Tough Girl Podcast

In the spring of 2018, at the age of 57, Kathy Elkind walked the Grande Randonnée Cinq (GR5) with her husband of 27 years. The 2,286K (1,400-mile) journey starts at the North Sea in The Netherlands and goes through Belgium, Luxembourg, and the whole length of France through the Alps to end at the warm Mediterranean in Nice.   Kathy always longed for an epic adventure, but the time was never right.    Finally, her children had flown the nest, and she had shifted from a fertile body to a not fertile body – What could this new body do?    It was the perfect time for a quest: to pause, reflect and explore. Could her marriage sustain and thrive on a long walk?   After two months on the GR5, they entered the mighty Alps—five weeks of alpine views, mountain refuges, and exertion. Her walking became more than meditative; she fell into an ethereal pace where she became the air and the landscape. In her own words: “Life was not about me. It was about the beauty of the world. This truth was what I had longed for but did