Originally Posted by
JAK
I was going to mention cross-country skiing also, but this past winter has me all depressed. Anyhow, river is open, paddling season starts today. lol.
Interesting to consider the relationship between weight and speed, and weight and distance, and speed and distance. Typically if you slow down by about 6-10%, you can run twice as far. This holds more or less true for distances from 400m up to 40,000m or more. Not sure how it translates to ultra distance, and multi-day hiking. I think it holds true that if you increase your weight by 10%, you need to slow down by 10% in order to be able to go the same distance. However, when we talk in terms of hiking miles per day, over multiple days, it gets trickier. Take someone that can average 25 miles per day on the AT, hiking say 10-15 hours per day, and maintain that average over 80 days. Typically they are light for their height, and in awesome shape. What happens if you increase the total weight on feet from say, 160 pounds to 200 pounds? How much do they need to reduce their miles per day? Not sure. My guess is its more or less linear, so in this case it would mean a reduction from 25 miles per day to 20 miles, but it might have to be more than that. Not sure. What I am saying is you can't just slow down and hike a longer day. Your body can only repair itself so fast, so you can only do so much work per day, and hiking work is a product of total weight and distance, but there could be some nonlinearities there also. However, at those higher speeds I think slowing down is more efficient, when walking, and that might cancel out the nonlinearities of adding more weight.
Anyway, have fun with it. Also, think of each day as a training day rather than a race, because it is a 80-120 event which is more or less a training season. So if you can do 50-100 mile day if it was a single day race, your thru-hiking day should probably not be more than 25-50% of that. Again, I am not sure. It would be an interesting question to ask someone like Jennifer Pharr Davis how much fast she might be able to do 1000 miles or 500 miles or 100 miles versus 2000 miles. She maintained about 46 mpd for 46 days, so maybe she could do 50 mpg for 25, 55 mph for 12, 60 mph for 6, and so forth, one something like that. Again there are a lot of nonlinearities there because you have to switch from mostly walking to mostly running and with rugged terrain you start getting into some nasty business.
Not sure where I am going with this. Lots of variables. It comes down to an experiment of one. Hope you beat yourself, without beating yourself up. Best advice might be to treat it as a very very long training run/hike, not a very very long race. Jennifer Pharr Davis said it was mostly about staying smart, not staying fast or even tough, though of course she was all three and then some. Listen to your brain. Don't over-ride you central governor until you really know your body can take it. Finish fitter than you start, at least for this first one.
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