Midpoint Musings

Today, I hit the mileage halfway point, so it felt like a good time to look back and kind of summarize some of the key learnings I’ve acquired over the past three months. These are in no particular order, and some might have more weight than others, but they're the things that came to mind as I was kind of reflecting over the final couple miles of my hike today.

The first is — drumroll, please — hiking is hard. And that seems trite to say, but I guess I had this naive idea that once you’ve been hiking for a month or so, you get your trail legs, and then the hiking part of the AT just sort of becomes the backdrop or falls into the background. It becomes a given and stops, you know, being the top story every day. And maybe for some people, that is the case.

There are lots of young, very athletic people who don't seem to be bothered at all by hiking 20 miles a day. I'm not one of those people. So hiking is still the primary story for me every day out here. There are sort of three main variables when you think about hiking. There's the weather, there's the terrain, and there's the mileage. So, for example, you're never really going to have a day where it's nice and cool, the trail is flat, and you're only doing 8 miles, right? Those days just don't happen. So, like, the weather today was okay. The terrain was pretty rocky. And I did 20 miles, so the mileage was high. And so that was sort of the source of difficulty. Sometimes, maybe, you don't hike very far, and the terrain's not bad, but then the weather is terrible. So there's always a hiking challenge of some kind or at some point in the day. And I really wasn’t expecting that to still be such a big issue this far along in the hike, but it is.

The second observation is that your hiking pace really influences your hiking experience a lot. Some people hike very quickly, but they don't generally do huge miles. And some people hike very quickly and also do huge miles. I mean, I know these people exist, but I rarely see them. They're either way ahead of me, or they just whistle by me like there's nothing going on while I’m struggling to drag my butt up a hill. And then I never see them again. But like, today, I did 20 miles, and it took me 10 hours, so I averaged two miles an hour, which for me is a good pace.

But there are hikers who can do 20 miles in seven hours, and that means they have the flexibility, or the wiggle room, or whatever, to take a long break during the day. Or they can pop into town and have lunch, or they'll get to their campsite on the early side, so there's time to hang out and get to know the other hikers there and stuff like that.

But I was on the trail this morning by 7 a.m. and off by 5 p.m. And when you pull into a shelter or a campsite for the night, you have all your camp chores to do before you can kind of chill. So having a slower pace sort of reduces the flexibility I have. Also, when you can hike faster and do big miles, you don't have to carry as much food, either, so your pack is lighter. And that becomes a self-reinforcing thing, since a lighter pack means you can go faster. I’m not meaning to whine about it or anything. It's just the reality. I'm just not a fast hiker, and that reduces some of my flexibility.

The third thing is that I definitely carry too much stuff, and I don't have a great idea of how to reduce my pack weight. I mean, I have some ideas, but I don't know exactly how much any of them might help. Like these days, Pennsylvania is pretty dry, so you’ve got to carry a lot of water, which is heavy. But I also carry too much food. I'm finally eating, but like, I ran across Trail Magic today, and that basically became my lunch. So you know, if you plan to have four days’ worth of lunches, but then you come across a couple of situations that substitute for lunch, like Trail Magic, then you’re two days in, but you’re still carrying four days’ worth of lunches.

Obviously, you can't — and shouldn’t — assume you’re going to encounter Trail Magic when you’re planning out your food for the next section of trail, but if I knew somehow that there was going to be Trail Magic, I could adjust accordingly and carry less food. And same thing with dinners, of course. If I could get comfortable with the idea of carrying less food, that would help me out a little bit weight-wise. But I haven't gotten there yet.

My equipment is also pretty heavy, and hot, too. So I've got to figure out a way to lighten my total backpack, so that during the summer, I can put in more miles and maybe move a little bit faster and sort of focus more of my time on the hiking experience rather than just schlepping from Point A to Point B.

The fourth thing is that when you're hiking, you naturally start thinking a lot about other things in your life. And I’m realizing that I'm a lot more of a homebody than I’d initially thought. You know, being Captain Adventure and having wanderlust and all that stuff is great, but I like being at home. And I like being with S. And I like seeing our friends and my dad, and I miss the pets. So, I don't know. I mean, I think during covid, I kind of slipped into a hermit-like state, and I was able to maintain that for a couple years, and that felt good. So again, maybe I'm more of a homebody than I'd thought.

