Date: 2009-02-27
To: Duncannon Prep Hikes II
Miles today: 0.0
Weather: light rain

On December 14 2008, I embarked on what I anticipated being the last opportunity for me to do an overnight shakedown hike for the season. The two weeks before had been pretty freezing (low temps in the low teens) and I didn't want to be out in that unless I absolutely had to be. Since the forecast called for lows in the mid twenties, I saw this hike as a 'now or never' opportunity.My plan was to park in Duncannon and hike northbound to Peter's Mountain Shelter. At this time, I had not hiked to this shelter from Duncannon and it took longer than I expected. Once I got to the shelter, set up camp, retrieved water, started a fire and got comfy, I realized I would need to leave pretty early the next day to get back on time for work. To complicate matters, there were tons of trees down across the trail, presumably casualties to the ice storm we had got the week before. It took much longer to walk over and around the trees than I had been used to.The next morning I had eaten, struck camp, stretched, and started hiking by 07:30. Knowing that I was trying to make time, I set a pretty rigid pace. As I began to slowly cross familiar waypoints, I realized I was making considerably good time. After about four hours, I departed the ridge line and began the descent down Peter's Mountain, a descent I had done about a dozen times before. Confident in my familiarity with the terrain, I decided that it was safe for me to keep pushing as fast as I could so that I could rest for a while before going to work.About 45 minutes before the end, I experienced my first fall. I lost my footing in a pile of leaves on a high-grade downhill section. Unhurt, I got up and kept charging downhill. About ten minutes later, I felt a dull twinge of pain in my right knee. At this point, I decided to stop charging and take it easy the rest of the way down. Upon each additional step, my knee began to hurt more and by the time I got off the mountain, I had a big problem both with my knee and with my hope of a thru hike in the spring. Although I was still able to walk, I was experiencing pretty bad pain with and without weight on my back. Also, I knew that I had experienced a similar injury when hiking on South Mountain the Spring before and realized I had a major problem on my hands. It was really difficult and time consuming, but I wanted to know everything about both my condition and my ability to undertake the thru hike. Several orthopedic surgeon visits, x rays, an MRI, second opinions, and a ton of research left me with less than concrete results. Both imaging tests showed that my knee is perfectly normal and fine. Than why the hell does it hurt so bad?? "Patella Femoral Syndrome" is the best thing they could tell me--an inflammation of the tissue where the quadracept connects to the knee cap. Well, doctor, would you hike 2000 miles on this knee? Your knee is fine but it might be dangerous if it gives out and you fall off a mountain. (An actual response). Sometimes you must take matters into your own hands. I tried to cross reference this condition with hikers and it turns out that it is a lot more common than I had thought. When you 'have the brakes on' coming downhill, your quads are under stress when they are extending rather than contracting and this puts an awkward strain on them. The solution to the problem: strengthening your quads, and being 'mindful' of your footing on downhills (I was really frustrated with the vagueness of this solution, not to mention the prospect of being 'mindful' of five million foot placings). But that, coupled with knowing that my knee was physically okay and I wasn't doing any longterm damage was the info I had to make a decision.And January was a really difficult month for me mentally. I wanted to get back out there and hike to see how my knee was but the weather stunk. And it still hurt sometimes. Some days it hurt bad and others not much at all. The few hikes I did were very short on sections with little or no elevation change and with no weight. The whole situation just stunk. It looked like I was going to have to decide not to hike the trail in the spring.