Fitness Preparation for the Trip

So one of the big things about a 6-month hiking trip is the extreme physical demands it will place on the hikers. Sabrina and I recognized that early and began our physical preparation for the AT in early 2009 (April for me and May for Sabrina). We both joined CrossFit Tysons Corner. For those who have not heard of CrossFit, the best way I can describe it is one swift kick in the rear that will generally put you on your back at the end of the short (less than 1 hour) workout and will do this repeatedly almost every time you go. For a while, I was going to the morning classes at the gym where a aspiring Navy SEAL taught and tailored his workouts towards that end. It was amazing how quickly I started seeing benefits working at that level.

In all seriousness, check out the CrossFit main page also to get more detailed information on the philosophy and methods that the program follows. It combines high intensity days with strength days with endurance days into a general physical preparedness program that result in drastic changes in your overall fitness in a pretty quick time frame. The program identifies 10 main areas of fitness: cardiovascular endurance, respiratory endurance, stamina, strength, flexibility, power, coordination, agility, balance, and accuracy. Hmmm...I wonder if any of those will come in useful on a 6-month, 2,170 mile hiking trip. I vote yes.

I won't go into a ton of detail about all of the workouts that we do, but our friends Alison and Dan have a blog where they recount some of the workouts and their impressions, which are pretty funny sometimes. Check them out here.

With our busy schedules we have had trouble finding good times to take overnight camping trips as preparation for the hike. We have done several day hikes and actually only one overnight hike (which was Sabrina's first backpacking experience ever), so the training we are doing will be a huge benefit to making sure we are at least partially prepared for this adventure.

One other thing that we discovered was the need for additional recovery assistance following the workouts, especially for me, to be able to go 4-5 days each week. I have only tried one product but it seems to work pretty well and actually tastes good. It is Xtend by SciVation (I know, it sounds like a competitor product for Enzyte, but trust me, it isnt). It is a branched chain amino acid (BCAA) product with no carbs, sugar or calories, just the good protein basics. It comes in a bunch of flavors, but we like the orange flavor and will probably package up a bunch of it into little ziplock bags to drink along the way.

For those who know anything about CrossFit already, if you are interested, I have a PR "Fran" time of 7:26, so don't look to me as some kind of elite athlete. If you don't know what I am talking about, see the workout description here and realize that there are people who can do this in just over 2 minutes.

A tent in the living room takes up a LOT of space!

Hi everyone, sorry for the late update.  Originally Matt was going to help write posts more....but he's reffing a bunch this month so I guess I'll have to pick up my pace :-)  There hasn't been much exciting going on here at any rate, so I thought I'd add a post about our new tent and and quick note about the last two dehydrated meals we tested.  If anyone has noticed that this information is not what one would call organized.....well, you're right!  I'm basically just posting what I happen to be thinking about or working on that day so I can promise a fair amount of jumping around :-)  Just FYI.

On the meal front we tried out Hamburger soup and Curry Chicken (both from TDB) and both passed the taste test.  I need to dehydrate some more food this weekend and do some shopping so we can finish up our testing this coming week and begin the massive batch processing that needs to take place.  And then figure out some sort of system so my fabulous in-laws (who have agreed to send us all our food) don't want to strangle us while trying to ship our food.

And now for the super fun part of the day......we set up our new tent!  We had previously been planning on using the 3 person QuarterDome tent from REI, but the thing weighed in at nearly 6 pounds and while fairly easy to set up as far as tents go, perhaps not as easy to set up in the pouring rain without getting everything wet.  We started to consider a tarp, but I have some major issues with the whole lack of bug netting (yes, I know there will be bugs on the trail but that doesn't mean I have to sleep with them!).  I started researching how to make a tarp with attached netting and came across Tarptents.  Best. Idea. Ever.  These guys are freaking amazing.   We opted for the Rainshadow 2, which weighs in at just over 2 pounds, uses our treking poles for front pole(s) (multi-use is a key component of lightweight) and has a reasonable price tag of $265.  They even tell you to seal the seams with a homemade sealent (and tell you how to make it) and send scrap silnylon to make repairs for free!  Here's a picture of our tent set up in our living room, as we were too lazy to go outside.

Sorry the picture is horrible, I couldn't back up enough in my tiny apartment to get a better view.  This thing is huge!  It basically took up most of our living room and it wasn't even pulled open all the way.  It is also the easiest tent to set up I have ever seen.  When they say you can set up in under 2 minutes with a little practice, they aren't kidding!  The top front comes up to Matt's chest and we can both easily sit up inside. 

Needless to say we're thrilled with our choice and will be taking our old tent back to REI posthaste!  Don't get me wrong, I love REI (especially their fabulous return policy) but when it comes to lightweight long distance hiking I think it can pay off to seek out specialty vendors.

First dehydrated test meal....Chicken Noodle Soup

So we finally did our first dehydrated test meal tonight.  Last week I dehydrated 4 carrots, 1 celery bunch, 3 roma tomatos, a basket of pre-sliced mushrooms, 1 giant red bell pepper, 2 zucchini's, 5 granny smith apples, 4 McIntosh apples, .75lb of chicken strips, .75lb of beef strips, and 1lb of ground beef.  That sounds like a lot of food right?  In fact the veggies were all I could fit into my 6 tray dehydrator, so I did the meat Saturday and the apples Monday. So here's what all that food looks like dehydrated and packed into small containers.

The two opaque containers hold all the dried meat....that's nearly 3lbs of chicken and beef!



Talk about lightweight food!



