Mileage...realistic?

imported
#1

don’t laugh - i know the planning may get tossed to the side of the Trail once i’m out there, but my plans to meet people different places and trying to coordinate with my dad’s work schedule to get to their house at a time he has no other obligations requires SOME advance planning. my question is, are the following averages realistic for the respective areas?

i plan to start out averaging 8 mi/day, work up to 12/day to Fontana Dam. 15/day after that until around Bland/Bastian, VA; 25/day to around Danielsville, PA; 20/day to around Glen Cliff, NH; then 15/day to Katahdin. I also plan to take one day off a week, and it leaves me some leeway to get to Katahdin before October 15.

hephzibah

#2

Hey Heph. You might be a little bored at only eight miles a day. The average hiker can make about 10-15 easily. On rainy days you’ll tend to do langer ones since nothing alse is going on other than trying to stay dry. You get up when its light, you walk all day, you stop at night. So simple, so delicious. You’ll get your groove soon enough.
Unless you have some legs under you before you start the first few weeks will be a little sow as you figure a pace and your body gets used to the grind. It will do some weird things. The hills are a little steep also. Check out our mileages for someone with so-so legs; we ate to much for Chistmas. trailjournals.com/rudolf we made some okay time and weren’t couch potatoes. That ride down in the car was a killer as far as getting all stiff though. You find that it takes about three days after town to get back in trim after one day off. One zero is good, two you get weak, three you lost it all. It will take almost a week to clean out all that pizza you ate in town. A week off is like starting from go.

Bushwhack

#3

For my section hike I trained for 1 week on a stair stepper mainly to work the soreness out before starting(it worked). I planned for 8 miles a day but ended up averaging 12 by the time I got to Franklin with my longest day being 16.5 miles(most days were 10-11). Most people can average 2 mph hiking at a comfortable pace. The usual day for me consisted of getting up around 8am, packing everything up, eating breakfast and start hiking by 8:30-9:00am. Around 12pm-1pm(6-8 miles) I would stop and take a 30-60min break, eat lunch and maybe lay down and take a nap(if it wasn’t raining or the black flies weren’t swarming too much). I’d then hike another 2-3 hours and reach a shelter or campsite around 4-5pm, set up camp and eat dinner.
One piece of advice would be to go SLOW on the downhills. About 20% of people go home at Neels Gap, mainly because of blown knees. I think most of the people I saw on the trail seemed to be averaging around 10 miles a day for the first 100 miles, so I think thats a good place to start.

Nooga

#4

It sounds like a very good plan. Just remember to be good to yourself. If your body says stop, then stop. Many people take pain killers, force themselves to keep going, break down, then wonder why.

Blue Jay

#5

I totally agree that it is good to prepare a “baseline” schedule for all the reasons you listed. I did.

Now, if you read Roland Mueser’s book, “Long Distance Hiking,” you will learn that the average weekly mileage for thur-hikers is 87 miles per week. And thru-hikers also take 1 day off out of 7. 50% of the hikers do between 94 and 83 miles per week average.

The data isn’t perfect, but the average thru-hiker averages 10 miles per day in Georgia, 12 miles per day in North Carolina and Tennessee, 15 miles per day through the mid Atlantic states, 14 miles per day through Massachusetts and Vermont, 12 miles per day through New Hampshire and Maine.

The point is, very few hikers average 20 miles per day for any stretch of the trail. And people usually don’t do consecutive 25 mile days.

Peaks

#6

Averaging 25 miles a day or even 20 miles a day is tough work. Perhaps if you are going real light… Several times on our hike we strung together 4-5 20 mile plus days only to be beat and tired.

Perhaps another way to look at it… How much time do you have? We averaged 14 miles a day for the whole trip and finished in just under 5 months.

Grimace

#7

This is a good topic. I had planned on hiking roughly 8-9 days then a day off throughout my hike. I wanted to start with the first 9 day round with 10 mile days, take a day off, then continue on. To finish in 5 months, I need to average 15.7 miles per day. (Calculated as hiking 9 out of ten days, from last week in Feb to last week in July, first 9 days at 10mi/day, then remaining 2070-odd miles divided by hiking days remaining). This is not strict, I know some days are high, some low, plus weather, etc. Plus, I am trying for a 40-45lb pack weight (I’ll be about 190 at start), but I am sure the body weight and pack weight will be lower as time goes.

I know I want to see the sites and towns, but also must complete by late July at very latest, earlier the better. I will be training alot prior to going, alot of stairmaster with pack, treadmill with pack, and short hikes if possible, plus my regular gym and cardio routine. Whatever other conditioning i need will have to come from the trail itself.