And a lot of people have asked me, you know, What's next after the hike? And I've spent a lot of time thinking about What do I want to do when I grow up? If any of my former work colleagues are reading this, I hope it's not insulting to say that I'm not going to be hustling to get another full-time gig with my former employer. That was a good run, and it's a good company. It provided me a lot in my life, but I don't want to go back to an office. That's sort of a cliche of long-distance hiking. No one finishes a hike and says, You know, I’m really looking forward to getting back to sitting at a desk all day, staring at a computer monitor.

But I’d thought that maybe that would still be somewhat appealing when I was done with my hike. But even in my sweatiest and most uncomfortable moments, I'm not pining for the office. I really want to find something where I can work with my hands and be more creative. And those of you who know me, know my love of malted beverages and brewing, so finding a role in the brewing industry is certainly very appealing. But so is finding something where I could build furniture or otherwise do some creative woodworking. That holds tremendous appeal. I just have to figure out a way to have that pay for itself or pay the bills. I’m not sure what that looks like, and it had always felt like sort of a fantasy to think about it before — not realistic — but if I can sort of make a buck brewing and building, I want to do that.

Please say in the comments if you have any ideas. I'm all ears. I know I want to study for the Cicerone exam, though I have to admit, and I feel a little bit silly saying this, I don't know exactly how that would help me career-wise. But it's somewhat of a self-study thing, and I can gain knowledge without having to shell out the money to go to the Siebel Institute and become a professional brewer.

Okay, so, the last one. This one sort of haunts me a little bit, because at the end of the first blog post I wrote — which wasn't very good, because S. didn't get her hands on it before I published it — I was talking about how people have lots of different reasons to get on the trail. Some people need to prove themselves to others or prove to themselves that they can handle the physical or the mental challenge of it. And I never really felt like I had anything to prove. Some people feel the need to just sort of drop out of society for a while, but I certainly don't feel that way. So I said my reason was that I just like hiking, which is true. But thru-hiking is a different animal. And that's something I've been grappling with. It's just like, Do I like hiking? Maybe? Do I like thru-hiking? It's not a resounding yes, let's put it that way.

What started as this sort of naive idea that I would wake up in the morning and put on my hiking boots and just kind of wander around and look at nature and have some fun during the day is turning out to be more of a grind than I’d expected it to be. So that's a bit disappointing. But now my hike is not so much a day-to-day pleasure cruise, it's more of a quest. And it's become a matter of whether I want to fulfill said quest or, you know, maybe I'll get to New Jersey and say that's good enough.

I can tell you that the support that I've received from everyone along the way, and especially via this blog, overwhelmingly points me toward wanting to finish. But it's something that I've been grappling with a bit, and I'm not really sure what the right answer is.

You know, I thought I would love it. And if I don't love it, what's the point? But in the long run, it'll take me — provided I don't sustain any major injuries — until the end of September or the middle of September, I hope. So, in the grand scheme of things, that's not a huge chunk of time, and having that feather in my cap of finishing the AT would certainly be nice. But I haven't really made my mind up. I'm still thinking about it. I hope that doesn't shock anybody who's reading this. You know, we try to keep things a little light on the blog, tone-wise, but the truth is that this has been a challenge. It's been a big challenge.

And the past several days of hiking, with the high temperatures and my painful feet, have made it seem less appealing than it’s been in previous sections. But I’m going to give it a shot, and we'll see what happens. This post might have ended up seeming overly negative, which I didn’t meant for it to be. It's just sort of a reflection of reality, I guess, and how the hike has sort of manifested itself within me so far.

It's been a hell of a ride so far. I've met some really interesting people. I've seen some beautiful landscapes. I've had a lot of physical challenges, and I can feel myself getting stronger as a human, physically. Mentally, that's a whole other ball of wax, but we'll see how that kind of works itself out, too.

I really appreciate you kind of hanging out with me and enduring my little mental exercise, and I’d be really interested in hearing your thoughts.