Okay, I’m back. My apologies for the lack of posts…I don’t have much in the way of blog experience, so when I ran out of novel things to say and was left with “Current Weight” and the typical Monday-Sunday list of what I did that week it started to seem slightly pointless until we got closer to the event.
Well, we’re closer to the event now, so it’s time to catch back up with what we’ve done and set the stage to see this thing through!
We have a bit more than two weeks of active training left, and it looks like we’re going to need to move to a “Plan B” in the training plan. The blizzards have pretty much crushed our training recently. For the past 3 weeks, I’ve put a lot of time in the gym but precious little else. The Perkiomen Trail is simply not usable for what we need right now. We did do a snow hike after the December blizzard, and while very hard it simply didn’t replicate what we needed to be doing. Too slow, too much loss of footing, and too much short term energy expenditure.
For those of you reading who are not in the Mid-Atlantic/Northeast: We have had a succession of blizzards this past month that has left us with ridiculous amounts of snow on the ground. We really didn’t factor this into our training plan, and have missed several of our lead up distance hikes due to it. We should be doing 24 miles with 42 lbs. right now…instead the longest we’ve gone was 20.
So Plan B looks like this: Y-M-C-A.
260 laps around the indoor track here at our local Y is 20 miles. On the upside, it’s pretty warm in there so we may get some acclimatization out of it, which is something we’ve been worried about. On the downside…well, 260 laps? Egad. We’ll see how that goes.
Otherwise on the catch-up front: We have been training over the past 15 weeks, some of it more intense than the rest, but overall lots of improvement and we feel that we’re just about ready. We’ve had lots of time in the gym and lots of runs, but less raw distance than we had originally planned.
Before I close up for this post, I want to touch on my brush with hypothermia. Anyone who has known me for any length of time knows that I hate being cold - that’s a left over mostly from a two week field exercise I did at one point in the Corps that had us outside doing ops in the middle of winter, 42 degrees and rain for almost the entire two weeks. I hated that op more than anything I did my entire 8 years in the Corps. I’ll admit though, I always hated being cold, even as a kid.
In any event, in mid January, Jeff and I put our sights on a twenty miler, the first we’d done together. I had done one solo before, as had he. We psyched ourselves up for it for the whole week, but as we got closer to the weekend the weather started looking worse and worse. What we ended up with was a forecast of 36 degrees and heavy rain. Sunday rolled around and we decided we were up for it anyway. This was the hike that would finally get us up to
Green Lane
Green Lane
I’ll admit I was pretty dumb about the way I handled this hike. When we started, it was right at the forecasted 36 degrees, but hadn’t started raining yet. I was in my standard winter gear, plus a lightweight rain jacket. We started out fine, but by the four mile mark I was very warm and decided to shed the rain jacket.
By about mile 6, the rain set in. It was coming down in sheets by mile 8. I figured I would put the rain jacket back on at our next rest stop, but at mile 8 we were feeling really good and decided to extend to about the 10 mile mark for our break. By the time we hit the break, I was completely soaked through, to the point where the rain had run down my pants legs, transferred to my socks from the top down, and soaked down to my toes.
I was very cold when I put the rain jacket back on, and remember saying something to Jeff about paying attention to hypothermia. I was already shivering, but figured that I’d warm back up coming off the break by getting out there and moving again. That didn’t happen. I never did warm back up.
By mile 14, I had stopped shivering. I couldn’t close my hands all the way because my fingers weren’t responding the way they were supposed to. I was very groggy, and wanted nothing more than to sit down and take a nap, right there on the trail. I was stumbling and not thinking clearly by mile 15, and at that point Jeff asked if I should call my wife to come get me. Unfortunately, that’s what I ended up needing to do.
Jeff did go on to finish the 20 that day. I felt bad leaving him to self motivate his way to the end, but I figured that it was better overall to not risk needing a trip to the hospital. When I got home, (after a warm up soak in a very hot bath) I looked up “hypothermia symptoms” on Wikipedia and learned that I was beyond mild hypothermia and well into moderate as far as symptoms go…so it ended up being a good call.
Jeff next to the "Welcome to Green Lane Park" sign...we finally made it!
Lesson learned, and I plan to take this to New Mexico
Oh, the stats! Current Weight: 168.
And in closing, I’m still planning on having my iPhone with me and doing small GPS posts throughout the hike. Hopefully there will be connectivity out in the desert.
