April 1, 2024

7 Days Out is an original docuseries from Garmin. Join Wes and Joel on their trek through Nepal’s Langtang Circuit and discover the power of friendship, perseverance and Garmin smartwatches. Learn more: https://www.garmin.com/en-US/7DaysOut/.

When Garmin notified me that I’d be going to Nepal to trek the Langtang Valley, I assumed there was a typo in the email address. Surely, they had the wrong guy. Much of my adult life, I’d found regular suburban living to be physically challenging due to a diagnosis of ankylosing spondylitis in my mid-twenties. Now, just six months into my 40s, I was going to travel across the globe to do the hike of a lifetime?

Most of my friends didn’t believe me — the ones who’ve known me the longest were the most suspicious of the trip because they’d seen me through years of physical therapy and prescription treatments of varying effectiveness. Everyone else thought it was some kind of a joke I was telling them.

There was no typo in that email, and there was no joke.

I consulted with my doctor, and his positive feedback about the therapies I’d been pursuing to keep my arthritis under control made me realize that I was really going to do this. I was going to Nepal¹.

I’d been using the fēnix® to help monitor simple stuff like daily step count, twice weekly Pilates training and the quality of my sleep, but I knew I’d need to take a new look at the features if I was going to begin training for the trip.

Within a week, I was out of breath and feeling like I was going to vomit in the Verdugo Mountains. Around 1,600’ of elevation and 95 degrees Fahrenheit sunlight, I was soaked with sweat and overlooking downtown Los Angeles in the distance. My training had begun.

I quickly became an expert at elevation reading via my watch screen, monitoring my heart rate to make sure I didn’t push myself to the point of exhaustion², and even timing recoveries to avoid any serious injuries. My Pilates trainer developed a program to target my weakened legs and stabilize my core to help prepare me even further.

Despite all this, I harbored a vague sense of it being an impossibility even as I climbed out of the car at Los Angeles International Airport a couple months later. It wasn’t until I got to meet Joel during our layover in Dubai that the reality of this life-changing experience finally hit me.

Joel is exactly the kind of guy you want to tag along with on an awe-inspiring adventure like this. He has a genuine nature about him that even a language barrier can’t suppress, has a knack for finding subtle beauty in the most challenging experiences and is always willing to politely laugh at a joke (no matter how lame they were when I made them).

I could see my excitement about the trip, and my anxieties about being thousands of miles away from my little growing family, reflected in Joel’s face. We spent our first few hours sharing pictures of our toddler daughters and swapping stories about how important being a dad is in our lives. As it turns out, being able to lean on someone for support when you’re on the other side of the globe from everyone and everything you know isn’t something you can simply throw on a packing list. Clearly, Garmin had put some thought into pairing us up for this trip.

There’s a lot about Nepal that you just can’t know until you’ve actually been there. I ran into this time and time again when I was doing my research before we arrived. And, if you’re reading this with the hope of achieving a deeper understanding of the place, you’re going to be let down.

Living in the shadow of the largest mountains on the globe has made Nepal a place that, throughout written history, has been spoken of with reverence. Subtleties of the Nepali cultural personality pervaded every interaction I had when I was there, and even with months of processing the experience, I’m still not able to fully explain it.

While we were in Kathmandu, trying to shake off the jet lag, Joel and I got to tour the Swayambhunath Stupa with its hundreds (thousands?) of monkeys before we headed into Darbar Square. The city, it seems, had surprises around every corner.

While in Darbar Square, we followed a crowd and found ourselves in line to see the living goddess Kumari at one of her rare public events. I failed to see the significance of this initially, but absolutely felt the atmospheric shift in the crowd as she peered down at us from her pedestal overlooking the atrium in the Kumari Ghar, her home.

It’s hard to overstate the cultural shock when arriving in Kathmandu from Los Angeles. And it was even more shocking when we left the city for the Langtang Valley. The teeming mass of humanity in the city was replaced by the quiet of a lush forest with a single path cutting its way along a river.

Joel and I were cautious when we started out, both of us very wary of altitude sickness having the potential to derail the entire trip. Garmin had mapped out the…