Chasing The Grid: How a city slicker found nature - and himself - in the Catskill Mountains
Ken Posner’s new book charts his physical and spiritual peak bagging journey
“Even today I remember the scene distinctly - how it felt like a signal was emanating from those peaks, with a code that unlocked something deep inside me.
“How I felt anticipation and a surge of energy, as if I could sense the whine of engines powering up.
“Suddenly I understood that the mountains were calling to me - and had been all my life - only before this moment, the sound had been drowned out by the roar of work, family, and the day-to-day distractions of life in the modern world.”
That was the moment, standing in the Shawangunk Mountains with his faithful dog, Odie, when Ken Posner’s life began to change.
He was staring out at the distant Catskill Mountains, and they were whispering to him, a mixture of warning and enticement from sirens thousands of foot high.
It is recorded in New Yorker Ken’s new book, ‘Chasing The Grid,’ the story of how he went from city slicker and regular runner to a peak-bagging mountain man in love with plants and animals.
The book outlines how he embraced minimalism and ran barefoot on his way to completing The Grid, a hiking challenge that involves summiting each of the 35 ‘High Peaks’ in the Catskills in each of the 12 months of the year.
In completing the challenge, Ken walked almost 2,000 miles, often through extreme landscapes and with a total elevation of around 500,000ft - the equivalent of almost 50 trips from base camp to the summit of Everest.
But more than that, he found himself, cast inner demons aside, and discovered a new way of life that put technology and modernity aside in favour of nature.
Using The Grid to avoid a ‘quietly desperate life’:
Ken, a former US Army infantry officer, wasn’t a complete stranger to extreme challenges before The Grid came calling.
He has completed 110 races of marathon distance or longer and set fastest known times for the 294-mile Badwater Double in Death Valley and New York’s 350-mile Long Path.
But those races, even though they involved hiking or walking at times, were completed as a ‘runner,’ with the aim of getting from A to B as quickly as possible.
The purposeful nature of such events chimed with Ken’s life working on Wall Street as an analyst and corporate executive.
The Grid was something completely different, a voyage of self-discovery that eschewed not only times and running itself, but modernity and technology.
Ken said life has a habit of providing you with wake-up calls, as long as you are willing to listen to them.
He added that while some are very “real,” highlighting Running Tales’ story about ultra runner Joshua Ross who took up the sport after a cancer scare, others are “quieter and more subtle”.
When he started to encounter problems with his running, finding he was slowing down and picking up injuries, including a nagging ankle problem that refused to go away, Ken felt the need to embrace new challenges.
“I had two big sources of energy in my life at that time,” he said. “One was work, and the other was running.”
It was when both of those aspects began to go slightly stale that he realised change was required.
Ken said: “With work, it wasn't like there were major problem. It just turned out there wasn't as much opportunity as I had been hoping for and it began to get a little slow.
“And then at the same time, the injuries started to derail me from my aggressive running exploits.”
In his early 50s, Ken feared he was set to join American naturalist Henry David Thoreau’s group of men ‘living quietly desperate lives,’ a reference to how most people are unhappy with their existence but have resigned themselves to a monotonous life.
His answer was The Grid.
Ditching Christmas dinner for peak bagging:
Ken compared taking on The Grid to a pilgrimage, with the key difference that rather than having to disappear off the beaten track for three months, six months or a year, he could continue to work during the week while embracing nature and minimalism at the weekend.
“You can have a significant project that's going to cause you to learn and change,” he said, “but you don't have to totally leave the modern world.
“I was able to stretch the rubber band and take a lot of time away from the conventional world, but not snap it totally.”
He said he realised changing the way he lived and putting his needs first had become essential for his own wellbeing - and ultimately that of his family.
It allowed him to spend weekdays in a windowless office or walking among skyscrapers dreaming of the mountains during his lunch breaks.
But only if at the weekends he was able to escape to the trails and wilderness to indulge his more wild side.
