if at first you don’t succeed…

Moving to Costa Rica a few weeks after his 39th birthday, D set himself a goal to go hiking at least 40 times before completing his 40th revolution around the sun. This aim was driven partly by the pent-up feeling we all experienced during the height of pandemic-related restrictions and partly by the expectation that Costa Rica would offer boundless opportunities to spend time in nature. At first, the stars seemed to align quite well. We went on a hike with our friend and neighbor our very first weekend in country and shortly thereafter joined an outing with the Embassy’s hiking group. But then work intensified and other commitments cropped up, and the plan floundered. By the time D’s 40th rolled around, he only counted a couple dozen true hikes during the year. A failure that spectacular called for self-reflection, reevaluation, and recommitment.

Part of the problem was that the goal was poorly defined. What counts as a hike? Having read somewhere that hiking and birding were incompatible — and having experienced firsthand the tension between S’s desire to hike for exercise and his own preference to walk slowly to maximize opportunities to find and photograph new birds — D set narrow parameters, zeroing in on our longer hikes to the exclusion of most of his birding walks. Upon further reflection, this approach proved too restrictive and, ultimately, self-defeating: first, because many of the national park trails in Costa Rica are very short; second, because length is a poor indicator of degree of difficulty given some of the terrain here; and third — and most important — because such a narrow aim was ill-suited to D’s current pursuits and passions, namely birding.

There was a time, during his Peace Corps and backpacking days, when D hiked for speed and distance, measuring accomplishment against a hike’s degree of difficulty. This was when he lived in Ecuador and was far more interested in scaling mountains than chasing birds. Nowadays, when we go birding with a guide, D sometimes shares that he spent more than three years in Ecuador — one of the birdiest countries on the so-called bird continent — without once going birding, just to watch the guides’ jaws drop. Those days are now in the rearview. It’s not that D no longer enjoys long, difficult hikes. It’s just that these days whenever he sets foot on the trail — even when hiking 20 miles in a single day in the Himalayas — D always brings his birding gear.

Incidentally, on another recent hike in the Himalayan foothills — a ten-miler near Dharamsala, India — D’s hiking companion remarked how he likes to go strolling (rather than hiking) in the mountains. That mentality encapsulates perfectly D’s preferred hiking approach these days. One might not get as far or as fast this way, but one is sure to see more and experience nature more deeply by slowing down. Unfortunately, this means that often when we set out on family hikes D winds up falling far behind. “Don’t worry,” a friend reassured D on another recent walk in the woods, “S will slow down to your speed eventually.”

With his sights reset, D’s second run at his goal is proceeding far better, with more hikes completed in the last five months than during the entire first year of this experiment. That we’ve spent those months exclusively in Costa Rica — unlike last year, when D traveled extensively for work during our first half-year in country — also helped. Excluding birding walks that did not feature an actual trail — D had to draw the line somewhere — he’s up to 33 hikes since turning 40 a little more than five months ago. And given our traveling plans over the next few weeks, D’s likely to meet his year-end goal before this month is out.

None of these hikes were particularly long — they averaged 3.5 miles each, and only half a dozen ran five miles or more — but that seems besides the point considering that the list includes multiple hikes in three different national parks where D walked all available paths and failed to reach the 4-mile mark. Unlike in the United States, where national parks provide visitors with extensive trail networks, national parks in Costa Rica seem geared more toward protecting nature from human encroachment. There are usually one or two short trails to allow visitors to experience the old-growth forests these parks safeguard while the bulk of the protected land remains untouched.

As we barrel towards summer, we are keenly aware that pretty soon we’ll be counting down our remaining time in Costa Rica in months rather than years. We’re aiming to spend as much of this time as possible enjoying the country’s great outdoors. That makes meeting this year’s 40×40 challenge a breeze; the bigger challenge will be ensuring we find just as many opportunities to spend time in nature when we leave this small and incredibly biodiverse country.