So then we followed the advice of Ms. Holmes and dumped the chicken in a Nalgene bottle with water and chicken boullion while packaging up the rest of the meal in press-n-seal (crumples down to super compact and lightweight trash on the trail) per her instructions.  Apparently I need more practice getting the air out of the package because I didn't do so well this time....but I'll get plenty of practice!!  So our psuedo-trail packaging looks like this

 

  The idea is that we dump the meat in the Nalgene bottle after lunch and let it rehydrate all afternoon in our packs.  That way we cut down on cooking time and hence save fuel.  Pretty sweet huh?  Then after we hike into camp, we dump everything in the pot and let it sit for a bit while we get organized.  The instructions (slightly modified) are to bring to a boil, then cook for 5 minutes.  After cooking, we set the pot in a (homemade) pot cozy where it continues to cook sans fuel.  

We cooked this test meal in our pot on our gas stove.

And viola!  We have our very first ever homemade dehydrated meal :-)

Unfortunately, the taste verdict was....too bland :-(  I think in general I'll be more generous with the spices but also that perhaps chicken noodle soup itself may not be the best menu item.

Oh, and we decided against dehydrated celery.....what's the point?  You eat celery when you're trying to lose weight because it has NOTHING in it.  Since we want the most bang for our buck when it comes to trail food, I have made an executive decision and vetoed all celery.  Sorry to any celery fans out there.

The Schedule

One of the most important items for our upcoming trip is how to make it all work within our already (somewhat) established lives. Right now our plan is for a total of a 6-month trip. This six months includes the week or so between when I stop work and we actually get on the trail, walking all those miles, zero days, a return trip to Northern VA and whatever other time we manage to consume while we are out there.

In a nutshell, here are some approximate dates that we are working with for our hike:
- April 16, 2010: my last day at work
- April 17-18: Bring one car to my parents house
- April 20-ish: Drop second car and cats in Richmond with Sabrina's sister and her husband (basically, they are saints for agreeing to add two cats to the 2 cats and a dog that currently run their house)
- April 22 or so: Springer Mountain (still are working on how we get from Atlanta airport to there, but we will work that our better as we get closer)
- Late July-ish: Hopefully from somewhere in PA, we perform the flip-flop portion of the hike and train/plane/automobile to Katahdin
- Mid-October-ish: Return to the flip flop point and complete our thru-hike

We chose the flip flop in this way for a couple reasons, mostly to optimize our weather on the trip, missing the coldest weather in the south and getting to Maine after black fly season and before the weather starts to turn there. We hope that with this arrangement, we also miss most of the big jump-off crowds in March and early April in Georgia.

Over the course of the hike we are also looking at something on the order of one day or so of "zero days" each week to let us rest, recover and keep us fresh and ready to go for a whole 6 months. This combined with the food plan (see Sabrina's previous post) will hopefully allow for as enjoyable (if that is possible on a trip of this scope) of a hike as we can have.

Eating on the trail

This is probably one of the first questions people ask when they find out we're planning to backpack for 6 months straight.  The most common answer is eat a lot of ramen, oatmeal and poptarts.  Little Debbies are very popular as well :-)  I'm a bit of a research junkie so I've spent the last 5 years reading just about everything I could about how to hike the trail and how to plan to hike the trail.  However, since the main motto of the trail is "Hike your own hike" everyone you ask or read has a different view.  When it comes to food the biggest choice to make is whether to do maildrops, resupply along the way or some combination.

I would say in general most thru-hikers will tell you not to do a lot of maildrops because you lose flexibility.  If you're doing maildrops, even doing only locations within a mile of the trail you confine yourself to a schedule and potentially end up racing to make it into town to make it before the post office closes or waiting until the post office opens on Monday.  This can be a fairly big drawback.  We have decided however to do the majority of our food via maildrops and here's why: nutrition.  When talking to people we've discovered that most people aren't putting much thought into the nutrition of the food.  Also if they do maildrops they're mailing things like poptarts, oatmeal, raman, etc, which is essentially what you can buy along the way.  Hence maildrops end up being more of a PITA than helpful.  We're hoping that by doing maildrops with a more nutrionally thought out menu we can enjoy the hike more despite the loss of flexibility.

For the past 7 months we've been (mostly) on what's called the Zone diet which is mainly about always eating protein, carbs and fats in proportion and together.  So our plan is to try and use the same nutrional principles to prepare dehydrated meals.  We've noticed such a huge difference in energy levels while on the Zone that we figured it should work (with some tweaking) to help us hike all day everyday. 

Since we were smart enought to register for a food dehydrator for our wedding (in 2005!) we are now in the process of testing out meals and then dehydrating large batches of food.  Last November we attending the Gathering which is an annual meeting/conference of the ALDHA and Matt attended some seminars on food for backpacking.  One of the seminars was run by a lady named Mary Holmes who printed and sold a booklet about backpacking food that is based on the Zone diet.  I love it when someone does the hard work for me!  And yes, Matt attended the seminar, because in our house Matt does all the cooking (he kicks me out of the kitchen) and hence is in charge of food for the trail :-)  Between her booklet and the book The Dehydrator Bible we sat down and chose 10 dinner recipies.  Today I started dehydrating small amounts of the ingredients for 4 of the recipies so we can test cook them.  We'll let you know how they are.

Since this post has become unreasonably long I'll write more on this subject later!

Just getting started...

Well, not really since we have been planning for this hike for almost 5 years now, but this is the first time that we have gotten around to putting some info on our preparations into a blog. Hopefully, this will be a good place for family to keep track of our preparations and for future hikers to learn from our expereince. AT 2010, here we come!