She left her desk job and walked 3,541 miles from Mexico to Canada: ‘Give yourself permission’

‘I didn’t start out as some crazy endurance athlete and I really think of myself as a normal person.’ Photograph: Joseph Scheller Photography/The Montana Standard

Jessica Guo had only slept for two and a half hours on an overnight bus when she arrived at the Mexico-US border near Lordsburg, New Mexico, in April. Out of the window she saw a flat, shadeless landscape. First-day jitters had Guo questioning what she was doing there.

The former consultant had left corporate America to attempt something no woman had completed: a single, continuous hike of the Continental Divide Trail (CDT) and the Great Divide Trail (GDT) in a single season.