holy mountain.

Tree roots and any form of an incline are now my enemies.

I got a little crazy in me on Friday and decided it was a good idea to take part in a pilgrimage to Holy Mountain in the town of Pribram, Czech Republic.

So the story of the pilgrimage is:

Svata Hora/Holy Mountain by the city of Pribram (approx. 40 miles SW from Prague) has been one of the most important Czech pilgrimage sites since the 17th Century.  For the people of Prague, Svata Hora was the usual one-day walk destination until communism. Communist actually did not ban the spiritual life, just limited it to activities that were easy to control and were invisible to those not attending. For that reason, a small group of students in the 1950’s decided to walk from Prague to Svata Hora at night, and the current students revived this idea in the early 1990’s, and have been walking once a year since then.

We left at 7:45pm from Prague, walked for 2 miles and stopped at a restaurant. We left the restaurant at 11:15pm and didn’t stop walking after that until 9:45AM.

The distance is 54 kms (33 miles)  on forest paths through the Brdy Mountains.

That is like me deciding on a whim to just walk from St. Paul to Minnetonka or Chicago to Wheaton. I don’t know why I thought this would be an interesting thing to do, because its not like I could really take in the sights until 7am when the sun rose and at that point it was hard to relish the beauty.

The first few miles we were all walking in a state of ignorant bliss, we had no idea what to expect. Then things started to get difficult;Vanessa fell flat on the ground at least 3 times in the fist mile, Catherine tripped over a tree stump and did an air flip and every one else was constantly tripping over the tree roots and rocks. Finally, our eyes adjusted to the darkness and our bodies started to anticipate what was ahead of us. But it was so hard.

I will go ahead and say this was probably one of the hardest things I have ever done, one of the most physically demanding things. And it’s not like I don’t exercise-last week I took part in a race here in Prague which was a 2 mile uphill run to the top of Petrin Hill and once you got to the top you had to run up the 300 stairs to the top of the Petrin Tower (it is a replica of the Eiffel Tower, just smaller of course). I thought THAT was hard, I would gladly run that race 3 more times in a row before hiking 33 miles.

I suppose I am still in aftershock mode, and I will appreciate this in the future. I am glad I did it – so I know I will never do it again- but it was also an intense physical feat for me. So in the end I guess it was worth it, but I’m not convinced yet.