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View Full Version : Just wondering if you've had similar thoughts before leaving on your thru...



phillphd
06-28-2013, 22:30
I don't know what to do.
I decided I wanted to hike the AT about 3 years ago, but I had several things I needed to accomplish personally to make that a reality. I weighed nearly 350lbs, had no money, and was still in school. With the trail as my focus I have now graduated college, lost 95lbs, and saved $5000 while also paying off my credit card debt. All of my gear is purchased and my current job commitment ends July 7. I did it. I am ready. I am terrified.
Like many people I have a strong desire for adventure and to challenge myself to grow as an individual. I'm also a very social being. I prefer to fill every moment of my free time with some form of social interaction. The least appealing aspect of an AT thru is the thought of sitting at a campsite alone and somewhat removed from society. While every other aspect of backpacking is exciting to me I worry that if I had to endure several days by myself I would have to quit.
I want to get in better shape. I want to have a once in a lifetime experience. I want adventure.
My plan has been to leave from Katahdin July 10. I have my transportation lined up but I've never been able to bring myself to pull the trigger on a campsite for night one.
This is all kinda scattered but I believe you can infer most of the rest. I realize I won't actually know for sure if it's for me unless I head out, but maybe by reading this a more appropriate alternative plan may become apparent. Maybe you can tell me all these feelings are completely normal. Maybe I don't have the right spirit for this type of adventure.
I appreciate all feedback. If nothing else, this has been an opportunity for me to gather my thoughts. Thanks, brothas (and ladies).

Datto
06-28-2013, 22:44
Your feelings are normal. Lots of trepidation, worry about this and that. It's all new coming soon so there will likely be a bit of butterflies for everyone who takes on the great challenge and adventure of thru-hiking the Appalachian Trail.


Datto

hikerboy57
06-28-2013, 22:45
i think you need to reread your first paragraph. with what you've accomplished using the a.t. as your motivation and now you dont think its for you?youve got the right spirit. lost a ton of weight finished school, saved money. yeah you know its what you want to do.hiking sobo is not quite as social as nobo, but that time you'll be running into plenty of nobos, and wont be alone till you hit the south, and by then ,youll certainly have figured out if "its for you".
its a great adventure,,but you cant finish unless you start, and you already started 3 years ago.
you're gonna have a blast.

Datto
06-28-2013, 22:46
Also, it's likely you'll knock off another 60 pounds of body weight. That's a pretty good reason right there to spend $5,000 for a great life adventure.

Being alone, well, you get used to it and eventually, you relish it. Not that you don't want to be with others necessarily later on in your thru-hike but by that time, you've been with yourself for quite a period of time and you're probably enjoying the peace and quiet -- and the discussions.


Datto

Silent Stroll
06-28-2013, 22:49
Wow. You will lose weight. You will have an experience. When you get to PA send me a PM if you need a ride or whatever. I'll bring you a cheese cake to fatten you up :-)

Swordpen
06-29-2013, 00:57
Really, I am so jealous of you, you have the world at your fingertips!

don't be hesitant, you really began this journey 3 years ago, anyway :)

Thank The Lord, that you don't have arthritis, or some other medical problem that you would be in constant pain trying to do this. Plus, you will lose significantly more weight doing the hike. Think of it as an investment in your health (& thus your future for, yes, the next 20 years), too.

i doubt you will be away from people for more than a day, anyway. I am a social being too (I work in the health care field), so I love interacting with most people, & can get "lonely" when I don't get my "fix", lol.

you will be fine! :)

rocketsocks
06-29-2013, 01:36
Yeah, I always get butterflies before vacation too...but seriously, your more than ready. I personally find it refreshing that you had a plan, saved, improved your health, and paid off debt, instead of throwing caution to the wind and returning to a mountain load of debt. Perhaps spending time with yourself is exactly what you need. have a great hike, and do get back to us and let us know where you land, I'd be curious to know.....I think your gonna do great and maybe even surprise yourself. Cheers!