Hope this is realistic planning…

xtn

airferret

#8

Here is a great applet that you can use to help you plan out your average mileage per day. Of course, it doesn’t take into account the fact you’ll do more in PA than in GA, but ah well. It’s still useful. Enjoy and see some of y’all on the trail. I’ll be in SNP from May 13-17th.

http://www.tomjanofsky.com/at/

just Cherry

#9

It is extremely difficult for any one hiker to tell you how fast you will hike. I have sectioned from Springer to Damascus and have seen some hiking 3mph and some 2mph. I am not in the best of shape, but have had some 15+ days, and a few 8mi days at the beginning. I have found the profile map most helpful in determining the timing of the given day’s hike : I go 1mph up hill if it is at an incline of 1000ft per 1mi. Less steep, level, and slight downhill I go 2mph. Steeper downhill I go 1.5mph. If you look at the profile maps, you can get a rough estimate for each days mileage, and where you end depending on shelters, campsite, hours of daylight, etc. This can give you a pretty obsessive compulsive “plan” for your entire hike…Then you go out and hike, reach various great places to see the vista, and spend time enjoying the trail, so your pace changes. I have sometimes wished I could hike the whole thing at once so I didnt “have” to be somewhere in 3 or 4 days. I think the best thing to do is just go out there and enjoy the fact that you dont have to have a time table to hike by like the rest of the world.

Cutman11

#10

Schedules get in the way of enjoying the freedom of your hike. When you have a set mileage it tends to become tedious and I have seen hikers quit the trail because it wasn’t fun any more. I believe in planning my mileage as I go and playing it by ear. Some days you feel good and hike all day doing 20+ miles and other days you take the day off and do 2 miles. I have done 20 mile days and I agree with Grimace that after a week of long days my body was beat and needed rest.

Darth Pacman

#11

I agree with everybody else. A schedule is hard to keep. In areas where you think you can do great miles something stops you. In areas were you think you will have bad miles you do great. We did the SNP in 5 days (107 miles) and it was not fun. We were meeting some friends in Harpers Ferry and did some crazy miles for about three weeks and it was at HF I had to spend some time at the Podiatrist. We averaged about 12 miles in the south, 15 in the middle and 14 in New England. We also had a deadline to be at Katahdin and hiked Maine at about 15.2 miles per day average. Maine was not easy at that pace. Flame ended up on crutches for two months with a bad hip pointer. Enjoy your hike and don’t get into a rush. When we rushed it was not near as much fun. Happy trails!

Papa Smurf

#12

Having a deadline to meet in Maine would be my version of hell. You’d have to walk by all those wonderful ponds and not swim in them. All those incredible wild places that do not exist anywhere else, and you’d have to walk right on by. Add to that the pain of forced miles on very hard terrain. It would be like having the best meal in the world put in front of you, during a thruhike, and being told you had one minute and everything would then be thrown out in front of you. How hopelessly cruel,I shudder at the thought.

Blue Jay

#13

I was a fairly strong hiker (young and resilient to boot!) and I know that I couldn’t average 25/day for 500+ miles straight. Owwww…it hurts to even think about it! Though that terrain is not as challenging as elsewhere on the trail, it is important to keep in mind that it will be hot and, unless you’re blessed with lots of rain, DRY. The heat and humidity will knock off a few miles for a weary hiker by themselves.

Even if you are in peak physical condition, I don’t think you should COUNT on being able to do that many miles each day through any terrain. Here is my recomendation: Be true to your body. In order to pull this off, it is essential that you listen to your body’s needs. If it says stop, STOP. If you don’t it’s likely that it’ll only get worse. be as gentle as you must be at the beginning to your knees. Don’t get addicted to Vitamin I (Ibuprofin). The trail will be here (with a little luck) well beyond either of our lifetimes, so that means you have plenty of time in which to finish if you find that your schedule is too pressing this year. Also, If you have time beyond October 15, you could always flip flop in mid-late August and head back down to where you dropped off (do it in plenty of time to get OUT of the White by October, though).

Since I don’t know what kind of physical shape you are in, I can’t really give you numerical suggestions, but guessing that you must be in fairly good shape to consider averaging 25/day through VA, if you wish to keep the schedule you have put forth here, I would up it a little in GA-Fontana (say 10-12mpd including layovers) and keep pushing it up ever so slightly as you are able to through mid VA. By then, you should be at your peak and know very well whether or not you’ll be able to keep your schedule…

Howie

Hungry Howie

#14

“are the miles getting in the way of your trail experience?”

-kinkora hostel-

magicgame03

#15

Sounds like your on Track!

Virginian

#16

Aloha! Do only what your body lets you do. It will tell you when to stop. It, or your feet or your head, will definitely tell you what you should do. Listen carefully. I thought I was listening and ended up with a broken femur and cracked tibia. Too far, too fast, too furious. Too much adrenaline. It’s hard to believe it in the beginning but you can and will make it to Katahdin by doing no more than 10 miles a day. And you’ll do far more than that at various points with ease. Take the time to see the views, smell the flowers and enjoy the camraderie of the trail. Have your friends meet you vice you racing to meet them. I promise you, leaving the trail for a major injury is far worse than possibly listening to friends complain about having to go a bit further than originally planned. Oh yeah… the best laid plans of mice, men and women … often get blown to hell! And it’s a good thing! Aloha! 8)

Aloha! Ann

#17

Just wanted to second what Aloha said. My hiking partner and I started from Springer with a metric ton of stuff we thought we needed, moving too fast and pushing ourselves too hard. My friend ended up breaking her ankle (multiple stress fractures) and getting off the trail at Unicoi, less than a week later. Take care of yourself and listen to your body!

P.S. Aloha–it was great meeting you in Duncannon when you picked up Peewee! Mahalo and aloha!

ravin’