In the Summer of 2012, my brother in law and I decided to do the 100 mile wilderness – the last 100 miles of the Appalachian Trail that ends in Maine at Mount Katahdin. For two months we did all the planning (really the blind leading the blind as neither of us had done anything like an 8-10 day hike with everything that we would need packed on our backs). And so two weeks after the birth of our third child – we took off (perhaps that was sign #1 that this trip shouldn’t have started in the first place).

We drove up the night before we were going to start hiking and stayed at a cabin at the start of the trail. The next morning, like two elementary kids on the first day of school we woke up all jazzed up and ready to go, put our 48 pound packs on (we weighed them…sign #2 to rethink this trip: if it’s summer time and your pack weighs 48 pounds, you need to open your pack and find at least 8 pounds of stuff to remove. 48# feels “light” on day 1…and that’s it), found the start of the trail and started hiking. The first 3 miles, out of sheer adrenaline and excitement, we couldn’t stop talking – covering life, philosophy, dreams, hopes, mistakes made, kids, family….

And then something just didn’t seem right.

We hadn’t seen a white marker on a tree in quite some time. We seemed to be on some sort of logging trail. And we just ended up in someone’s backyard (seriously).

We knock on the person’s door.

“Is this is the Appalachian Trail?”

“Yeah. It’s right over there,” he says while pointing.

Ok so we’re not that far off. We turn to walk away and get back on the trail. Relieved.

And then Jon turns around and asks a very important question, “If we get back on that, are we headed towards Long Pond Stream (a lean to area that we were going to stay at)?”

The man sizes us up, probably realizing our packs look way too full to have any sort of experience….and we don’t have beards. “Which direction are you trying to head?”

“North.”

“I’m sorry to say, you are heading south.”

The next three miles back to our starting point were a little less…chatty.

Six miles into our hike….and we end up back where we started. Day 1: We covered 12 miles but only a net of 6, already behind schedule.

Fast forward to three days into the hike. In our tent the elephant in the room question get asked, “Are we going to finish this thing?” For a variety of reasons we decide to once again turn around and go back to the start to head home.

Over the weeks I’d run into people asking, “Hey how was that hike you were doing?” Each time it was asked it stung. All that I could think was that we failed. We didn’t finish. All I wanted to do was list all the reasons why we “had to” turn around. And so I would list them. Heat. Sickness. Baby at home. Behind schedule. They were reasons but I used them as excuses to soften, what in my eyes, was failure.

We want to succeed. You have a child, you want to raise that child well. You try out for the team, you want to make the team. You decide you want to lose weight, you want to actually lose that weight. You get a barbell on your back to make a lift, you want to accomplish that lift. It’s not often when things don’t go according to plan that you raise your hand and run around looking for high fives saying, “Wohoo! I didn’t do what I really had my mind set on doing!!!”

But maybe it’s in the “failures” where we learn how to succeed. I was just meeting with our dietitian yesterday who I personally hired (for myself) because I know what I’m doing right now is not working (in my eyes, harshly put, I’m failing). She was going through her assessment of my nutrition and she asked, “What are the barriers you have in that particular area?” Really, what is preventing you, Marc, from accomplishing what you say you want to accomplish? It wasn’t a question to beat me up and for me to start seeing all the spots I was “failing.” The power of that question was to look at the fault, because anything that you feel is not working needs to be acknowledged and addressed, and then USE that to build a new path. But if I hadn’t made the mistakes I wouldn’t know what needed fixing. I would never have been able to say, “Well that didn’t work so let’s try this.”

I have been on two multi-day hikes over the last few years. You better believe I went back to my google doc (because that’s what I do – collect data in google docs) before those multi-day hikes and tried new approaches based off of what I saw didn’t work.

You may have gained weight you didn’t want to or stopped exercising for awhile or had to turn around on a hike that you wanted to finish. Here’s what we have to choose: wallow in what’s not going the way you want it to OR plan a new course learning from what you did.

Your choice.