Well ... I have decided to attempt to break the unsupported unresupplied speed record for the John Muir Trail. It stands at 5 days 7 hours 45 minutes for the 211 miles, as recorded in Wikipedia. I will use this blog to record my steps.
I've arbitrarily decided my "official" training will begin on February 5th and last approximately 28 weeks. I've started work on a spreadsheet to track the progress. I'll post later.
There are many issues related to this that weigh on me:
- The training schedule for the last couple months will be brutal simply based on the time required to tick off miles.
- I need to recruit some people to hike with me for different sections of the trip (hint for anyone reading :) )
- There is at least one other serious attempt being planned. I don't mind if he breaks my record but I worry that if he breaks the record I wont be able to break his record.
- I need to work on my gear list, including food.
- My body is build for speed, not endurance. I continuously fight my physiology when I hike.
- I need to increase my night hiking as well as sleep deprived hiking.
I guess by writing I'm hoping I can humanize the process for myself. By taking away it's monolithic nature the idea becomes possible. In the end it will be interesting to see how far I've gone.
4 comments:
This confirms it... my friend Jon has completely lost his mind! In all seriousness, it's a testament to Jon's can-do attitude and torpedoes-be-damned approach to life in general. Good luck Jon!
Great to see you do this. I've been trying to recruit help down here for the Whitney --> JMT Portal part of the hike (to no avail). We'll be needed to start Jon off, by carrying extra gear and food up the mountain. We'll head back down while Jon heads off light. Maybe someone in SJ wants to do Whitney?...
What sort of record-keeping needs to be done for this? How do you prove that that you actually hiked the trail in X amount of time?
Jon, all I can say is you're the man, I could barely manage the short east bay hike we did.
I'm definately in to help in any I can.
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