Fact check
We live in a funny old world of fake news. So rather than ask you to take our word for it, here’s our working.
Every story we publish is true — but a good one isn’t only facts. There’s the occasional fair inference, and a little colour in the telling. Below, we’ve gone through 15 Years of Chronic Pain, Then the Appalachian Trail at 41 line by line: what we know, where it came from, and the few places we’ve read between the lines.
Primary sources
Sourced facts
- Gail slept on a tin of tomatoes pressed into a hip trigger point, awake every ten minutes through the night.
- At fourteen she was told she would be in a wheelchair by forty unless she had surgery on her feet.
- Fifteen years of chronic pain, finally explained by a jaw-alignment treatment in northern Italy.
- At forty-one she set out southbound from Katahdin, Maine, to walk the Appalachian Trail.
- She walked the final 850 miles to Georgia on two broken bones in her foot.Her publisher’s biographyHer AT blog
- The Pennsylvania foot injury, the Virginia hospital X-ray, and hiking the Triple Crown in “silent agony.”
- She has written two books, Unlost (2021) and Do Hope (2023).
Reading between the lines
- “She had been warned.” — our framing of a sourced fact, not a new claim.Framing
- “There was no montage. There was a programme, kept to, week after week.” — the progression is sourced; the weekly rhythm is our inference.Inference
- “Her name for it now is determined joy.” — the phrase is Gail’s own strapline; linking it to her teaching is our reading.Our reading
Where sources differed
- Gail’s own accounts give slightly different distances for the stretch she walked on a broken foot. We used the more precise 850 miles from her publisher’s biography.
- We checked the spelling of the breast-cancer charity against Gail’s own writing — it’s CoppaFeel.
A note on quotes
Every line in quotation marks is taken word for word from Gail’s recorded conversation on The Adventure Podcast, lightly trimmed without changing its meaning.