Biggie Master
06-29-2013, 08:01
You certainly seem like a goal oriented person. Just like the challenges you've already faced (school, weight loss, saving money) - set your goal and learn as much about what that challenge will really mean, then go do it. I'm confident that you will accomplish something very meaningful for yourself, just by taking that first step on the trail. Go get it!

rickb
06-29-2013, 09:03
One of the great things about going southbound is that you will build confidence very quickly.

So you arrive at Baxter State Park as scared as when you went to your first Jr. High dance. Those feeling are natural, and it hardly matters anyway. You are there and just passed the biggest hurdle of all. Be proud of that.

Next you spend all freaking day getting to the top of Katahdin and down. Your body feels more abused and and sore and useless than when you made the mistake if trying out for your HS wrestling team (or whatever) and you are further humbled by the recollection that a bunch of 12-year old kids were frolicking up on the Tableland like they were going down the street to Dairy Joy. Hardly matters, you just made the toughest climb on the entire trail and are on you way. You should be extra proud of that.

Next you you see the sign just before you enter the "Wilderness". It is getting real now, but you are committed as there is just no going back. Scary and exciting all in one, like the day you left home for college or basic or whatever. You walk in the woods and don't look back. You feel proud that you have the guts to do this when many don't.

Then something funny happens. You find yourself in Monson a week or so later all showered up and enjoying food like you never have been before, sore and blistered and bruised and banged up -- but you now know that you can make it to GA. You know you are somehow different than you were just a couple weeks prior. Will you make it all the way? Hardly matters-- you understand there are challenges and adventure.

But you will KNOW that you can make it all the way, and that matters a great deal-- around people or not. You will feel proud of that, and deservedly so.

For what it is worth, you will be starting your thru hike almost 30 years to the day after I started mine. I envy ALL the feelings you are going thru now, and will experience over the coming months.

Slo-go'en
06-29-2013, 11:36
As for being lonely, you will likely start bumping into other hikers at camp pretty quickly, if not right away. Although there won't be many NOBO thru hikers in Maine in mid to late July, there will be section hikers.

illabelle
06-29-2013, 20:09
For what it is worth, you will be starting your thru hike almost 30 years to the day after I started mine. I envy ALL the feelings you are going thru now, and will experience over the coming months.

Just saw this under your name, Rick: ME => GA 19AT3
Nice!

PD230SOI
06-30-2013, 07:18
I say you are ready and should just try it. So what, you decide after the first night you don't like solo hiking or long distance hiking...

then adapt, make another plan!
Go home (or wherever) get some temp work and start lining up section hikes.

really you have done the hard work and nothing says you have be a Thru Hiker, but I think you would love it.

Old Hiker
06-30-2013, 09:34
I don't know what to do.
.......................... I'm also a very social being. I prefer to fill every moment of my free time with some form of social interaction. The least appealing aspect of an AT thru is the thought of sitting at a campsite alone and somewhat removed from society. While every other aspect of backpacking is exciting to me I worry that if I had to endure several days by myself I would have to quit.....................

Emphasis added above.

I have to ask: by social interaction, do you mean your cell phone is glued to your ear, Facebook every 10 minutes or less, 800 texts per day? Please understand, I'm not trying to demean you. It's just that a lot of places on the Trail have no cell reception and you will not have those.

I am NOT a social person. I'm pretty shy and reticent by nature until I get to know you. I'm not the one to start conversations, etc. Part of my problem is that I CANNOT remember names after 5 minutes, so after an hour or two of hiking, you yell "HI" at me and I can't remember your name. Your face, no problem.

I was in awe of the young pups on the Trail during my attempt and did not try to talk with most of them, yet most of THEM tried to interact with me. I was happy to talk with them after they showed it was OK. I could have camped by/with people every night, had I chosen to do so. I just did not.

You will find your social interaction if you desire. It just won't be electronic, probably.

