The story below is an excerpt from our Nov./Dec. 2014 issue. For the rest of this story and more like it subscribe today, view our digital edition or download our FREE iOS app!
Beth Macy, a journalist based in Roanoke, Va., is the author of “Factory Man: How One Furniture-Maker Fought Offshoring, Stayed Local, and Saved an American Town,” (Little, Brown & Co.). It will become an HBO miniseries, produced by Tom Hanks.
David Hungate
Beth Macy and Tom Landon
Beth Macy and Tom Landon on Mill Mountain with rescue dogs Charley and Mavis.
As chill-seeking pilgrimages go, my little mountain in the middle of my small city is not the most obvious. At just 1,740 feet, Mill Mountain is a baby bump amid the Blue Ridge Mountains. It’s tucked along the outline of a geological thumbprint that surrounds Roanoke, Virginia, where its true claim to fame is the gloriously tacky jewel adorning its peak: the world’s largest neon star.
But Mill Mountain has become a balm to me, a kind of walking worry doll for my 24-year marriage. Ten years ago, on the eve of my 40th birthday, I was staring down the threat of type II diabetes. I was working too hard at a mostly sedentary job.
At home, I was often too busy checking work e-mail to ever fully disengage. I fretted at not being with the people I love most: my husband, Tom, and our two teenage sons.
I returned to my first love for help: sweat. There was almost no fitness trend I didn’t take on, from hot yoga and tai chi to cycling and gluten-free. The most extreme ended not in buoyed health but in damaged appendages. “Pulverized,” the hand surgeon said of the bones in my left hand after a mountain-bike tumble.
“Add more weight to your hang-cleans!” admonished the CrossFit instructor 20 years my junior. I did, promptly ripping my right rotator cuff.
Running was too hard on my right heel – “plantar fasciitis,” the orthopedist labeled the throbbing heel pain.
“You’re no spring chicken,” my octogenarian mother scolded. At 45, I was still 10 pounds overweight, and my blood-glucose levels were borderline high. Plus, for all of my fads, I now had the unencumbered use of only one appendage – my left foot.
Still, I could walk, and with hills dotting my every vista, it seemed silly not to. My husband, still skinny but with a burgeoning beer belly, was keen to join me on the trails of Mill Mountain, 10 minutes from our house. ...