after 12 or so miles of hiking, bending them became quite painful. I even started to look for patches of deeper water that would cushion the movement of my legs and, because the water was cold, numb my pain. Maybe because of dehydration or just physical strain, I also developed an irritating nosebleed–never serious enough to really warrant Kleenex but just bothersome enough to make me notice it. And of course, I was simply tired. Since I don’t exercise much, 16 miles was a considerable trek for me. Accompanying the euphoric feeling of my senses in full alert, then, came a disconcerting cognizance of my physical “unfitness.”

Unfitness really is the word I want here. It expresses, of course, that I wasn’t fit in the sense of being out of shape. But, more than that, it also captures a deeper epiphany I had about my body as I rode the shuttle back to our campsite after our hike: that is, that my body was disappointingly unfit for or unworthy of nature, its natural habitat. What do I mean by this strange statement? I mean that on the one hand, my body’s responses to the hike’s sensual pleasures made me realize that natural landscapes like the Narrows are my natural habitat, my home. But on the other hand, the pain and discomfort I experienced on the hike made me face my own feebleness and my inability to function in my newfound home.

I suppose for the Christian, I’m merely restating the old teaching that humans were created to be perfect beings and to live in a perfect world, Eden (or Zion!), but that they fell and are now too sinful to live in paradise. Under such a paradigm, my unfitness is an inevitable state which I must pray to change. For the pessimists I hear on NPR, I suppose my struggle to hike the Narrows is just another example of the descent of American culture and its disinterest in the natural world and physical health. From their point of view, my unfitness is something about which to dialogue, worry, and write books.

While I think both of these approaches have their merits, I have chosen to deal with my unfitness in another way–a strikingly physical and unintellectual way. I do enough praying and dialoging, worrying and writing, and, for me at least, the problem of unfitness requires a more hands-on solution. Namely, something rather unoriginal and anticlimactic: exercise. For the past month, I’ve been trying to spend more time “out of my mind” (!) and “in my body” which usually amounts to spending a few minutes 3-4 times a week on the treadmills or elliptical machines in my apartment complex. I’ll admit, running in a fitness room isn’t nearly as exciting as hiking the Narrows, but, in light of what I learned on my hike about sensual stimulation, I’ve been trying to pay more attention to my senses as I exercise in order to make it more interesting. I ask myself: what does my breathing sound like? how does my sweat feel? how–I ask myself, embarrassed–does it smell? how does my body look as it exercises? I am, after all, a bit of nature, and if I can’t enjoy the beauty of a stunning canyon or breathtaking vista, I can at least enjoy whatever small curiosities I can find in myself. I feel more motivated to exercise too if I think of it as preparation for returning to the wild, for returning home. I try to think of my exercise as “fitting” myself to the beauty I encountered on my hike, beauty I hope to encounter again. In the end, I suppose my solution isn’t very original or earth-shattering, but for me at least it’s a start and it’s what I can do.