I'm better at short term goals like running 50 mile ultras in less than 12 hours.
Great thread.
I had the desire stretch a section hike into a thru, but decided against it, mainly because, as Warrageyaghi stated earlier, it would have been for formalitys sake only. I will begin an intentioned thru eventually but as others have stated, and as I've said in the past, If there comes a point when I don't want to hike anymore, thats it. when I'm done I'm done. No remorse, regret or ill feeling, just pleasure in knowing where I started, where I ended and everything I learned on the journey.
I've met too many a Northbounder whose fun had ended maybe a thousand miles earlier, and their toil was drawn out, just so they could say they finished the trail. Sure you did the 100 miles in 4 days. Did you enjoy it, or were you in a race to finish so you could go home? I say go home and come back some other time when you WANT to hike again..
Go confidently in the direction of your dreams! Live the life you've imagined. As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler.
Henry David Thoreau
I wonder how many folks get to the end with the help of the honor/pride/I-made-a-commitment thing. That was a tough one for me. But then I figured, I'd made that commitment with insufficient information.Well, that's my alibi and I'm sticking to it.
Folx in the "real world" really can't know what it's like.
A "failed" thru-hike is not a failure. Stop thinking like that right now. It's a vacation, not a marriage or a legal obligation. If it stops being what you want to do more than anything else in the world, then that's OK and you can go home without feeling like a failure.
It's just a hike, it won't change the world. Your family will not be destroyed because you choose not to hike the whole thing in one year.
If you want to try again, great, but don't do it because you think you have to, do it because you want to more than anything else, and find a way to maintain that desire even through lonely periods and rainy periods and times when you are hurt and tired. Don't squish your schedule too much with rigid timelines. If you need to take a couple days in town to get clean and feel human again, do it. Recover your mental headspace and get back on the trail. If you get to feel like quitting, stop, take a day off without any obligation to hike miles and think about it a while, hike one more stretch and see how it goes. Analyze what is making you unhappy and find ways of addressing those things. Feet hurt? Change your footwear. Don't sleep comfortably at night? Change your sleeping pad. Living conditions too austere? Consider adding a luxury item or two to make things more comfortable.
Andrew "Iceman" Priestley
AT'95, GA>ME
Non nobis Domine, non nobis sed Nomini Tuo da Gloriam
Not for us O Lord, not for us but in Your Name is the Glory
The Dude Abides
While I have credited my time on the trail with teaching me that it's not about the thru but about being on the trail, the reality is I set out on a thru and along the way this forrest muse suggested that if he were thru-hiking and decided he was done, then he would just leave the trail no matter how far he'd made it.Originally Posted by DawnTreader
When the Dude said this I couldn't have been more perplexed. Now it makes perfect sense.
Peace
By the way - that desire to stretch a section to a thru didn't have anything to do with a crazy bunch of Mobsters pestering you through the state of Maine did it?
The only hike of mine that I consider a failure was 2004. Just a series of mishaps, starting with a three week delay of 'Springer Day' thanks to surgery to correct a hernia. It went downhill from there, bottoming out in Pearisburg where I spent a week trying to recover from a nasty shin splint...which came back two days after hiking out. Worst of all, my mind just wasn't in the right place. I just wasn't thinking about thru-hiking.
I got to Waynesboro by July 4th which for my pace is late. Partway into the Shenandoahs I got the idea of switching my heavy yet tried and true gear for lightweight stuff. I somehow got a ride home to NH, did the switch, got back on the trail and then realized that this entire hike was an ordeal and kind of sucked. I put the thru-hike out of it's misery at Matthew's Arm campground, got a ride to Front Royal, rented a car and drove home. Three weeks after that, I'm in Vermont intending to hike from Sherburne Pass to Katahdin. I went home two days later.
Funny thing is though, I set out in '04 intending to hike the entire way and pooped out in Northern Virginia. In '06 I set out to hike to Northern Virginia and ended up hiking the entire thing. Weird, huh?
"I too am not a bit untamed, I too am untranslatable,
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world." - W. W.
obligatory website link
This thread has some of the best content I have seen in a while. Sharing stories about goals not yet met and goals redefined can give insight into what backpacking/long distance hiking is about. Though many posts deserve praise in this thread, I thought Wacocelt's was very candid and inspiring. Thanks to everyone who has shared their personal experiences.
