I’m Jeff Peterson, although somewhere along the Appalachian Trail I became Just Pete.

I grew up in a small town in South Dakota, served as a Naval Aviator, spent nearly thirty years in the pharmaceutical industry, and retired in 2017. My wife, Kris, and I have been married since 1986, and together we raised two daughters, Brooke and Kerri.

I assumed retirement would give me more time to relax and refine my golf game.

That didn’t go exactly according to plan.

A few months after retiring, despite having no hiking experience and a well-established dislike of camping, I started walking from Georgia to Maine on the Appalachian Trail. It took 164 days to hike all 2,190 miles. Along the way, friends, family, and people I’d never met helped turn the adventure into something much bigger by supporting charities close to my heart.

Apparently, once wasn’t enough.

Two years later, I walked 820 miles across Spain and Portugal on five different Camino de Santiago routes. Then in 2021, despite not having ridden a bicycle since I was a kid, I decided riding one across America sounded like a perfectly reasonable idea. Eighty-one days and 4,535 miles later, I reached Key West.

Together, these three adventures raised more than $150,000 for charity.

Kris has put up with all of it, although she’s convinced that none of this is normal behavior for a retired person.

The adventures also gave me lots of stories.

Those stories became It’s Just Walking, It’s Just sMiles, and It’s Just Riding—three books about big adventures, questionable decisions, unexpected kindness, and discovering that we’re often capable of a lot more than we think.

I’m still Just Pete. I’m just not very good at sitting still.