Bold tracks and Bagpacks

We Came for a Race. We Left as Something Else. Mercy Gitari Mudathon · Mt.Kenya · KESAL team unannounced The morning after There is a cockroach in the hotel room. I see it before I see the glorious sunrise. I am lying in bundu's, this gloriously silent, wonderfully little hotel somewhere between yesterday and a fever dream, and the first living creature that greets me on this earth, the morning after the Mudathon, is a cockroach doing casual laps near the skirting board. Like it too survived an obstacle course yesterday. Like it is simply cooling down. I do not scream. I do not call reception. I lie very still, stare at the ceiling, and I smile. Fair enough, mate. You earned your rest too. Outside, through a window I am too gloriously boneless to open, the green goes on forever. Kirinyaga green. Ungovernable. The kind of colour that makes Nairobi's manicured roundabout shrubs look like they need therapy. Mount Kenya sits in the middle distance not doing anything in particular e...

Awake? Very. Not because of peace, but because clarity has a way of disrupting comfort. Heartbroken? Not quite. This feels less like heartbreak and more like consequence. Self-authored. Fully owned. I misstepped. I acknowledge that without decoration. But I also left, and leaving was not a mistake. There is a quiet violence in stagnation. A space where nothing grows, nothing stretches, nothing challenges. No love, no conflict, no evolution. Just a dull, persistent nothing. The kind that exhausts you without movement. The kind that makes your body feel like it is slowly shutting down. I have come to respect that feeling. It is a signal, not a weakness. I found myself in a connection that demanded neither my mind, nor my spirit, nor my softness. No exchange, social, intellectual, or even basic care. Just presence without substance. And presence without substance is erosion. At some point, I stopped participating and started observing. The questions became louder than the conne...

  I haven’t climbed the big mountains lately. But I have been climbing. For the past few months, hiking has stretched me in ways I didn’t expect not just trails and ridgelines, but perspective. The gym followed. A few consistent sessions. A handful of runs. Spin classes that humbled my quads. A Hyrox Challenger Doubles with three fierce friends intense, wobbly, almost catastrophic, wildly alive. I have called myself strong this year. And I have also remembered that I am weak. Strangely, holding both truths at once has made me gentler. Strength without humility becomes noise. Weakness without courage becomes fear. Training the body has been training the ego too. Now I am resting. Not by choice, muscle wear insists. No workouts for a couple of weeks. The days feel longer. The evenings quieter. I do not like it. But I respect it. Because even hikers must pause. I may not have stood on dramatic peaks recently, but I have staged my own summits, in spin rooms, on gym floors, along mild...

  It’s been a minute😄 That’s how I wish to begin my writing from now on...because life doesn’t announce itself when it shifts. One moment you’re counting months, the next you’re standing at the edge of a year, wondering how it moved so fast and yet carried so much. Lately, I’ve found myself back where the old souls live...in the aisles of hardcore literature . Montaigne’s essays. Shakespeare’s tragedies. Gibran’s quiet, piercing wisdom and having a background excitement of Clarissa Pikola's Women who Run with the Wolves. Words that have survived centuries and still know exactly where to touch you. Call me old school, but there is something sacred about literature that refuses to be rushed. And somehow, in between English poems, essays, hip-hop debates, and Spotify wrapped surprises, my soul remembered itself. This season has taught me one gentle truth: Slowness is not a vice. In a world addicted to urgency, choosing to slow down is a radical act. To sip your tea withou...

  There are years that rush past you like a strong wind on a ridgeline, and then there are years that carve themselves into your bones. This one did both. It ran, stumbled, lifted, tumbled, and somehow still held my hand through every sunrise. It has been equal parts chaotic and compassionate, a beautifully disorganized universe, operating with precision beneath the surface. As the year folds itself into its final pages, I find myself sitting still, not because life has stopped, but because I finally learned how to quiet my own noise. Where Strangers Become Stories If I were to measure this year, I wouldn’t count the trophies or the tired days.  I’d count the strangers. The ones I met on trails, sweaty and breathless on mountain ridges. The ones serving me dinner on evenings when I chose solitude over crowds. The ones in boardrooms, in parks, in supermarkets, in conversation queues of life. Strangers who became friends. Friends who became familiar. Some who drifted away wi...

  It’s been a minute since I did a traverse hike. And I must have been out of my mind to think I was back in shape for one. Say what? The weather in the Aberdares is always something else, wild, moody, humbling. This year, hiking has been what I’d call polite,  not easy, but kind. The mountains have given grace. But last week, I prayed for rain. I missed the chaos, the kind that tests not just your boots, but your spirit. The Aberdare trails answered generously. The ascent up Table Mountain was brutal. The kind that leaves you talking to yourself, bargaining with your breath. My rain pants stayed forgotten somewhere at home, so the rest of me had to make peace with the soaking. But the boots held firm, my Salomons biting the mud like loyal soldiers. By the summit, the wind came from the belly of the clouds, the cold biting deep. We stayed barely ten minutes,  there was no view to steal your breath, only mist, wind, and the silent kind of triumph that doesn’t need an au...