This philosophy led him to make some radical decisions, including getting up and leaving the house during Christmas dinner when his feet became just a little too itchy.
Eventually, it saw him leave the corporate world behind for a year as he took a sabbatical to concentrate on The Grid and ponder his future.
Ken told Running Tales: “If I'm not squared away, I'm not going to be much help to anybody.
“So, I also have a philosophy that you’ve got to make change. You got to take risk.
“I took risks in a lot of places but towards the end of the book, you'll see that I'm able to lure some of my family members back out into the mountains with me and to share a little bit with them.
“But as the Christmas scene shows, you do what you have to do, and there may be consequences, but you have to make decisions, move, and then deal with what happens afterwards.
“And I think the scary thing for me is the sense of drift, where you let other people and generally the unspoken impressions that other people have, constrain you into a path that ends up at a dead end.
“If you're in that situation, you might need to break glass to get out.”
He said the ideals of prosperity and success that are so often put forward as essential to achieving happiness can actually trap you.
“In America, we used to call it having the white picket fence and the garage with two cars,” he said.
“It’s all about keeping up with the Jones’s. It looks the same for everybody and it's a great train.
“It's the train of progress but where does it take you? It's really hard if you're on a train to go anywhere besides where it's going to go.
“Sometimes in life, you need to make a bold move. Otherwise, you're going to be on this train going not exactly where you wanted to go for the rest of your life.
“And that to me is very frightening because you only get one life.”
Embracing slowing down and the tricky ‘real’ stuff:
One element of Ken’s adventures that shines through in the book is his ability to pivot from one challenge to another if circumstances don’t favour his first goal.
At the start of ‘Chasing The Grid,’ he reveals how he was looking at doing more extreme running challenges, including the Badwater Quad.
This Herculean run is two times the length of the Badwater Double, totalling 584 miles from the Badwater Basin to the summit of Mount Whitney and back again twice. It has been heralded as the ultimate Death Valley challenge.
Ken also eyed up a record set by much-heralded hiker and ultra runner Ted ‘Cave Dog’ Keizer.
In September 2002, Cave Dog had claimed all 35 of the Catskills’ High Peaks in a single trip, finishing the 137-mile route in two days, 15 hours, and 24 minutes.
But when injury put paid to those plans, Ken quickly turned his attention to The Grid.
This ability to change tack and find meaning in whatever moment he is in can also been seen throughout his peak bagging ventures, when poor weather or extreme conditions on the trails meant he couldn’t always achieve his ‘A goals’.
“That’s characteristic of me,” he said. “ I was actually out this weekend and I was going to do 12 peaks, but ended up getting three.
“When you're out in the woods doing things like this, the risk of disappointment or perhaps injury can be high. And there's also the risk of frustration.
“But one of the things that was interesting about the experience, particularly when I started doing more barefoot, was embracing slowing down.
“In the modern world, we're always rushing. We're trying to go fast.
“If you're a runner and you wear shoes, you're used to pounding the pavement. Moving through the forest without shoes can be very slow.
“And talking about risk and frustration and disappointment, I would get really mad that I couldn't just fly through the forest.
“There would be stuff in your face and stinging nettles, and slopes with tilting rocks and all this stuff. It's just terrible.
“But it's also nature. It’s real. Part of me realised, at age 55 or whatever it was, I needed to work a little bit on patience.”
‘If you can't take risk, you're not free’:
Ken’s experiences tackling The Grid helped him discover a new type of enjoyment - ‘type three fun’.
Type 1 and Type 2 fun are well known in outdoor adventure circles, the first representing something enjoyable in the moment and the second being unenjoyable at the time but becoming so in retrospect due to the conquering of challenges or through personal growth.
“Barefoot in the mountains is actually considered type three fun,” he said.
“One way of achieving transcendence is by leaving those societal voices that create a conformist view behind.
