The Athlete | 4 June 2022

Being an athlete, I was no stranger to trials of physical and mental endurance.  This was just so much harder than I expected.

BNR Response

The drop had only occurred 46 hours ago, leaving me alone in the relatively forgiving wilderness of the Pacific Northwest.  When I’d signed up to participate in the B-list celebrity adventure series, I’d pictured more of a metropolitan scavenger hunt type competition rather than outright drink-your-own-pee-to-stay-hydrated kind of survival exercise.  It made me wish I’d paid more attention when my boyfriend was watching those “survive for money” shows on Netflix.

I cruised through the first day, still full from my sushi dinner the night before and buoyed by adrenaline.  My sleep, under the canopy of an ancient Redwood, had been interrupted many times throughout the night as the local wildlife emerged in the safety of darkness to investigate their newest neighbor.  The second day greeted me with sensations my privilege had protected me from my whole 31 years: real hunger, real thirst, fear, desperation, and panic.

I’d objected to killing animals for food but had finally resigned myself to sustaining on fish.  Not two full days into the excursion, my empty belly began reminding me at increasingly close intervals of my inability to catch anything.

Fresh water was only slightly less elusive, but I had found a rapidly flowing creek that provided me with immediate relief and allowed me to fill my vessels.  I forgot how sweet water tasted, full of minerals and the ride it had taken to get to me.

Days three and four came and went without much of note – some fungi and berries for my tummy and all the water drunk.

All the while I kept trekking onward, the ultimate goal being to complete 30 days and 60 miles’ journey to an abandoned cabin to be reunited with the show’s producers.  I was obligated to capture most of my misadventures via my GoPro, and for the life of me I couldn’t imagine how even the best editor in Hollywood would be able to piece together five minutes of watchable footage from my four days out.

The isolation and hunger afforded my mind space to play tricks on me.  I remembered long-forgotten tales of others’ outdoor escapades: the fictional story of a man who slowly succumbed to hypothermia after crashing his car in a snowbank less than one mile from the dinner party he was headed to.  The seafaring couple who, after traveling asea together for 28 years, capsized their boat and drowned when  an unexpected thunderstorm off of Puget Sound ruined their afternoon sail.  The mountaineers who had the poor luck of having a large tree fall on them one day into their hike, all but killing one of them instantaneously, the other two nearly dying during a week-long rescue effort.  And now, here I was, a young Olympic swimmer with a decent Instagram presence and no more outdoor survival instinct or knowledge than Yogi Berra.  I thought hourly about initiating my geo-locating SOS device to initiate my helicopter extraction.

And then suddenly, in the twilight of day six, as if a miracle or a mirage, a cabin arose in the mist at the foot of the behemoth Redwoods that had kept me company during this harrowing and humbling week in the wild.  Could I possibly have traversed the whole 60 miles in six days?  Under my normal, Under Armour-clad, Camelbak-wearing circumstances that would have been a breeze.  Damn, had I underestimated myself? 

Almost immediately my body began performing an inventory, registering that I had gone nearly two days without water and nearly four without anything more than hedgehog mushrooms to eat, and it started breaking down.  It was a phenomenon I was familiar with: once I made it through the Olympic trials, my body would exhale its own sigh of relief and get sick.  My body instinctively knew then, as it knew now, that it was safe to release and recover.

My knees buckled beneath me and I had to army crawl along the forest floor, finally clawing my way int the dilapidated lean-to.  Tunnel vision set in and things grew blurry.  Hmmm.  No one was here.  I reached for my SOS device and couldn’t get it to turn on.  I tried once.  It was growing more difficult to exert any effort.  I tried again.  Nothing.  Well, damn.