[pct-l] Hiker Fitness

[Brian Lewis]

Jason said:
"Does anyone want to relate:There perceived fitness when they arrived
at the border/  How long was it before you were making good (relative)
miles per day / How long until "hiker hunger" set in/ How long did it
take for your feet to toughen up?
I realize that this is all very subjective. I think that many people,
myself included, take some of these for granted. "I'll be eating 5000
cal. per. day, doing twenty miles..." All of these things take time. I
don't hope to gain exact information only a little broader insight
into the "Toughening Up" process."

Hi Jason.  One approach would be to skim through a few past-year
journals looking for intro/bios of people that seem somewhat "like
you" and then just look to see what kind of miles they were doing for
the first couple of weeks.  Look for those that posted a relatively
large number of times in hopes of getting sufficient
granularity/detail.  I was surprised in my own experience to have done
a 25 mile day just my fourth day out, but the dynamics of getting
water vs. carrying more sort of encouraged me to do so.

I can't recall exactly how long it was for my feet to toughen up, but
maybe a month or so (?).  Certainly everyone was focused on blisters
(or fear of blisters) in the first couple of weeks.   Lots of
potential remedies out there, from different types of shoes and socks
to pre-trip toughening to dealing with hot spots and changing socks,
etc etc.    What seemed to work fairly well for me personally was to
take off shoes and socks at every break in the first few weeks and
apply body glide to my feet.  I still got some blisters, but nothing
like what I saw on some other folks feet.

Hiker hunger varies a lot, and my new pet theory is that it's at least
somewhat related to how much body fat you're carrying at the start.  I
heard a range from 2 weeks to 6 weeks, and my own experience was
somewhere in the middle, around a month or so before I felt real
thru-hiker hunger, and I was a bit pudgy starting out (sadly, I am
again now ...).     I had expected hiker hunger to kick in a lot
earlier than it did for me, with the result that I left a lot of food
in hiker boxes early on.  I think it's safe to assume at *least* 2
weeks if not 3 before you'll be transformed into a high volume eating
machine.

I think it's pretty perilous to listen to one persons experience,
however, and anchor too much on that; certainly there's a lot of
variation in this stuff, based on a host of factors: starting body
mass index, age, equipment type and weight, experience level,
expectations, whether starting alone or with a partner or group,
pre-hike training, plus your-year stuff like temperature and water
availability, and heck, maybe the current level of sunspot activity
factors in ...



Side note: I think in this thread someone mentioned acronyms, perhaps
from my previous use of YMMV.  (I think the 'HMMV' reference actually
referred to a 'YMMV', which isn't hiking-specific, just
internet-generic, "your mileage may vary").

It's not hard to find sites that give general purpose internet
acronyms like this, such as (random example)
http://www.gaarde.org/Acronyms/

For acronyms specific to thru-hiking, here's one anyway:
http://www.whiteblaze.net/forum/showthread.php?t=8115
It's from the AT community, but a lot of cross-over.


Brian Lewis / Gadget '08
http://postholer.com/brianle