Date: 2009-02-22
To: It's Different This Time
Miles today: 0.0

I can¢t believe it¢s less than two weeks before I leave for Springer Mountain, and I¢ve only got five entries in my journal so far. Last time, I had like close to 40! But it was different then. VERY different!        That first time, I really had little idea what I was getting myself into. Oh, I¢d done a couple of ¢shakedown¢ hikes, including an 8 day, 104 miles backpacking trip through the Shenandoah¢s. But that was more of a gear check kind of thing. I really had no idea what lay in store for me over the coming six months.         In retrospect, that was a good thing! If I HAD known, at least if I had known how the first three weeks were going to go, I¢d probably have stayed at home. As the intrepid readers of my ¢05 Journal know all too well, I suffered serious injuries within the first two weeks of my hike. I carried on for several more days, hoping they weren¢t really all that serious, before stopping at Fontana Dam to assess things. Long story short: I was done. As the MRI revealed after I got home, I had a stress fracture of my right tibia, and a meniscus tear in my right knee. After only 18 days and 162 miles, my hike was over.        NOT. That was my year to hike. And I don¢t give up all that easily. So I get home on a Monday, have the MRI on Tuesday, have surgery on the knee on Thursday, and by Friday I¢m working on the rehab process. Ok, at that point, the rehab consisted mostly of mental exercises ¢ trying to maintain my sanity as I read the journals of my hiker friends, and cried inside knowing that they were still hiking north while I was sitting at home changing the dressings on my knee. It was hard.         I felt sorry for myself for ten minutes a day, and then, after a week of keeping the pressure off the stress fracture, I slowly began the physical rehabilitation. I hobbled around the block on my crutches. After anther week, I did it without the crutches. Only a mile a day, and slowly, so I didn¢t aggravate the stress fracture. My orthopedic surgeon had told me when he read the MRI that stress fractures take about six weeks to heal. I consulted a calendar and decided that the recovery period on that has begun when I laid up in Robbinsville, near Fontana Dam before giving up and going home. That meant I could restart my hike by May 15 ¢ right after attending Trail Days in Damascus, Virginia. Perfect. I had a plan, and all I had to do was work the plan.         My friends at home, of course, all thought I was nuts -- standing around at the Scout Troop Meeting, me on my crutches, talking about how soon I could get back to the trail. My wife knew me better. I think she was more relieved, and happier for me even than I was, when I left home five weeks later on a Trailways Bus bound for Damascus.         Like I said, that was then. This is now. In some ways, I know too much this time. There isn¢t the mystery, or the level of anxiety, as the last time ¢ the ¢can I really do this?¢ kind of feeling. I pretty much know what to expect out there in terms of the physical and mental challenges, and I¢m comfortable with all that. Well, except for that nagging little fear of falling to my death, but hey, I¢ll deal with that when the time comes.        Meanwhile, I¢m not going through the same kind of mental trauma as I did ¢pre-hike¢ back in 2005. That¢s a good thing because, as I said, I really haven¢t had time for it this year. Mostly it¢s the office and the pressures of work, but things outside of work have sort of complicated my life as well.         Take last week, for example. Have you ever had ¢one of those weeks¢?   I did. It began earlier in the month, when I decided to go see my orthopedic surgeon about my back. I¢ve had back problems for a dozen years ¢ at one point, it was so bad that I couldn¢t sit for more than half an hour at a time. I actually had a ¢stand-up desk¢ installed in my office. My chiropractor pulled me through back then, and eventually I guess the herniated disk kind of resolved itself. Still, over the past few months, when I first got up in the morning, it gave me a kind of nagging pain until I had been up on my hind legs and walking for a few minutes. Nothing debilitating, just a pain in the ¢¦ back. So I decided to have it checked out. The x-rays showed some clear deformities and a few missing pieces, but the Doc said he couldn¢t really make a definitive diagnosis without an MRI. So I scheduled that for 7 am the next Monday morning. I didn¢t want to be late for work, after all.        Things kind of went downhill from there¢¦