Highest Duty_ My Search for What Really Matters - Chesley B. Sullenberger [64]
“I think I’m in love,” she told me one day, “…with exercise.”
Lorrie would go on to be a fitness expert on the San Francisco ABC-TV affiliate, hosting regular segments about how women can incorporate the outdoors in their quest for better health. And she takes groups of women on regular hikes, listening to the stories of their lives as they walk, and sharing her own.
“The body that betrayed me for so long responded to the outdoors,” she explains to them. “Exercise gave me the confidence that had eluded me. It made me a better mother, wife, and friend. And I hiked off those thirty-five extra pounds.”
Lorrie is frank. “As women, we have to become comfortable with our bodies. That’s crucial. A woman who isn’t comfortable will turn off the lights at night and say to her husband, ‘Please don’t touch me.’ When a woman is happy in her own skin, she’s more willing to let her partner be close.”
For years now, Lorrie has included me as a character in her repertoire of inspirational stories. I’m not sure I want to know everything discussed high in those mountains about our private lives. But I’m happy with Lorrie’s basic message: “Hiking,” she says, “has reinvigorated my marriage.”
IT WAS Lorrie’s idea. She wanted us to hike together to the top of California’s Mount Whitney, which is in the Sierra Nevada range, southeast of where we are in Northern California. At 14,505 feet, it’s the highest peak in the contiguous United States.
This was fairly early in Lorrie’s discovery of hiking, and she arranged for eight couples to go together. She got the necessary U.S. Forest Service hiking permit, but one by one, for scheduling reasons or because they hadn’t trained well enough, each of the other couples dropped out. The sixteen-person hike became a two-person hike—me and Lorrie—but we decided, what the heck, we’d still do it.
We trained for the adventure faithfully. Whenever I was home from a trip, we’d put on our running shoes and run over to a shopping center a mile from our house, where there is a series of stairs leading up a hill to a parking lot. We’d run up and down the stairs fifteen or twenty times, and then we’d jog home.
We kept going to the gym to lift weights, and we went on practice hikes locally, carrying weights in our backpacks. We also did a lot of biking up Mount Diablo, just northeast of Danville.
Lorrie believes that to meet your goals in life, it’s important to write them down. But that’s not enough. You also need to take what she and others call “authentic action” every day to achieve them. That means you have to knock on a door, or make a phone call, or do something concrete to get you closer to your goal. When training to hike the tallest mountain in the continental United States, you have to get out every day and prepare. She made sure we did that. In the middle of our training, I hit a patch of gravel while riding a mountain bike on Mount Diablo, breaking my pelvis. I was out of work for six weeks, and it made getting back to preparations for Mount Whitney that much more challenging.
Lorrie felt that, not unlike our adoption journey, training for the hike would be good for us as a couple. We needed each other for emotional support. When one of us was tired, the other would offer encouragement. And these moments of rallying for each other would be good practice for the support we’d have to give each other on the actual hike.
Our ascent of Mount Whitney was set for September 2, 1999. We got a babysitter for the girls, and rather than driving the seven hours southeast from our house to the mountain, we decided to rent a Cessna Turbo 182RG (a four-seat, single-engine plane) and fly there. It was pretty romantic, just the two of us, heading off to test ourselves in the wilderness.
We planned to complete the hike in one day, but that meant we’d have to start very early. We stayed in a motel near the mountain, woke up at 3 A.M., and were on the trail at four-fifteen, wearing our headlamps and backpacks, ready to go. The trailhead starts at 8,300 feet, and if we could make it to the top and back, it