Date: 2008-03-26
To: Thoughts after completion
Miles today: 0.0

1. Why did we do it?David: Don't ask! Like most people, we find that very hard to answer. Best I can say is that as I have been hiking for 40 years now, hiking is just something that I enjoy doing and the AT is just another hike; though a very long one.I have been aware of the AT since the '60's and it has just sat there as something that I would like to do if I ever got the time and money. Photos I saw of it then looked interesting. And the concept of a long distance trail through such a highly populated area appealed.Susan: While actually on the trail I wondered why on many occasions, but it is just what we do. We do it at home, we do it overseas. We'll keep on doing it, no doubt. What other way is there of gaining total immersion in some particular place? You get to smell, taste, feel, see and touch it. You are hot, cold, hungry, sated, exhausted, depressed and exhilarated. You are alive!2. Did we enjoy it / did we have fun?David: For all the trials and tribulations, we kept going, so we must have got some enjoyment from it even if it was not that obvious at the time.Susan: Ditto. There is no doubt that it would have been more enjoyable day-to-day if we'd chosen to take more time and not tried to do it all in one hit. But then, to use words from Sir Ed Hillary, "we knocked the bastard off" and there is a sense of achievement in that which is "fun" of a sort. 3. Level of difficultyDavid: Ten years ago, I would have found it no problem. But in the last few years I have slowed down a lot and can no longer cover the distance that I used to be able to. We only had a six month entry permit which equates to 5 1/2 months on the trail. The trail is 3,500 kms long so that effectively meant that we had to do 30+ kms per day and to minimise days off in town. We found that hard. For much of the trail it felt like a forced march and this became more so as day-light shrank. On top of this we were climbing around 1500m per day every day with pack weight of 15 kgs.But we did it! No-one said it was going to be easy.Susan: It goes without saying that I would have survived it much better 10-20 years ago too. But we chose to challenge ourselves in this way!4. Our bodies survivedDavid: We came with near 60 years of health problems and 40 years of hiking injuries and wear and tear. At the start we thought it quite likely that something would go wrong. For the last few years, one or other of us has often been out of action for one reason or another and it seemed totally unreasonable to expect both our bodies to function fault-free for six months simultaneously. Well, they nearly did! Just one sprained ankle was our only problem, plus assorted blisters and foot problems which never got bad enough to affect our hike and soon went away.Susan: Pure luck! No knee problems or other "overuse" injuries, of which we've run the gamut over the years. There was only one stupid accident and it was relatively minor. 5. Our choice of directionDavid: We fretted for weeks about whether to do the trail NOBO (north bound ie south to north), SOBO (south bound) or as a flip-flop. We weighed up the options and decided to do it SOBO. We knew we were taking a risk with the weather in the south but we decided that that was better than NOBO. NOBO also had possible weather problems in the south. Most of the "experts" along the trail explained to us how we got it wrong and how we had little chance of making it through. What seemed strange to us was that they all seemed to think that we had no idea of what we were doing; that we were heading off with our eyes closed. Well, we did know what we were doing and we "won" our gamble with the weather. In fact, we never got really cold weather with the coldest temperature we experienced being only -7 degC (19F). We were a little apprehensive with going SOBO to start with but now we are convinced that SOBO is better than NOBO. Even going southbound we had a terrible time in the mid-Atlantic states with the temperatures hitting the high 20s, but then the NOBOs got temperatures into the high 30s and even 40 degC.Susan: Dave did a lot of research on the climate conditions we would encounter, and our choice to go SOBO was a calculated risk based on our own preferences for cooler rather than hotter weather. We encountered a lot of doomsayers who tried to wind us up about the difficulties of winter in the south. The difficulties should not be understated, they are real, but if you have enough experience to know your own needs you can be pretty well prepared. Our only reservation was our awareness that our survival instincts in another country are less reliable than they are at home. We know this, so we built in a margin of error. So, for example, we never had to use all the cold weather gear we had.6. On adviceDavid: We received lots of advice and got a lot of information off the net. 90% of it was wrong. In fact, we wondered how many of these people had actually walked the trail. My advice to future hikers: ignore all advice.Susan: I wouldn't go quite that far. Some people know what they are talking about, but the trick is to know which people! You only know in hindsight.8. Post-trip traumaSusan: People say they took time to adjust afterwards. I don't think that has been true for me. I've thought about the trail quite a lot though, but mainly because we're organising our photos and because I'm reading some journals to see how the early thru-hikers are coping with winter hiking. The whole trip seems somewhat unreal now, but since it seemed that way before we went I'm just getting back to normal life again.9. Dealing with the trail lengthSusan: I found it worked better for me not to dwell on anything much more than what I was going to do that day. It was easier to do this during the first half of the trail since we had so far to go that, in the scheme of things, mileage really didn't matter. It was harder on the second half of the trip since it is easy to fall into the trap of counting down the hundreds of miles. In this you are aided by Wingfoot since every time you look at it you can't help but read the "miles to go" number. I think this is rather unfortunate since you aren't gaining anything by constantly being reminded of how far you have to go. We had to count miles and monitor progress due to our time constraint but I would have much preferred not to have to do this. Under different circumstances (ie no time limit) I might have whited out that column of Wingfoot.