“I got to the next road crossing, and I was crying and hurting. I told my husband that I was done,” she said. “I expected him to give me a hug. Instead he looked at me and said, ‘if you want to quit, that’s fine, but you can’t quit now. You feel too bad to make a good decision.’ Then he drove off. It’s hard to quit when you don’t have a ride.” 

After her husband agreed to meet her a day and a half later, she started to recover and took stock of what she hoped to accomplish on the trail that summer. “I realized I could keep going, but I didn’t think I could set the record,” she said. “Was it worth going on if I couldn’t set that record? I decided my ultimate goal was not to be the best. My goal was to find my best.” 

So Jennifer kept hiking. Her speed increased, and as she reached the final miles of the trail, she realized that her best, despite early setbacks, might indeed be enough for her to set the Appalachian Trail’s speed record. She ultimately finished the roughly 2,200-mile hike in forty-six days, eleven hours and twenty minutes, breaking the record by one day. 

Nolan LaVoie, Woodberry Forest’s director of outdoor education, invited Jennifer to campus to speak with boys and to participate in the school’s robust outdoor education program. During her visit, she hiked with boys on the Perimeter Trail, attended a rock climbing team practice, ate meals with students and faculty in the Randall B. Terry Jr. ’53 Dining Hall, and met with English and environmental studies classes. 

Noting that her husband, Brew, attended an all-boys school in Nashville, Jennifer said she felt comfortable on campus and enjoyed meeting students in a variety of settings. In Paul Erb’s English class, boys had read excerpts from her books before the visit. They discussed her development as a writer of three books about her time on the Appalachian Trail and several hiking guidebooks. In Graham McBride’s environmental studies class, the students talked with her about good conservation practices and how to hike in a way that respects the environment. 

Jennifer told the entire school that after her record-setting hike, everyone wanted to talk about numbers: total miles, miles per day, pairs of shoes, calories per day, and bears seen (thirty-six, she said.) “Nobody asked me what the most valuable part of the trip was. Nobody asked me what I had learned,” she said, quoting an excerpt from her book, Called Again. “Why were there no questions about living in the present, about finding my purpose and asking for help? … The miraculous part was not the record; it was how well my husband served me and loved me along the way.” 

She also told the students that when they fill out college applications, they might be tempted to focus on numbers, such as GPAs and board scores. She said focusing on those numbers is as mistaken as focusing on the numbers from her hike. “You can’t sum up a 2,200-mile journey with numbers,” she said. “It is about lessons learned and experiences gained. You are so much more than the numbers on a college application. The things you learn here, you cannot quantify, things like honesty, integrity, and striving for excellence.”