Enjoy your hike!

Datto
06-30-2013, 12:32
One of the things I've brought up in another thread is the element of drive when thru-hiking the Appalachian Trail. I think it's the most important element when you start an AT thru-hike.

It's said by others more experienced than I that when you start an AT thru-hike, if thru-hiking the AT is not the number one focus in your life, you should stop and go do whatever your number one focus is. The unstated implication being, to me anyhow, that a thru-hike of the Appalachian Trail is so demanding, taxing and difficult that if you're not focused on completing your AT thru-hike then it's unlikely you'll complete your AT thru-hike.

I found that to be true.

That's not to say you don't get butterflies before you arrive at the Trail or even during the first week of your AT thru-hike.

Heck, look at me when I was getting ready to start my AT thru-hike. I had done a day hike with a hiking club shortly before I started my AT thru-hike -- only one other member of the hiking club had shown up to the start of the day hike that day because it had been raining that day. He and I decided to go ahead and do the day hike in the rain anyhow. By this time everyone in the hiking club already knew that I took my full backpack with me on every hike -- day hike or overnighter -- and I'd carried it with me that day too. The day hike was a 12 mile +/- down and back type of day hike and somewhere along about three-quarters of the trip the other guy, who knew I was heading to the AT soon to start my thru-hike, had asked me what I thought my chances were of completing my AT thru-hike.

I told him 100%. That it was a 100% chance that I'd complete my AT thru-hike. No qualifications about if I didn't get hurt, or if I didn't run out of money or if I didn't have something happen back home or whatever.

I just told him it was a 100% chance that I'd complete my AT thru-hike.

He laughed and said back to me, "No really, what do you think your chances are?".

I told him, again, 100%.

What I hadn't realized at the time was how much flexibility was required, just in the normal daily trail life, in order to complete a thru-hike of the Appalachian Trail. Drive is one thing, learning to be flexible is another. Learning to accept what is, rather than how you want (demand!) things to be, was a big key to me completing my AT thru-hike. Having great drive with the complete understanding (known ahead of time or learned along the Trail) that you have to learn to be flexible is what I'd found that was important in completing an AT thru-hike.

As far as worries, yes I had some prior to starting my AT thru-hike. Given that right before I was to leave for Springer some bad things happened that I had to deal with (and succeed at within a short time frame) certainly had tested my drive -- even before I'd arrived at Springer. It had seemed there was one expletive moment after another happening in-sequence or concurrently just before I'd left for Springer Mountain trying to impede me making it to Springer.

But, I showed up to Springer and just started hiking north to that very distant place called Katahdin with the intention of passing every single blaze along the way. I think the simplicity of the goal -- to start at one end and just pass by every blaze on the way to the other end -- identified what I'd intended to accomplish. I had no idea about the other immense benefits I'd have and experience by doing just that -- doing what I'd set out to accomplish. That was part of the surprise.


Datto

SawnieRobertson
06-30-2013, 19:39
Datto's post reflects what an amazing person he is. (Hi, Datto. Kinnickinic here. I remember how Give Me Chocolate raved about your sense of humor, how you kept her laughing throughout the miles to Trail Days in '99.) Did your sense of humor help as you tromped north through all the rocks and roots? Surely, you determination to allow nothing to deter you when it came to climbing Katahdin speaks for itself.

Datto
06-30-2013, 21:23
Did your sense of humor help as you tromped north through all the rocks and roots? Surely, you determination to allow nothing to deter you when it came to climbing Katahdin speaks for itself.

Hi Kinnickinic, glad to hear from you again!

Yeah, a sense of humor helped immensely on my AT thru-hike. That was such an important element to making life along the Trail so enjoyable.

Sometimes I used a sense of humor to deflect what could have been a bad day into a day I remember fondly in great detail. The day Fennel and I did the stand up song and dance act for the thru-hikers at the front of a Shenandoah shelter -- in the middle of the pouring rain singing and dancing to Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head. I sure couldn't help but laugh and I guess everyone else had to laugh too even though we had all been soaking wet for hours, maybe days by that time. And it wasn't just my masterful choreography skills in the mud neither.

