The Hills Make Me Wanna Shout, Throw My Hands Up and Shout

I'll keep it a buck, I have sensitive skin. My reactions to bug bites are impressive and I burn easily. I'm currently sporting a rash of unknown origin. Benadryl and a quarter tube of hydrocortisone I scooped from a hiker box. The trail provides.

See above the top of the approach trail hike at Amicalola

By late February, everything was packed -my hiking bag and a 2 day duffel for the trip down. My base weight was over by 20%, and my knee was stiff. Hopefully just the cold Buffalo air. The night before leaving for Chattanooga, I stayed up late to watch tv and eat ice cream, and thought about the distinct possibility of failure. Are ideal conditions unrealistic expectations?

The hiking routine has symmetry, which pleases me. Wake up, eat, pack up, hike, set up, eat, sleep. My body speaks to me in many ways, and I acknowledge these voices out loud when I'm hiking alone. The blogs and books don't talk about the joint pain nearly enough. If I validate my pain maybe it will go away. It already worked for one knee. The other, an IT band is acting up.

It's a guessing game of what's gonna be an issue and what you just need to walk through. Fortunately there aren't many opportunities to escalate problems, so you just stretch and decorate your feet with luko tape. Pain doesn't just hurt, it yanks open curtains to reveal doubt, and sometimes honesty. But sometimes it's hard to tell if what you're seeing is real.

I wanted to work through some things in my head while hiking, but so far it's a lot of the same thought patterns. Fortunately, I'm a first team all pro daydreamer. I went cold turkey on civilized life, and the power of routine is mighty. I've still got over 2000 miles left. It feels like I've been out here forever. A zero day at a hostel feels like a long weekend, not 34 hours. The magnitude of the AT is starting to dawn on me. Six months?? Whose idea was this????

When people I meet ask me how I'm doing, I tell them I'm living the dream, but not in that breathless sarcastic way I used to say it when I was trying to get work done between meetings.

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Progress: About 100 miles in, done with Georgia, into NC, coming up in a couple weeks, Great Smoky Mountains National Park, hell yeah

Quick update on the questions from the last post:

-Does my gear fit correctly? No, after about 97 miles my "hotspots" aka pre blisters were really taking a turn for the worse. I met Salt, a nearly TRIPLE triple crowner (a triple crowner is someone who has done each major through hike, the AT, PCT, and CDT, so like 10k miles per triple crown), who convinced me to cut the toe boxes out of my hokas to relieve the pain and get new shoes in town the next day). This led to my trail name, Fritos. Like free-toes, get it?