#34: Why Would Anyone walk from Mexico to Canada?

Staying motivated through endurance endeavours

The first time that I climbed a volcano was steep, hot, and barren (as volcanoes tend to be). When I reached the top, did I look around jubilantly at the Mars-like immensity, in awe of our beautiful planet and my capable body? Oh no. I sat down, feeling undone and furious, wondering what had possessed me to agree to go into this so poorly prepared.

I only had to put one foot in front of the other for a few hours. I suppose I could have asked one of the athletic runners around me to fetch a helicopter, although I don’t remember thinking of a way out.

But what happens when you’re on a long, long trail? When you walk, walk again, pitch a tent, get back on your sore feet, every day? What happens when you have to sustain your motivation for several months? What happens when you have a lot of time to think about quitting?

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Photo by Sébastien Goldberg on Unsplash

Psychology researcher Ken Sheldon¹ studied the motivations of 93 hikers² before and after they walked the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT)—an arduous, 2,650 mile trail that links Mexico and Canada.

Each summer nearly 1,000 people attempt to complete the trail, Sheldon writes in a 2020 paper: “[A]bout 60% of thru-hikers actually finish the 5-month marathon—those who can average the required 18 miles a day without succumbing to injuries, fatigue, or sheer loss of will.”

This is the hike that author Cheryl Strayed (partially) retraced in her memoir Wild, which was adapted into a movie starring Reese Witherspoon in 2014.

I’ve written earlier (for instance here and here) about the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation: doing things because you enjoy the process vs. being driven by external ends. A lot of lay articles—this newsletter included—tout intrinsic motivation as one key to a happy, creative life, but things are more complicated than that.

“Intrinsic motivation can be undermined by controlling forces or difficulties within the environment”—like the hardships of the PCT—to be replaced by extrinsic forms of motivations, Sheldon explains. In Wild, Strayed writes about her motives morphing on the trail³:

“I’d set out to hike the trail so that I could reflect upon my life, to think about everything that had broken me and make myself whole again. But the truth was, at least so far, I was consumed only with my most immediate and physical suffering.”

“I was eager to hike away not so much because I felt like hiking, but because I had to. In order to reach each resupply point on roughly the day I’d anticipated, I had a schedule to keep.”

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Here are the different forms of motivation on the Self-Determination Theory’s continuum:

Self-Determination @centerforSDT

You probably recognize this if you follow #SelfDeterminationTheory This is just an updated representation of the Motivation Continuum we're working on. Feel free to use and cite @centerforSDT

Sheldon says that two types were particularly relevant to the hikers in his study:

• introjected motivation, which means ‘forcing’ oneself to do something to evade guilt or shame (“I will feel like a failure if I didn’t hike the PCT”)

• identified motivation, when one performs a behaviour because it is “a source of meaning and value, even if it is not enjoyable” (“hiking the PCT is personally important to me”)

He found that:

• the type of motivations that hikers reported before starting the PCT did not predict whether they completed the trail, or what distance they covered

• increases in introjected and identified motivation during the hike were linked with performance

“finishing long and grueling projects may require developing greater internal motivation en route. This can help people’s performance and also provide them with well-being benefits.”

“many PCT hikers chronicle the processes by which their initial exuberance dissipated, as difficulties and injuries mounted. In this case the second-most autonomous form of motivation on the [continuum], identified motivation, may be helpful.”

I asked Sheldon if we can decide to develop that kind of motivation.

If we understand the importance of having intrinsic and identified motivation, we might “find new ways to enjoy aspects of the activity, or think of new ways that the activity connects to [our] identity and value system,” he says. But he admits there’s not much research on that.

Also, convincing ourselves that we have autonomous motivation—even when we don’t really—might have positive effects. “We call this ‘grit’ (I will embrace my goal even if I’m not sure I like it), rather than ‘fit’ (the goal expresses who the person is in an objective way),” Sheldon wrote to me.

This chimes with what Natalie Chudacoff, a PCT hiker and camp director, told writer Caroline Benner in this Washington Post article:

“With a couple hundred miles to go in the hike, she had had enough. So she told herself this part of the hike was ‘final exams.’ ‘Like grad school, you don’t quit because finals are hard,’ she told me. Thinking of her larger purpose, which was serving the youth who attend her camp, helped her finish.”

Strayed also writes how being a hiker helped defined her identity, before and during her journey:

“But a woman who walks alone in the wilderness for eleven hundred miles? I’d never been anything like that before. I had nothing to lose by giving it a whirl.”

“Basking in the attention of the people who gathered around me, I didn’t just feel like a backpacking expert. I felt like a hard-ass motherfucking Amazonian queen.”

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Photo by Juliane Liebermann on Unsplash

These concepts also make sense to me when applied to other areas of life. Take parenting. What keeps us going for years on end, through endless sibling disputes, picking up toys and food on the floor, wiping bums? Even the most joyful game of hide-and-seek can get old; even the most tender of cuddles can leave me feeling touched out after a while.

Maybe thinking: This is me. I’m a parent. Caring for my children is what I value. (Or even: I’d be a failure if I didn’t look after my children!) Maybe that helps us through.

1. I quoted Sheldon’s research on Christmas and materialism in this post:

#8: Intrinsically Motivated Holidays

2. Out of these, almost half said they had only backpacked a few times before, or had never backpacked at all. [I’ve updated the post on 20 February 2022 to correct the number of hikers in the final sample.]

3. In the book, I couldn’t find that line from the movie when Strayed says she thinks about quitting “every two minutes or so”.