I guess I learned relatively early on that perception of circumstances during an AT thru-hike is important to helping the drive in a person remain alive. Having (or developing) a sense of humor just makes daily life so much more enjoyable. A sense of humor also helps to keep the situation in perspective -- a realization that we were the luckiest people in the world being able to "get away from it all" for such an extended period of time -- and to complete our thru-hikes of the Appalachian Trail.

Budget conscious Ziggy coming down the Trail within the first few miles from the start of the Appalachian Trail, yelling from a distance to Mac and Michelle and I who were sitting at a trailside picnic table, "Hey did you know people are throwing food along the Trail?" Ziggy wearing a wild tie-dyed T-shirt he found hanging from a tree on the first day or two of his thru-hike -- and in his amazement also having a couple arms full of canned tuna. Ha, still cracks me up today. Seeing Ziggy six months later at the bottom of Katahdin -- him so skinny and with such a long full beard I didn't know how to respond when he walked up to me and said quietly, "I bet you don't know who I am." Of all good fortune, Mac was also there at the bottom of Katahdin as was as Riddler with whom I'd started my AT thru-hike. Mac, in that deep voice of his telling me that it was Ziggy who I was talking to when I was so befuddled. Hard to believe a person could look so unidentifiably different.

That time in Virginia where a thru-hiker who was a mother of several children back home saw me heading down the side trail from the shelter, headed back to start hiking north one hot Virginia morning. I guess I'd bounded out of the shelter a little to quickly that morning and looked a bit disheveled. She grabbed the chest strap of my backpack as I'd stopped to talk to her -- the strap that had gotten twisted so badly because I was in a hurry. She'd said to me, "Who dresses you in the morning?" as she was unbuckling my chest strap and unwinding it before buckling it back up again. I said, "I don't know but could you help me pick out a tie? I never know what goes with this outfit." Well that got her laughing.

A crowded shelter I'd arrived at late one evening in New York someplace -- I'd hopped up and spread out my sleeping bag right away and within a few minutes was sound asleep. Early the next morning, I woke up to find a pretty 22 year old girl on top of me and hugging me. She'd evidently come in late to the shelter and had gotten the only remaining spot in the crowded shelter -- the spot next to me. In the middle of the night she'd cuddled up with me and by morning, had her leg thrown over me and her head on my shoulder. I was facing out from the shelter and looked backward to the just-before-dawn sky and said, "Thank You" since my dreams had been duly answered. Ha. Well when the girl woke up she and realized she had rolled over on top of me and had woke herself up still hugging me, she sat up quickly and was all apologetic -- she must have apologized four or five times in the space of the first ten minutes after she and I had woke up. I eventually told her "No problem." Then after a few seconds while I was getting ready to hike north again I said to her, "What shelter are you staying at tonight?" That got all of us thru-hikers in the shelter laughing, including her.

I ended up seeing that girl several hundred miles later on my way north out of Gorham, New Hampshire. It was just an hour or so before sundown when I'd started hiking north out of Gorham and I had my head down looking at the treadway, making sure I didn't slip on the rocks and roots abundant in that area of the Trail. All of a sudden I came around a corner and that same girl from way back in New York was sitting on a big rock -- feet dangling down and not touching the ground. She had an absolute glow about her -- I mean some kind of aura in the fading sunlight that evening. She'd smiled and said hello to me and after a few quiet moments of enjoying the sunset she said to me, "We're heading into Maine tomorrow" and after a few more moments said, "Can you believe it?". After a few moments I'd said, "Yeah, I know." Just an absolute glow about her. The next morning I took self-portraits at the sign on a tree on the side of the Trail that had said, "Welcome To Maine". Someone had used a wide-tipped pentel marker to write on the bottom of the sign, "Wipe Your Feet." Given it was raining cats and dogs and by then I was already covered in mud even though it had been less than 24 hours since I'd left Gorham, I was laughing at the request.

