Mental Stamina

I'm sure any athlete would agree: most of your performance is mental. This is something I have been keenly aware of as we have increased our distances, increased our pack weight, and increased our boredom of hiking the same trails week in and week out. I hate out-and-backs. I simply hate seeing the same thing I've already seen and this is part of the big appeal of the PCT for me - every day will be new, every step on fresh terrain.

Sunday was a day for my inner 6 year old, the one that got dragged off to church with Grandma Lena rather than watching cartoons and rolling around on the high-low carpet. Sunday dawned gloomy, the kitties were extra cuddly, there was much procrastination and a mild suggestion by Jan that we could skip this one training hike. It was a hard sell for us both. But I'm a rule follower and anxious about lack of preparation so I forced us out of bed and onto the trail.

What followed was 13 miles of Jan's saintly patience while I shuffled my feet, stopping every 30 minutes to contemplate how much further I had to walk, and routine "jokes" that Jan could just hike back to the car and come get me at the nearest road crossing. We had easily hiked 19 miles the previous week with heavier packs and more elevation changes, so I knew it wasn't an issue of physical endurance... it was a day for mental endurance. Shut up, Brain! Just let me walk!

This topic had me considering what true athletes do to succeed at their sport, so I looked it up. According to the Ohio Center for Sport Psychology, there are nine mental skills of successful athletes - Number 1 is "Choose and maintain a positive attitude." There is nothing truer than this, because with each step I constantly had to remind myself to look up and enjoy the sunshine, the redwoods, the vista, or Jan's company. If I extend hiking to life in general, I think this mental skill is probably one of the most useful skills to possess. As my dad says, life is 10% what happens to you, 90% how you choose to react to it. Boom.

New Boots

The last bit of gear - new boots. Somewhere along the line, a friend suggested we buy new hiking boots and use our training boots as backup. It makes sense, considering a boot failure in the backcountry would not only be highly inconvenient, but hard to repair.  So we are stowing the worn and reliable ones with a salute, and hope we need them not.

Here are my new boots before their inaugural hike in Redwood Regional Park last Sunday. I like to think about what they will look like in 1800+ miles.

But let me back up a bit and give you the facts and figures: Jan and I are hiking a significant stretch of the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT) this year. We will start at Campo, CA, which is just north of the Mexican border, on April 30th and hike all the way to Crater Lake in Oregon. It should take us about 4 months, which is pretty leisurely (a full "thru-hike" from border-to-border takes most people about 5 months). We are taking an easy pace because we can. Foregoing the northernmost 800 miles of trail removes the rush of hiking before rain & snow set it. I am a stop-and-smell-the-roses kind of girl, so I am determined to break at a pretty meadow or alpine lake if I want to! There is no real destination or goal for me other than the journey, hiking a trail I have always wanted to hike, and getting to see my home state from bottom to top.