Trail Fit

So, May is drawing to a close and along my linear world of the Appalachian Trail it’s been a fairly slow news month. While the rest of the world has been busy with French and English elections, the horrifying events in Manchester and Trump imitating Nixon, the only news that really hits home for us is the weather report. And that has been depressingly predictable. For several weeks it has rained, every day. Every. Single. Day. Not always a lot or for very long, but we’ve been camping in varying degrees of wet all month. 
We have passed the quarter way point, currently at about mile 730 in a town called Daleville, Virginia. If you’re looking at a map Daleville seems essentially to be an outer suburb of Roanoake. “The bubble”, which is the universally understood name for the large cluster of hikers who started at peak time, is a day or two behind us. For those of us who are nearer 40 than 20, The Bubble also signifies a lot of drinking and smoking and late night noise in crowded camp sites, so we are among a handful of greying hikers gladly pushing long-ish days in an effort to widen that gap a little. 

Food is a constant topic of conversation, with each other and with other hikers. When will we stop for breakfast? What are you carrying for lunches? What will you eat first in the next town? We carry perhaps 2,000 calories per day, and burn 4,000 to 6,000 so town is synonymous with binge eating everything in sight. As in real life, that means hamburgers for me and pancakes for Sam. Luckily there’s no shortage of either in the US of A!

I’ve worn out my first pair of shoes, and Sam has just ordered her third. The effort of destroying our footwear has forged our bodies into unrecognizable machines. I am fuzzy-faced and tanned. Body fat is gone. Even Sam, who started the trail tiny and super fit, has become a thinner, harder version of herself. Our legs are sinew, bone, bulging quads and calves. Arms, as one of my climbing friends predicted, have become twiglike, save for slightly over developed triceps from plunging trekking poles into the ground thirty to fifty thousand times a day. That is what my step counter says we are doing. 

We have even started trail running a little, especially towards the end of a stretch when we have eaten most of the food. When my pack is light I can run six miles of mountain terrain in an hour or so, and without too much difficulty. Sam, if not slowed by the need to wait for me, could (and would) run all day. These are not our real world bodies, and we wonder how long trail fitness will linger once we go back to normal activity levels. 

The challenge of hiking is therefore no longer physical. It has become a mental game. Whilst trail life remains beautiful, it is no longer new. We have seen the animals and vistas before, found the beautiful streams to swim in and perfect isolated places to sit by a campfire. There are times – especially if it is raining – when all of that beauty becomes just the obstacle course between here and the next hot shower and dry night. The resolve to get up and out again after those rest stops becomes the through-hiker’s test. 

Today we have passed that test, well almost. Our habit is to find a coffee shop in town which becomes the rallying point between hotel room and trail. Also a place to write a long overdue blog entry, and post a few photos! Memorial Day, the symbolic start to summer, has just passed, and the weather forecast looks much more positive for the next little while. 

Heading into it, and writing this, I’m reminded just how fantastic life is on the trail. We, the through hikers, are consistently happy, care free, relaxed, and bemused by the banal stresses of our former lives and of the regular folk we encounter. We band together, young and partying or old and glad of solitude alike, swapping information about town and trail whenever we pass an instantly recognizable member of our little subculture. Our stress is mileage to the next water source and the flatness or otherwise of a campsite. I hope everyone who has enough interest to have read this far will heed this call: make the time, and hit the trail. We started traveling nearly 20 years ago and that re-wrote our thoughts on life; but it is the trail that has taught us how to live it.