How to poorly plan a thru-hike, a guide for the overly ambitious
While I sit in my English class writing this, reflecting on my hike, I am met with a large amount of clarity that I lacked while planning this trip. I now realize that going from the extreme fatigue and lassitude of a 26 day canoe trip to hiking thirty mile days in the heat of a midwest summer was immeasurably foolish. I suffered the consequences of this in the form of nightly muscle spasms, otherworldly levels of chafing, and ultimately the yellow blazing of roughly 20 miles.
Why I planned it wrong
In the beginning I planned a 10 day thru-hike averaging 25 miles a day. It was only 30 hours and 46 miles into the hike I knew I needed a change of plans. With 5 days of food on my back, a pack with little to no shoulder padding, and 7lbs of extra water (my filter was so incredibly slow I decided I’d rather deal with the weight.) I was hurting, bad. You see I had planned for a perfect thru-hike, however as we all know, thru-hiking isn’t perfect. While in another world I could’ve night hiked every day and taken micro breaks in the heat, the human part of me said otherwise. I needed to support myself more than I had planned to.
My food strategy
The human body is simple, we crave what we craved 1000s of years ago. In hunter/gatherer times we craved sugar (Because the only sources of sugar were berries, a simple and easy food source) and fats to sustain energy. While on a much less extreme scale, I find my body reverts to this diet as well. Even while knowing this, I still attempted to pack an assortment of carbs and protein in the form of healthy snacks. I started with about 2500 calories of “healthy foods” to eat, and finished with *You Guessed it* the same amount of healthy snacks. What I did eat were: Cold soaked oats, snickers, chips, and cookies. By my final day I was eating multiples of packages of all of these.
Gear
My gear was the one part of planning I got right. I’ve always been a gear nerd and everything I brought on this trip worked well for me. While I would’ve probably changed every item of my big 3, I still enjoyed and got great value out of all of my gear. To summarize my gear I brought my: ULA Ohm, REI Quarter dome, EE quilt, Closed cell foam pad, and talenti jar.
To summarize
In the end, almost every aspect that a planned fell through. However I learned so much about my likes, habits, dismays, and cravings. I learned what worked for and against me. What I could and couldn’t handle. And what, even when ravenously hungry, I refused to eat. And when thinking about all this, I realize that maybe in planing it poorly, I learned much more than I would’ve if I planned it right.
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