That's my dog, Echo. He's a fine young dog.
This is more a twist of semantics than anything. Let me say again, I am not thru hiking just for the fun of it. It isn't one of my reasons for going. That doesn't mean I will deprive myself of having fun along the way. (!) Of course there is going to be fun times. I've already had great times with other hikers on the sections I've done. But if you read the journals, there are others who go on the perception of going for the fun of it, and when the fun stops they stop (even one of the hikers in the dvd TREK mentions this as well. Thankfully when it stopped being fun for him, he kept going anyway. Guess he learned something from that, I'm sure). Let's get real, there's going to be a point it ain't no fun. Then you'd better look to other reasons why you're out there. And that's why I gave some of my own.
i quit more than twice, this year at 620 miles and 67 days at perisburg va. i allways quit for the same reason. the trail tells me whats wrong and i go home and fix it. me and the trail understand each other. it knows i love being there and i am allways so so comfortable .it knows i would stay forever. but it shows me a thing i can fix in life and so i obay.onece the trail told me to go home and raise my 2 year old son and that he was too young to leave home . once it told me i was running away and must change first in certian ways before i could face the blazes. and this year it said," matt, get the fuch out of here and stop spending money and go home and pay your taxes before you get in trouble. and so as per our agreement,..me and the trail,.. i came home and went to the irs.such is the life of trail lovers.
matthewski
What a great thread! I really want to do the whole thing and sometimes worry that I won't want to stop. I like the thought of being able to be out there...having the choice to keep going instead of that long drive home on Sunday night after a weekend of hiking and having to go to work Monday morning. Like Blissful said, I'm sure there will be times when it won't really feel like "fun", but still better to be out there than not. Some of my fondest hikes have been the ones that have the most challenges .. emotional or physical.
The thought of doing this started creeping into my being about 10 years ago and it is finally at a point where I have to give it a try. I love the Dylan quote!!Thanks for some of the suggestions about taking some time to make changes along the way to make it a better hike.But I was so much older then. I'm younger than that now.
You said you were doing it, at least in part, "for your son." I wasn't sure what that meant. Still not sure, actually, even if it's none of my business. Without knowing the specifics, I'm wary of rationales of that sort.
Anyway... I can only speak for myself. Life is short, and my goal is to enjoy it. Fun = enjoyment. Enjoyment = fun. No semantics. It's really that simple. When it stops being fun, I find something else to do.
Absolutely. No one is going to die if you don't finish your thruhike....but maybe something inside you dies if you try to force yourself to love something that you just don't.I don't think anyone is a weenie for realizing that they aren't having fun and then doing something about it. I call that good judgement personally.
Personally, I differentiate between an "incomplete" thru-hike, and a "failed" one.
This year, I had an "incomplete" thru-hike. In the course of a single season I managed to break my ankle not once, but twice. The same ankle. Did it the first time coming out of the Smokies. I hobbled my way to Hot Springs, and from there, Asheville, and then home. I sulked around the house for 6 weeks and then came back to the trail at Trail Days. Hooked back up with my hiking buddies there, and skipped ahead to VA to ease back in to hiking on the easier terrain. That lasted another couple of hundred miles until the ankle let go again. That I took as a sign from a higher power that '06 was not the year for me. So back home I went.
Was I sad went I went home? Oddly, no. I had discovered that I could hike the trail. With the exception of one misplaced step in GSMNP, and my exacerbating the injury through sheer stubornness by walking 30 miles on it afterwards, I know at my core that I could have continued hiking the trail for as many miles as the trail has to offer. Thus, I consider my hike incomplete. It will be completed in '08, if I don't trip over my own two feet again.
Now if I had gotten out there and decided that the trail was too tough, that the rain was too wet, that the sun was too warm, or that the dirt was too, well, dirty, and went running back to my barcalounger and my budweiser...then that would be what I would call a "failed" thru-hike.
I"ve decided that even among people who call themselves "thru-hikers" most of us don't actually set out to hike the entire trail. We may say that we do, but what we really mean is that we want see if we can hike the entire trail. Sometimes, once you've proved to yourself that you could hike the entire trail, hiking the rest of it really has no extra meaning. I think a lot of the people who posted above me in this thread came to a similiar conclusion at some point in their hike. By hiking part of the trail and then deciding that they don't need to hike the rest you seem to come away from the experience with a much different perspective than those poor souls who call a cab from Neel's Gap and go away feeling defeated by the entire experience, and by the trail itself. We all define "failure" separately.
