I've been on trails where my legs were burning and my lungs felt like somebody filled 'em with wet sand. Still thought about turning around. Most of us have been there. So when I read about Nichollette Peoples, I had to sit with it for a minute.

When she was 16 years old, a car accident left her paralyzed with a spinal cord injury. Doctors told her she might never walk again. You can imagine what that does to a kid. Sixteen years old and somebody tells you the rest of your life just changed shape and you can't fix it. A lot of folks would hear that and fold. Nichollette didn't.

She found a way back onto the trails using a mountain wheelchair and now she's out there hiking national parks. If you don't know what a mountain wheelchair is, think about a regular wheelchair, then throw that image away entirely. These things are built like tank suspension systems with seating, made to crawl over rocks, roots, creek beds, loose gravel, whatever the trail throws at you. They're heavy. They're mechanical. They take real upper-body strength and pure grit to operate. This isn't rolling down a paved walking path at the city park. She's out there on actual trails, the kind that chew up people who have two good legs.

According to her story, the outdoors called her back. Not as some kind of inspirational bucket-list thing. Because being outside is where she wanted to be. I understand that. The woods don't care about your situation. They don't feel sorry for you and they don't pat you on the back. A trail is a trail. It just exists, and you either figure out a way to get down it or you don't.

What sticks with me is the problem-solving of it. I've spent my whole life tinkering with trucks, rebuilding engines, figuring out how to get a busted vehicle back to camp when the nearest paved road is a long way off. The mindset of looking at something that doesn't work and saying "what if I try it this way" is the same mindset that gets a person into a mountain wheelchair and points them at a trail. You work with what you've got. You don't quit on the thing you love just because the method changed.

I've said before that the barrier to getting outside is mostly mental. You don't need to be an athlete. You don't need fancy gear. Common sense and respect for the distance will carry you further than you think. Nichollette is out there proving that in a way I never could've imagined. She took the hardest version of a bad hand and found a way to do the thing that mattered to her anyway.

Tell you what, I've complained about a sore knee on a trail before. Won't be doing that again anytime soon. Not after reading about what she's doing out there.