I'm coming off a 6-day shakedown hike on the Pacific Crest Trail in Washington. Tons of pictures and full stories uploaded at the link in my signature, but I have to reiterate how useful one big shakedown hike was for preparing for the Appalachian Trail.

I'm interested in hearing your lessons learned from big shakedown hikes. We're nearing the end of summer, so presumably the big shakedown hikes are behind you or are coming up soon.

My big lessons learned:

  • Think you want to do a thru? Do a big shakedown trip first. Despite all the absurd things that went wrong this trip, the stab wounds, the sore feet, the hunger, the cravings, the blisters – at the end of the trip, I was still absolutely fired up about my thru next year. Discovering that you don’t have the fire in your belly for a 6-month trek while on a 1-week shakedown hike is so much better than figuring it out on a thru attempt, after you quit your job and leave your family and friends behind.
  • Setting a conservative pace for yourself for the first few days will let you get your trail legs under you with minimal risk of injury. Super tired legs = Not paying attention to footfalls = Landing weird on tendons that aren’t accustomed to strain = bad stress injury to ankle / foot / knee that takes weeks to heal. Cool your jets, we’re in this for the long haul. Go for 10 miles a day your first week, then ramp it up after that. Your body will thank you.
  • Pack yourself delicious, easy-to-make food for the trail. There's reading this, and then there's experiencing this. Screw healthy food. Screw complicated cooking. Your best intentions at home will absolutely fall to hell after 24 hours on trail. I was so tired and craving salt so hard that by the end of the trip I was ready to see if my Trader Joe’s Raw Organic Almonds would make a good fire starter. Convenience and tastiness are king in the wilderness. I'm considering going stoveless for the convenience on my thru.
  • Immodium. Take it. You won’t need it ’till you drink some bad water and you’re 3 days out from town, squatting over the side of a cliff letting it fly in the wind. Then you will be really, really glad you have it.
  • Take any blogging notes in an offline app, then transfer over to WordPress or your preferred blogging platform once back in civilization. I took all my notes out on the trail in the WordPress app with my phone on Airplane mode. As soon as I took my phone off airplane mode, the drafts all deleted.