What the Maryland Trek Taught Me About Selflessness

Imagine getting up one day and hiking 27 miles through mountains. Then you get on your bike and ride another 14 miles across that same terrain. In summer heat.

That might be enough for one day. But the next day, you hike 14 miles and ride 27. And this continues for seven days, carrying you from Western Maryland all the way to the Atlantic. Yes, even in the rain. Whoa.

That’s what a group of people did last week.

I first learned about the Maryland Trek from a high school friend. She’d been posting on Instagram about her rigorous training, and I got curious enough to look it up. The trek was founded by a former TV meteorologist at a local Baltimore station, and it’s grown into something much bigger than a personal challenge.

These trekkers weren’t crossing the state to prove anything to themselves—that they were strong, that they were fit, that they could endure. They were doing it for seven children currently fighting cancer, and in memory of five children who didn’t survive it. By the end, they’d raised more than $200,000 for these families.

Yesterday, I met up with them as they finished the ride in Ocean City. Their longest stretch—46 miles—turned out to be the final bike leg of the whole trek.

As they gathered for a group photo, one of the trekkers broke down in tears. I believe he’d lost a child to cancer himself. He said, through the emotion, how truly selfless this whole effort was.

That moment seized me. I haven’t been able to shake it.

If you let yourself get pulled into the vortex of news media, social media, or the endless churn of podcasts, it’s easy to lose hope for humanity. So much of what fills those feeds is complaint about “the other,” or sugary pop psychology designed to help us stay comfortably blind to the suffering around us.

But for these families, blindness isn’t an option. Cancer is their daily reality, whether the rest of us are paying attention or not.

That’s what makes something like the Maryland Trek so striking. It doesn’t just acknowledge the suffering of others from a safe distance—it does something about it.

That’s humanity. That’s loving others. That’s God’s will, lived out in hiking boots and bike shorts.

So often we feel we need to prove our worth—by accumulating wealth, status, or the biggest house on the block. Some of us might even wear “spiritual” or “religious” as a kind of badge, measured in prayers said or services attended.

But none of that means much if we’re not using what we’ve been given to help someone else.

I want to be fair here: there are plenty of generous billionaires writing enormous checks to charity, and that matters. Their money can genuinely help an organization survive another year.

But what about getting our hands a little dirty? What about sacrificing something many of us hoard even more tightly than money—our time? How often do we actually step outside our comfort zone to offer real hope to someone in need, instead of just funding someone else who will?

What struck me most in Ocean City was the community that had gathered to meet these trekkers. Some of the children being honored, along with their families, showed up at the boardwalk finish line. I imagine the pediatric cancer community already leans on each other in ways most of us can’t fully understand.

But events like this remind those children and families of something else entirely: that there are people out there who don’t know them personally, and who are still willing to show up for them.

The trekkers themselves gave up an entire week—time away from work, from their own families, and from their own comfort, pushing their bodies past what felt reasonable. And still, that’s only seven days. These children and their families carry a hardship that doesn’t end on a Sunday afternoon in Ocean City. The trekkers wanted them to know, in a tangible way, that they have their back.

And the people who couldn’t be there in person still showed up—$200,000 worth of showing up, from people who will likely never meet the children they helped.

The self-help world loves to talk about mindset—growth mindset, success mindset, empowerment mindset. But notice the root word buried in there: self. Ego. And sure, there are seasons when that kind of focus genuinely helps us.

Eventually, though, most of us hit a moment when we ask, “Is this all there is?” We want our lives to mean something. So we sign up for a course, or a weekend retreat, hoping to uncover our purpose, maybe even name our spiritual gifts.

That can be a helpful start. But purpose named isn’t the same as meaning lived. Meaning is found less in a growth mindset and more in a giving one. A community mindset. An offering made to humanity without any expectation of getting something back.

This truth isn’t new, and some of history’s clearest voices have spent their lives trying to get us to see it.

Gandhi built his entire philosophy of service around the idea that we find ourselves precisely by losing ourselves in the service of others—that self-forgetfulness, not self-focus, is the doorway to a meaningful life.

Mother Teresa lived among Calcutta’s poorest for decades, and her enduring message was disarmingly simple: most of us will never do something the world calls “great,” but we can do small, ordinary things with tremendous love, and that’s enough.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. put it as a question, one he believed every person eventually has to answer for themselves: “Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, ‘What are you doing for others?’”

And Viktor Frankl, who survived the Nazi concentration camps and then spent the rest of his life studying meaning, concluded that the people who endured the unimaginable weren’t the ones focused on saving themselves—they were the ones who still found some way to give something to another person, even in the middle of horror.

Different centuries. Different traditions. Different languages, even. But every one of them arrived at the same place: character isn’t measured by how we treat the people who can pay us back. It’s measured by how we treat the people who can’t.

Our wisest teacher said it most simply of all: whatever we do for the least among us, we do for Him.

I think that’s what I witnessed on that boardwalk. Not seven days of hiking and biking. Seven days of selflessness, made visible.