Trusting My Training Got Me to Havasu Falls
Havasu Falls is this epic place. It’s photographed all the time. It has these amazing turquoise waters and it’s to the west of the Grand Canyon. It’s part of the Havasupai Reservation and it’s this one place on my life list that I really wanted to go.
Permits are difficult to get. In fact, on February 1st they go live, and within a few hours, they’re gone.
The first part of the hike didn’t intimidate me that much. I mean, it was 12 miles in and out of the canyon, but there was this other part…
It’s called Mooney Falls.
Mooney Falls is this absolute sheer drop down 100 feet and essentially you are holding on to a wet chain, traversing this terrain that is like little notches carved into the rock. And I’m afraid of heights.
So, as I started to prepare for this hike, I remember telling my husband, “Listen, we’re going to go to Havasu Falls, it’s going to be amazing. We’re just going to camp two nights, and there this other part… it sounds really great, but it sounds really dangerous and I don’t think we’re going to do it.”
But I’d started to meet with my friend, Jay Jacobs, who was part of The Biggest Loser. He’s a Wellness Navigator. I shared that I really wanted to take on this hike with him and, together, we started to come up with a plan to do it.
What I learned through preparing for this hike and deciding that I wanted to train for the hard part, was that if you come up with a plan and you follow through with the work, you can get yourself ready for some of the scariest, most frightening, terrifying things of your life.
I worked with Jay to come up with things that would expose me to the kind of movements that I wasn’t used to doing. Things like stepping on the laddermill at the YMCA, this moving ladder, so I could get into the habit of moving my feet up a ladder. Because as somebody who struggled with weight, I hate ladders. As somebody who struggled with heights, I hate ladders.
I started using things like the Versa climber and doing TRX classes so I could trust myself with my bodyweight, and feel like I could pull myself up in a moment of need if my foot slipped on the slippery rock.
There was another part of the training, which we do in binge eating therapy a lot, called exposure therapy.
Now, I couldn’t go and descend a sheer face of a rock to prepare, but I could watch other people doing it. I went on YouTube and watched videos. Everybody’s got a GoPro these days and a lot of people film themselves going down this sheer face of the rock. Every day before I left for that hike, I watched somebody else go down Mooney Falls.
By the time I was ready to go to Havasu Falls, not only was I physically trained, but I was mentally trained.
Yes, I almost backed out two times.
There was a moment where I said to my husband, “Isn’t this enough? Let’s go back!”
But when he said, “No, I’ll go down, I’ll just meet you at the top.”
I said, “No, no, I really want to do this.
By the time I got there, I knew every step of the way. I knew how to traverse. I knew the part where there was a cave. I knew the part where there was a ladder. I knew exactly how many steps it took people to do it. So I was ready by the time I arrived.
So, what I learned from this experience is that most things in life are trainable, including the mental part. That it is equally important to think about how to conquer something physically, emotionally, mentally.
In fact, when I climbed Kilimanjaro the first time, I would lay on the yoga mat in Savasana, that part where you looks like you’re sleeping, and I would imagine myself at the top of the mountain before I ever got there.
Don’t forget the part of your training your mind of the possibilities that lie ahead.