Hmmm. You just described my hike to a tee.
I think that comes close to describing my situation. There's a place in Bryson's book (damn, I can't find it the quote...) where he says something like, "We'd already walked our million steps. Was it really necessary to walk the other four million to prove we'd gotten the hang of the thing?"I"ve decided that even among people who call themselves "thru-hikers" most of us don't actually set out to hike the entire trail. We may say that we do, but what we really mean is that we want see if we can hike the entire trail. Sometimes, once you've proved to yourself that you could hike the entire trail, hiking the rest of it really has no extra meaning.
Anyway... there's an upside. I realized (in fact never once doubted) that I would always love hiking, even if thru-hiking wasn't quite the thing for me. And that was quite liberating. I've never really left the trail, not for very long, anyway. These days, while I'm on it, I make it a point to enjoy every minute. And mostly I do.
Millions of people love to run but few like to run marathons.
Wolf, you know you were part of it. And I mean that in a good way.
Cathy and I did our very first backpacking April/06 42 miles on AT north of Damascus.We tented where Tom from Mount Rogers Outfitters suggested as we hiked south back to Damascus.
On the fourth day the weather turned wet and we felt cold and grumpy when we met a lone hiker from CO named ELK on the Trail.He had a smile a mile wide as we chatted in the cold rain.He hiked and spoke very slowly and seemed to have some disabilities.When he mentioned that he had thru hiked before we both were amazed and realized that ATTITUDE must be the key to enjoying the hike and going the distance.
Personally, I think the only way I could hike the whole distance is to have my wife and dog and maybe our sons along with me. In the past I have never enjoyed being away from home more than 3 weeks.
Yet, going back to high school days, if hiking were to mean that I could avoid school then now doubt then I could have stayed on the Trail 4 years straight! LOL
Sandalwood
I`m interested in this and the success rate of modern thru hikers in general...I think back in say the 1970`s almost everyone who started a thru hike had years of backpacking experience behind them including a number of long distance hikes and they truly loved the trail and that life (The whole commune with nature,escape the rat race ,etc of that day)..And in general I think with a few exceptions most finished aside from injury or other outside forces...But (Or so it seems to me) a lot of thru-hikers in 2006 have little or in some cases no real backpacking experience and seem to be out there for a wide variety of reasons...This post interests me because of the terms "Too fast" and "boredom" which to me perfectly capture the mindset of younger adults I see in the world today...I wonder what the percentage of successful thru hikers is today?
But to answer the original question: I attempted a thru in 1977 and got as far as Duncannon,PA..There is no doubt that physically and mentally I would have made the entire hike..Why did I quit?..Money..I probably never should have started to begin with but HAD to go..In late March of 1977 I suddenly came into an unexpected $500..I took one day to decide to hike the trail and went out and bought a new Tioga,boots,sleeping bag,etc as well as all the guidebooks for the trail (Which without the internet back them were mandatory) I arrived at Springer with $200+ in my pocket to buy food and other needed goods for the entire trip..Well obviously that wasn`t enough even eating rice,noodles,cereal and kool-aid as much as I could (Plus needed film,fuel,etc)..The last couple of weeks I was really scrapping by and tried calling home for financial assistance so I could continue but we were a desperately poor family and I had few friends being the mountain loving bearded oddball living in the big city so I went til I knew it was pointless and stopped at a town with bus service out (I at least got someone to send me bus fare)
Sometimes you can't hear them talk..Other times you can.
The same old cliches.."Is that a woman or a man?"
You always seem out-numbered..You don't dare make a stand.
a friend who has hiked large sections of the trail, but never the ENTIRE thing (skipped sections, aqua-blazed, etc.) said, "i'm a thru-hiker, cause i'm never through hiking."
another old-timer told me, "the AT is a metaphor for all trails." in other words: the AT is simply a vehicle for accomplishing what could be accomplished elsewhere or by doing something else. i think this quote applies a lot to what Mweinstone was saying.
That's close to where I'm at these days... the AT has been the "framework" for my hiking... and some day (maybe soon) I'll finish it -- but there's plenty of hiking above/beyond and before/after the AT.
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