There are many more aspiring thru-hikers than successful ones. I'm one of those who didn't make it. I thought '01 was to be my year. Didn't happen that way. Ultimately, it was Miss Janet's trampoline that was my downfall, literally. Probably shouldn't have been doing back-flips on it, specially since that was usually a swimming thing for me so I had a tendency to jump far back rather than straight up. -landed on the bar, wrong... took me off the trail for 5 weeks. By the time I got back on the trail I weighed the "chore" of racing the clock north against doing my own little tour of the east coast. Being from California, and not having seen much of the east coast at the time, I opted to do my own tour: jumped up to the Shenandoah, went to Montauk (tip of Long Island), made it to Maine after all! -though it was Acadia NP, not Katahdin. I tried to hit up every cool place along the way while I was at it. It turned out to be a very worthy adventure; no regrets, but the desire to thu-hike never left me. So 20 years later, I plan on going back for it.
Anyway, what's your story? Why didn't you make it?