You should have seen my legs the night I finished the Appalachian Trail. Standing naked in front of a half-length mirror in a Maine hotel room so dingy and dated it should have come with complimentary mothballs, I marveled at what I had become over the past 2,200 miles. I was now a rippling sheet of endlessly lean muscle, my sinew bulging beneath mud-caked skin like some surrealist relief map of the ancient ridges I’d walked. David
might have looked this ripped, I mused to myself euphorically, had Michelangelo wielded a better chisel.
There was, however, a twinge of irritation. Although my wife, Tina, and I had transformed our bodies into aerobic-exercise automatons over the past five months, becoming more fit than we’d ever been, we’d have to wait to run she’d broken a toe during a day off, with 600 miles to go, while I had broken one three days before the summit of Mount Katahdin and the end of the AT, when a root in the 100 Mile Wilderness ripped through my trail-tatt