It’s about time I tell the story of how an overweight, out of breath, constantly swearing 27 year old boy adopted his first real passion. The kind of passion that makes you think “Where was this when I was younger?”
It was hiking. The first time I did it properly, I weighed over 90 kilograms (198 pounds) and hadn’t moved seriously in years.
It was May 2020. The first COVID restrictions had just been lifted, and a friend invited me to walk a trail that descended from a hilltop village to the sea — about three hundred meters of elevation, nothing crazy.
A new feeling arose while I was sitting on the rocks, watching the sea and eating an apple. One that can be explained in only one way:
This is where I am supposed to be.
The descent was beautiful in a way that surprised me. The ascent nearly killed me.
My lifestyle was completely wrong: I was overweight and sedentary, and putting myself under a crazy sun, climbing back up what I had just come down — oh, boy, that’s tough. My body had no idea this kind of effort even existed. I made it, barely, and went home destroyed.
That was just the start. I went on another hike soon after that, and it asked my body for an even bigger effort. That continues to this day: it’s not over, I refuse to let it be.
I grew up in a region where natural beauty is insanely common. My childhood summers were spent in mountain villages, so I grew up with my heart closer to the mountains than to the sea. It wasn’t my choice, though: mountains were just where my family went in August. They had nothing to do with me.
Luckily, the village I went to during the summer is home to one of the most famous hiking trails in the country. That was the first real hike of my life, years before the one I just told about. I was stubborn enough to convince my father and sister to walk this hike with me, and it was extraordinary. The sights, the sea, the dopamine; I was having a total blast. When it ended I had no framework for what to do with the experience, no concept that people did this voluntarily and repeatedly for pleasure. The thing became an amazing memory, but it died where it stood.
It took a pandemic, a diet, and a friend’s invitation to resurrect it.
What pushes a 30+ man to get out of bed at 5 AM in the weekends to drive 1+ hour and walk 10+ kilometers uphill in the woods or under a scorching Sun?
It’s not the scenery, or at least not just that. It’s more of a feeling, something that happens when the body is moving through nature for long enough — when resonance is established, the mind stops thinking and starts actually living. The sounds, the colors, even the smells: all of this wakes up a part of me that is usually asleep, but craves waking time. I become one with the environment surrounding me. Where there is no schedule, no job, and no traffic, what remains is the trees, the grass, the sky and the vastness of the mountains.
Nothing else does this for me. Music, reading, karate: I love them all, but when I occupy my time with them, I do; when I hike, I am.
I think there’s an evolutionary argument here: the human body is designed by millennia of evolution for exactly this kind of movement through exactly this kind of environment, and that the glass and concrete cities we’ve built are a very recent deviation from millions of years of something else. When I’m on a trail, something in my nervous system recognizes the context, and again, it tells me that this is where I am supposed to be.
I do it alone most of the time now. Not by choice — I moved to another region for a job, the friend who introduced me lives far away, and the alternative was stopping altogether, so I adapted.
Hiking alone, I discovered that the solitude of a mountain is nothing like the solitude I grew up with.
The loneliness I knew as a teenager was a condition imposed by the absence of connection, filled with screens and food and the constant, relentless awareness of not having anywhere to be. That loneliness is absolutely useless, it gave me nothing and didn’t help me build character. That’s what I’m trying to do right now, well past my thirtieth birthday.
Walking alone in the mountains is one of the most rewarding experiences one can live. Navigation, physical endurance, decisions at every fork in the path. It demands your body and your mind, and it gives you the world back. The loneliness is just a side effect of being somewhere beautiful without someone to point at things.
Often, in the middle of a long climb, I find a kind of clarity that I can’t manufacture any other way. When you have hundreds of meters of elevation to cover, the mind stops making excuses and starts focusing on the body’s effort. This is extremely simple, it’s our very human nature, and it clears our heads of all the cluttering and background noise. When nothing else but reality is there, decisions that seemed complicated become obvious.
You can live very special moments on a mountain, apart from the ones that make you question your sanity when your body isn’t in the right condition yet. On mountain summits, the arrival often features a final, steep walk that rewards you with the sudden opening of the view, the physical proof that the effort was worth it. On forest trails, it’s different: sometimes I come around a bend and find a clearing, a particular quality of light, a silence so complete it’s almost a noise of its own, and something in me recognizes that this is where I am supposed to be.
I think all hobbies should be like that. Despite the pace of modern life, not everything has to be productive or make you money. Sometimes you just need the experience of being present in the moment, enjoying yourself.
I found this at twenty-seven, which is much, much later than it should have been. But I found it, and it has been mine ever since. Today I organize my hikes alone, I drive there alone, I walk alone (my shadow is the only one that walks beside me, for those of you who know this song), I return alone. Every logistical detail handled, every decision made, every kilometer completed under my own power.
Before I discovered I could do hard things, the mountains already knew. Rebuilding your relationship with nature is a crucial part of discovering who you really are; if you ever do it, maybe you’ll find out that this is where you are supposed to be.