Ah well, a sense of humor sure did go a long way toward making my AT thru-hike so immensely enjoyable.


Datto

KermitBoxer
06-30-2013, 21:37
Datto, I love reading your posts.

That's all.

Sunwolf
07-01-2013, 17:04
I'm also a very social being. I prefer to fill every moment of my free time with some form of social interaction. The least appealing aspect of an AT thru is the thought of sitting at a campsite alone and somewhat removed from society. While every other aspect of backpacking is exciting to me I worry that if I had to endure several days by myself I would have to quit.

Nights alone on the trail may be hard for you. But there is nothing wrong with hard. Hard is how we grow.

Barring an injury that destroys your ability to walk, you'll never have to quit.

q-tip
07-02-2013, 09:34
Congratulations. 99.99% of the people that say they want to hike the AT never show up at the first trailhead. I was scared, and after my first day thought, how can I do this. Made it 1/2 way which was my goal. GOOD LUCK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Dogwood
07-02-2013, 13:39
Wecome to WB Philphd. "With the trail as my focus I have now graduated college, lost 95lbs, and saved $5000 while also paying off my credit card debt. All of my gear is purchased and my current job commitment ends July 7. I did it. I am ready. I am terrified." LOL. :D IMHO, what you have going for you is that you have taken significant action steps getting to this point. Losing that wt will pay huge dividends on a hike! The saving of $5K tells me more good things about you. And, well, graduating college, paying off debt, and having had a job committment that is ending speaks more of your character. Congrats. You're going SOBO so you'll be in less of a AT hiking crowd but you WILL DEFINITELY not be camping alone nights on end on the AT IF you choose not to. AT shelters conrgregate hikers. Camp around or in the shelters if you want more social interaction. Here is something you need to embrace on a thru-hike though if you're going to actually complete a thru-hike - even with all the planning and steps you've taken so far YOU HAVE TO BE ADAPTABLE. Events are going to occur that you can not possibly anticipate. You have to know that and take it in stride. Without that adapatabilty you'll struggle and probably quit. We can discuss from a keyboard endless scenarios and hiking topics but you have to realize, you WILL have to adapt to a different lifestyle - the thru-hiking lifestyle. This will mean extending the boundaries of your present comfort zones! If you don't you will go back to your house, apartment, city life, etc. Take it easy at first. Settle in and adapt. Embrace the unknowns and the lifestyle and many of the unknowns will soon be the basis for what will become a new lifestyle and what you will soon become comfortable with.

Meriadoc
07-02-2013, 13:58
Phillphd, I suspect that you found out everything you needed just from putting your thoughts into words and writing it out.

If not, I'll try to help nudge you :P.

You are, in your own words, "ready." Do it. It doesn't matter whether you go for one day or two hundred, 10 miles or 2,200 miles. You want to do it, so do it. Once you get on the trail there is no commitment to continue. There is no shame in finding out that the very eclectic long distance hiking style is not for you. (Although I bet that it is for you!) You will probably want to continue and I would recommend giving the experience at least two weeks. Seriously, you have absolutely nothing to lose by just going for it all out, with your whole heart and soul. Happy hiking!!

-Merry the Hobbit

P.S. On a thru hike you will find that some of the most valuable time ever is the time that you have completely to yourself for a few days. Depending on temperament, it may not be easy - it sure wasn't for me - but it was so exceedingly worthwhile and truly was the best opportunity I have ever had for me to learn about me.

Datto
07-02-2013, 22:59
Datto, I love reading your posts.

Thanks for the kind words. Here I was thinking the AT was funny every day of my thru-hike.. Surprisingly, the CDT is lots of fun too. Especially when you trot out Apache women:

http://www.trailjournals.com/entry.cfm?id=383382


Datto