To read part one of day thirteen, click here.

“Get dressed quickly. We need to hurry, or we’re going to have to skip breakfast.”

That was exactly what we needed to hear. Skip breakfast? We were all going to do everything in our power to avoid such a terrible fate.

Five minutes later we were hiking up the trail towards the bear boxes. Twenty minutes after that, we were done eating and had started hiking to where we were starting the PCE.

I had gotten a little information about the PCE while we were eating. PCE stands for Personal Challenge Event, and apparently it was a seven mile hike around Base Camp. You were expected to push yourself to the limit. If that meant running the whole thing, that meant running the whole thing.

As we hiked, Jen was explaining more to us. “It’s about learning how much more you can do. When you started this trip, most of you had trouble hiking. Now? You all climbed that hill to Table Rock yesterday. Do you think you could have done that on the first day?”

“We encourage you to set a goal for yourself for this PCE. It doesn’t have to be a time goal – your goal could be for you to run all the downhill parts. But we encourage you to have a goal.”

We stopped at a building to refill our water bottles – they wanted us to have a full water bottle when we got done with the PCE.

Once the water bottles were full we followed the gravel road towards the starting line. After a couple of minutes we could see it. And I could also see Colter. I hadn’t seen anyone from home in two weeks – I wanted to run up to him and give him a big hug. But I also didn’t want to embarrass him in front of his crewmates.

He was just standing there, laughing with them and talking. It was definitely a big difference from when they were all sitting in the airport, not even talking to each other.

Jen and Katie walked past them and I followed, wondering when I’d be able to say hi to him. I looked back and he caught my eye and smiled, and I knew that eventually we’d find time to talk.

Click here to read the next part of Day Thirteen.

*Everything here is from my own memory and may not be correct. Outward Bound is not responsible for anything I post here. Thanks too NCOBS for letting me use their photos.*