“That view isn’t evil, it’s not wrong. It’s just an average view of the world. But when you start to leave that behind you discover that in the mountains we have a more primitive sense of identity.
“Again, it’s not to say that that's better or worse than the social identity, but it may unlock new experiences, new insights, a sense of connection.
“In society, people can end up with a sense of alienation. It’s a low energy state where something is wrong, your goals aren't working out for you, but you don't quite know what to do about it.”
He told Running Tales there was an element of risk to his peak bagging exploits - at one point he even flirts with accidentally stepping straight off the edge of a cliff in the dark - but added that “is the mark of a free person”.
He said: “If you can't take risk, you're not free, either because somebody has got you in their clutches or because you've allowed other people's opinions and voices, as sensible as they may be, to limit what you allow yourself to do.
“I think risk-taking is super important because it's about learning.
“When you are on the productivity train, you maximise that productivity by doing the same thing over and over again and getting really good at it.
“But you may lose the ability, depending on what you do, to take risks and learn.
“Wandering around in the mountains is a certain amount of risk, but you’ve got to balance that against the risk of just getting comfortably numb.”
The power of minimalism and escaping modernity:
The Romans are considered to have been centuries ahead of their time, particularly when it came to engineering and urban infrastructure.
In terms of concrete, aqueducts, roads, and sanitation systems they were remarkable for their era.
Yet, for all their brilliance, the Romans made mistakes. Sometimes fatal ones, such as the pipework that pumped water through their cities being made of highly toxic lead, reducing life spans considerably.
The lesson is that not all that is modern and advanced is always the perfect answer.
During his Catskills’ hikes, Ken increasingly shunned the modern world and embraced a minimalistic outlook.
This included hiking and running barefoot or shirtless, going without breakfast, and taking on peaks without GPS or via unusual and off-the beaten track routes.
At times, in certain weather conditions or during trickier hikes, Ken would revert back to modern technology and equipment.
But the spikes, GPS watch and phone apps would soon disappear again in favour of natural navigation and minimal clothes or shoes even when bushwhacking through thorny trails.
Ken said: “You will want and need the tech, but you also want the judgement and the skills of being able to manage yourself.
“I think minimalism is super important. It goes back to the sense of transcendence. In cultural traditions around the world, you build mental resilience by exposing yourself to stressors.
“You have your choice of modalities. Running creates stress. Running in shoes on roads creates stress, mainly cardio and muscular endurance, with the risk of alignment issues affecting joints over time.
“But you can add other stressors. For example, Wim Hof advocates for cold exposure. Or if you're going to be running in Badwater, you had better do some heat training.
“Going without food? You look around and people are talking about metabolic weakness as a root cause of many chronic elements, ranging from obesity to diabetes to even cancer, heart disease and dementia.
“So, you can pick your stressors. And nobody has to do all of them.
“The question is whether pure speed for runners is the most important goal versus, for example, metabolic health.”
In ‘Chasing The Grid,’ Ken explains how he sees the point of minimalism not as a desire to “eliminate all technology, nor to produce an authentic paleo lifestyle in all respects.
“Rather, the minimalist subtracts one piece of equipment at a time, in order to measure the trade-off between benefits and costs.
“This attitude springs from skepticism about conventional wisdom and the suspicion that the modern world may have taken some wrong turns here and there, especially in the uncritical acceptance of new technologies.”
Ken said his move towards minimalism is all part of avoiding the risk of modern society dictating his life.
“I have a sense that my inherent strengths are being replaced by technology, and therefore making me more dependent and weaker potentially,” he said.
“It starts with calculators, you learn to multiply, and you may forget your multiplication tables. And it's fine. We all make these trade-offs.
“But the point of minimalism is to be mindful and to measure the benefits. So, where is the GPS helpful? Where is it not?
“Going barefoot in the mountains is slow and painful, but it's real. Instead of doing that, you could just be on social media looking at pictures of mountains.
