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8/11/04 the joy of elsewhere Barbara Frank
Dr. Seuss
This was meant to be an inspirational article about Trudy Nepstad, distance walker. One of the doyennes of the Kansas City running scene for nearly 20 years, Trudy has ascended to the Over 70 age group. She continues to enter races of all lengths, both home and abroad (literally). But now she inserts walk intervals into events beyond half-marathon length. The weekend before our interview, she had just finished the Deadwood-Mickelson Trail, marathon #14 for her.
But scratch all that. Talking with this eloquent woman, so soft-spoken she verges on the conspiratorial, poses a distraction. Trudy Nepstad is the pied piper of adventurous travel, a true explorer, a most convincing cheerleader for all the wonders of the world. Yes, we all need to be reminded of what other seniors are doing to keep fit. But to talk about this woman solely in terms of running and walking is so much focusing on the iceberg’s tip while missing the story’s point!
Trudy is no namedropper. There is a total absence of one-upmanship in her accounts of global meandering. Rather, she speaks with offhand familiarity of far-flung locales the way most of us recall our hometown, its side streets and hangouts. She has definitely “been there”:
As for “done that,” Trudy has completed a marathon above the Arctic Circle, slept in a tent at The World’s Most Northern Campground, watched whales breach from a ship off Norway’s Lofoten Islands, yielded the right-of-way to reindeer herds crossing roads in Finland.
“I love hiking. It’s my favorite thing in the world to do.” And so she has hiked up mountains on four continents: the Andes and the Julian Alps, Mount Kinabalu in Borneo, through Swedish snow and glaciers on 1169-meter Njulla, and Kilamanjaro itself. Did she and her friend summit this tallest mountain on the African continent?
“Almost….But Olympic Airlines lost our luggage. So all the warm clothing, the boots, the mittens, everything: we didn’t have it. At the bottom they ‘hire’ these things (rent them).” Trudy and company made do with the rented gear, but “it just wasn’t warm enough….You go through five or six climate zones. You start in jungle. Then you have the forest, and then…this barren …moorland. And then it’s even more barren…like the moon--craters and boulders. The top is arctic. It’s just very cold.”
From our upholstered Midwestern vantage point, we gotta wonder: what makes Trudy run?
Maybe it was that Siamese dance troupe that performed in her “little, remote prairie town” when she was ten. “Those images of exotic and faraway places have always been with me.” In 1971, her recently widowed mother proposed that Trudy join her, to visit another daughter in Sweden. Impossible! She had four children middle-school-age and younger. But her husband insisted he could manage the household. Leaving behind a freezer full of casserole dinners, Trudy took the two women on a seven-week version of the Grand Tour.
The rest is history…and geography.
“The more exotic, the better,” she asserts. Intrepid is her middle name. She takes pride, wants it completely understood, that her watchwords are “barebones,” “shoestring,” “budget,” and “dirt cheap.” We’re not talking squalor or danger here. It’s just that Trudy Nepstad’s forays into the unknown are not travel agent-cushioned launches toward four- and five-star destinations. Quite honestly, she can’t afford that; plus she’d miss all the fun.
She obviously doesn’t give a second thought to leaving the comforts (or inertia) of home. Maybe it’s her artist’s gift for perspective--she paints, designs T-shirts for area races; for years she was art teacher at Indian Hills Middle School in Johnson County.
Just a sidewise glance at Trudy’s example brings it home: life is not all about our comforts, or overdone security, or a death-grip on the status quo. We’re alive, and this is our planet. There is great joy and satisfaction in taking that truth--and a Lonely Planet guidebook--into our two hands and going with it.
Trudy Nepstad travels light: minimal on the luggage; self-sufficient in bargain research, booking arrangements, itinerary plans; content with simple needs (self-proclaimed “Irongut,” she always eats the local food, eschews “luxurious” for clean lodgings). Even more essential, the heart lightened by wonder: she never leaves home (nor returns) without it. © University of Kansas Medical Center, Center on Aging, August, 2004.
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