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.