“That's a low energy state. I don't want to go through my life like that. As ridiculous as barefooting in the mountains is, it's for real.”
The Grid also kindled a love of nature in Ken which he hadn’t previously experienced. In the book, his trips are interspersed with commentary on the birds he sees and hears, and the plant life he encounters.
After returning from the mountains, he spent time researching the species he had seen and building a new knowledge of the natural world.
As a former self-confessed ‘corporate guy,’ it was a departure from his city slicker life.
“If you had said to me, ‘Ken, by the time you are in your mid-50s, you will be turning into a flower child, I would have been surprised,” he said.
“But, you start to build up this set of experiences, and you feel like ‘I've done something’.
“I have a project now, it's the next project after The Grid, which is to climb 1,000 mountains barefoot. And I'm at 540.
“Climbing 540 mountains barefoot is not the most worthwhile thing in my life because I love my kids, and my family and friends and other things. But it's like a foundation for my life.
“I can say, ‘at least I was alive’. Whatever else I accomplished or screwed up, at least there was a certain amount of time in my life that I was alive.”
So, did that Wall Street existence and his windowless office eventually push Ken towards the extremes of a very different life?
The answer is a definite yes: “It’s like the rubber band got stretched too far. And it snapped back
“I had this strange sensation, like I was in the desert. And I was just so thirsty.
“It’s somewhere I had been before when I ran in the desert at Badwater, where it’s hot as hell and dry.
“Despite all the running and hiking I had done over many years, I felt this huge need for nature as if I was in the desert again.”
Part of the whole experience of The Grid became a quest to try and marry the two parts of his life, to rediscover and reset in the mountains before seeing if he could bring that peace back with him into the corporate world.
Redefining pride and accessing energy:
Ken said he would encourage anyone to “pursue the path of spiritual development by putting yourself into some kind of training regime,” but added people shouldn’t feel they have to follow his path.
“The first thing you have to do is figure out what you have to do,” he said. “And that might mean listening to the mountains, and maybe they are calling for you as well.
“But I would never tell people, ‘hey, you have to do the same thing I do,’ because everybody does different things.”
He hesitates when asked if completing The Grid has made him the proudest he has been in his years of running and hiking.
“Pride is an interesting word,” he said, “and I consider myself a proud and independent person, but in a limited sense.
“Statistically, the Badwater Double is probably my best executed run. I think I still have the record.
“But going out in the mountains, I began to think of myself in very simple terms, more as just another person.
“And that's in the sense of animals and plants and trees being people, too. So, just another living creature. And from that context, pride starts to lose its meaning.
“The image that comes to my mind is an eastern tiger swallowtail butterfly that I saw getting its breakfast on a flower. That's not really what I’m supposed to be proud of.
“But that's an image that comes to mind which is as important as any of the runs I've done.
“I would say I think it's more, at this point, about the vibrancy and energy and joy that are in my mind, because I had the chance to get out there in the real world and see things.”
He said when he was young he “considered myself a ‘low energy’ person, in part because I talked very slowly and sometimes struggled to follow along in conversations, especially when people were joking and using irony, slang, and sarcasm, because I was a very logical young dude and didn't always understand.
“Today, I feel like I have so much energy. In fact, I feel like there's abundant energy in the world for everyone - it's just a question of accessing it - from nature, as well as from the important things I can do for friends, family, colleagues, and the community.”
He told Running Tales that this change was born out of an ability to constantly embrace change and development.
Throughout his life, Ken has been the military man - learning a mission mindset, contingency planning and the importance of objectives; the corporate Wall Street executive dealing with volatile markets and constant change; the ultra runner whose mantra was to relentlessly push forwards and try harder; and finally the extreme hiker bushwhacking through nettles in the dark and discovering a love of Mother Nature.
What will be calling him next remains to be seen, but it is certain Ken will be ready for it, ever seeking to avoid becoming that quietly, desperate man he so fears.
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