AT's AT 2015 Hiking Training Plan, Week One

Week: March 31 - April 7 (8 Days)
Miles Hiked (Week): 1.5
Miles Hiked (March): 7.5
Miles Hiked (April): 1.5
Miles Hiked, (March Goal): 10
Miles Hiked, (April Goal): 30
Miles Hiked (Yearly Total): 9.0
Pounds Lost (Week): 0.6
Percentage to Next Milestone: 5.67%
Pounds Lost (Total):  0.6
Weekly Goal Met: Yes
Nights Camped (Week): 0
Nights Camped (Total): 1
Nights Camped (Backpacking): 0

OK, sports fans, we're in for a tough slog over the next year. It's a marathon, not a sprint, after all. Which is fortunate, because I'm pretty sure I don't have the wind to do a sprint very well.



Week one didn't include much hiking, and I didn't lose all that much weight. However, I did do some hiking and I did lose some weight, so it qualifies as a victory, slim though it may be. As a ramp up week to bigger and better things, I'll take it. As an indicator of how things will go, however, it doesn't work so well.

When my schedule isn't disrupted by long work hours or trips out of town, my simple dinner plan is still working pretty well. And I'm starting to feel the effect of getting back to a regular walking regimen, although I still have to go a ways before I'm back to my 60 minutes a day that I often reached last fall.

My hiking schedule for this year is pretty ambitious, as I intend to hike 300 miles during my 9.5 hiking months of this year. As you can see, I'm already 2.5 miles off the pace, which I intend to make up over the course of the other nine months. To hit my 30 miles for April, I should be averaging 7.5 miles per weekend. As you can see, my 1.5 miles fell a bit short of that goal. Fortunately, I have a three day weekend this week, so I should be able to make some of that shortfall back up. Still, it's going to be close.

The simple fact is I have to kick up the effort on both the exercise and nutrition fronts. While my weight schedule isn't crazy in the long term, it is still rather ambitious given my track record. And the 300 miles, though just 1/7 of the total length of the Appalachian Trail, is kind of nuts given I only have weekends, holidays, and vacation time to do the vast majority of it.

So I can stay on track, I'm going to start making better choices, and doing things which will encourage those choices. For example, I am going to get back into tracking my exercise and calories. In fact, I'm going to take the unprecedented step of recording this on the weekend as well. This doesn't mean I'll hit my goals every day, but it will get me into a state of thinking about things before I do them.

As such, week two will be a big test to see if I can keep to that goal, as well as improve my weekly progress. Weekends are often problems for me, and given the margin of error I've set for myself, they need to be much less of a problem for me to succeed. Even more of a problem is the fact that this will be a long weekend. By marking down what I eat and what I hike, hopefully I'll keep on top of it. We'll just have to see come next week's recap how well I did.