  The Mountains, The Stillness, and the Life-Death-Life Cycle It’s been a while since I last wrote. I can’t quite explain what’s been happening, that strange vacuum where everything happens, yet nothing feels magnificent enough to record. No high-altitude mountains, no extreme gym routines, no extreme runs or walks. Just life, flowing quietly, steadily, and unhurried. Since August, that’s been me, just letting life happen. Maybe it’s Mount Kilimanjaro’s fault. A few months before, I would have blamed Mount Kenya’s altitude, but you know what they say, you come down from the mountain, and everything feels different. Only hikers might understand this feeling , a kind of serene emptiness that follows great heights. Runners call it the runner’s high ; for us, it’s altitude high sickness,  that beautiful post-mountain stillness where the body is grounded, yet the spirit still floats somewhere among the clouds. When the Mountains Go Quiet Coming down from the ...

  Just the other night, I lay awake staring at the ceiling, silently wishing it was Friday. Not because I had big weekend plans - no, because I wanted to cancel them and just sleep. But sleep wouldn’t come. And when it doesn’t, at least for me, it usually means one of two things: either I’m anxious about something, or I’m paying the painful price of skipping the gym for too long. This time, it was the latter. My arms, legs, back, and even the small muscles I didn’t know existed were staging a full-blown protest after this week’s workouts. Lesson learned: comfort has consequences. Still, I had a hike planned with my team, and there was no way I was going to bail. So I made a deal with my body - pain and I would have to coexist. We’d negotiate our way to the summit, spend the day in the wilderness, and hopefully come down not just alive, but renewed. That’s the paradox of movement. It hurts sometimes. It demands sacrifice. But in the same breath, it heals. Movement is medicine. ...

  It’s been a while since I last wrote here. Writing had quietly become a rhythm in my life, almost like breathing, something I owe not only to myself, but to the world that listens back when I share. For the last three months, books, myths, and poems have been my companions, grounding me in unexpected ways. The turning point was @Clarissa Pinkola Estés’ Women Who Run With the Wolves . To call it a book feels too small. It is a portal, into the psyche of women, into the wisdom of ancestors, into the wildness we often silence. Clarissa weaves stories like threads, reminding us that fairy tales and myths were never just “children’s tales.” They were maps, coded with symbols, showing us how to navigate love, loss, struggle, and rebirth. At first, the weight of the book almost overwhelmed me. Its stories ,  The Handless Maiden, The Skeleton Woman, The Crescent Moon Bear, La Llorona, Sealskin/Soulskin  etc, each echoed through different corners of my life. They whispered tr...

  This Sunday afternoon, under the strange glow of the September 7th red moon, my mind decided to open its floodgates. Thoughts came streaming in like uninvited guests at a house party—loud, messy, but oddly revealing. I found myself asking: what really is the game of life? Because if you look at it too closely, it feels like a rigged board. Play it well, eat your greens, run your miles, chase careers, build families, and still, the clock runs out, and you die. Play it carelessly, burn through the midnight oil of recklessness, and you still die. Either way, the exit door is the same. So what exactly are we here for? And worse—imagine spending a lifetime chasing someone who doesn’t love you, or running after jobs, relationships, or “destinies” that were never yours in the first place. You turn your back on people and places that genuinely welcome you, and instead sprint head-first into rejection, chaos, and heartbreak. You wake up one day and realize you’ve been auditioning for ...

 I climbed a mountain, but the higher I went, the more I realized— the real ascent was inside me. Between Arusha’s blur and Moshi’s song, I shed politeness like an old skin. Strangers became philosophers, altitude turned us into children of honesty. At Gilman’s Point, my body staged a rebellion. Not defeat— but wisdom, whispering: Sometimes, you conquer by turning back. Now, off the trail, I feel the same altitude rising in my mind. Detachment, visions ahead of their time, synchronicities dancing like hidden guides. I ask: Am I rewired, or simply awake? Books speak through me— Jung’s shadows, Marcus’s stillness, Gibran’s fire. Each word a river, each page a mirror. I crave solitude— mountains, hills, silence— because only in aloneness do the voices in me sing instead of scream. And I want it all— joy and grief, birth and death, music and silence, truth so raw it cuts through pretense. For life is a construct, a stream of passing waters, and I...

  The Journey Begins: A Bus, A Book, and a Breath of Relief Before I even set foot on the mountain, a man on our bus to Tanzania summed it up perfectly: “For once, I feel a sigh of relief — no pressure of work, no pressure of family, no pressure of hiking… just me, existing.” He spoke for me too. Because Kilimanjaro isn’t just a mountain. It’s a pilgrimage. Armed with Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet (which I devoured faster than I expected), I watched Arusha blur past the window, Moshi welcome us warmly, and the first communal songs of the mountain melt away the awkwardness of strangers. That night, we weren’t just hikers. We were family-in-the-making. Day One & Two: Pole Pole (Slowly, Slowly) They say pole pole in Tanzania. Slowly, slowly. And they mean it. Our first day was a test of patience more than endurance. We napped in the sun, swapped stories, laughed, and waited until nearly 4PM to actually start hiking. But stepping into camp after that first 8 kil...