251–260 of 281 posts
This guy took a selfie every mile of the PCT. It's pretty cool to see his transformation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyo8OIp7aHM
I did 50mi backpacking over 7k feet with a 40lb pack in 5 days, and lost 10lbs. Which is impressive considering even at my hardest training I have a hard time losing more than 1lb/week normally.
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I don't have many sources but I believe the word 'hiking' is a relatively recent American import. The OED lists a lot of American historical examples, but only relatively recent ones in the UK I would just call it walking, or tabbing if it's at an aggressive pace. Old people seem to call it rambling, but that makes it sound a bit lazy I think.
We used to use rambling for a gentle country walk through fields etc. We'd say we were fell walking if we went out for a day up the mountains in the Lake District, we'd wear walking boots. If it was for a night or more it would either be camping or an expedition - as in DofE. Tabbing tends to be a military term as far as I'm aware. I don't remember using the term hiking until recently.
The MilFit community have brought it into mainstream usage. I don't remember not using/hearing the term hiking.
I did El Camino de Santiago 3 years ago weighing at 220 pounds. 600 miles and 35 days later i was 160 pounds and had new perspective on life. As someone who always struggled with extra weight I've been able to keep the weight off ever since. Never felt better physically and mentally. By the way, I've met a lot of folks who started with the Camino as their first thru-hike and went on to do AT and Continental Divide. I…
60 lbs in 35 days is really dramatic! Is that even possible? Are results like that typical?
From memory, we had oatmeal and coffee for breakfast, a bunch of salami throughout the day, and freeze-dried camp meals for dinner. Couldn't have been more than 2k calories/day. I'm not saying this is sustainable for more than a week, but I don't remember feeling particularly hungry. It's really hard to carry enough food to eat a huge amount of calories.
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Well it's all carbs. I don't see how adding water changes the macronutrient makeup.
In the same way a block of wood is chock full of carbs but will provide no nutritional value (not quite the same way, but vaguely related).
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When you carry your gear for a thousands of miles, you reevaluate what you really need. A stove is not needed because food can be consumed raw. A full tent is not needed because a basic tarp and careful site selection are enough to keep a person dry while sleeping. Toilet paper is not needed because smooth rocks, leaves and other material found on the trail can be used to wipe.
I need some comfort to sleep otherwise I'm more and more tired on the trail, I get up later and later and get cranky and then I just frigging stop and go back home.
There are situations where a tent will be more comfortable: a tent provides protection from the wind absent natural barriers, a tent provides a refuge from biting insects, etc.
In many situations, the comfort provided by a tent is more mental than it is physical. The full enclosure of a tent provides comfort to people who worry about critters crawling over them in the night. Some people just feel more comfortable when fully enclosed.
All this said, it does take more expertise to sleep comfortably with a tarp. Site selection is more important. There are several ways to pitch a tarp and the best pitch to use depends on the situation. Tarps are more fiddly to pitch.
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The reason some experienced hikers (not talking about noobs here) carry small stoves on the AT and other trails is not because they haven't evaluated what they need. It's because "what you need" is about tradeoffs. Sure, you can consume raw food for the entirety of your hike, and some experienced hikers do this, but food aversion is a real thing. Avoiding it is worth the weight for some hikers.
You generally get more calories from cooked foods too. I suspect the raw food thing has more too do with being cheep/lazy/hard-core.
Good article, but just to nitpick a 0.3% hemoglobin A1c change over only 2 tests doesn't necessarily mean anything. Normal people can vary by that much from week to week due to a variety of factors. We would have to see multiple tests over a longer period of time to tell whether there was a real reduction.
Also his testosterone levels were shockingly high but I know from personal experience those can fluctuate dramatically for many men. Additional tests would have been nice. IMO strength training will boost my test far more than cardio but I have never carried a 20lbs pack for 500 miles.
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Over the same distance sure, but have you ever raced mountain bikes? The broken terrain thing applies as well. And the increased efficiency just translates into more speed and distance. You might think descending 10k feet on a bicycle is cake compared to hiking, but packing that elevation drop into a tiny fraction of the time leads is actually a fairly intense upper body workout.
"have you ever raced mountain bikes?" No. I think the OP was referring to road racing. One question, "do you carry the bikes uphill?"
It's asinine to get into this dick measuring contest, you shouldn't claim your sport is more hard-core than a sport you don't know. This mentality is why Lance Armstrong got his ass handed to him the first time he tried mountain bike racing because he thought it would be easy. And yes, there are race format where you carry bikes uphill: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclo-cross.
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I don't have many sources but I believe the word 'hiking' is a relatively recent American import. The OED lists a lot of American historical examples, but only relatively recent ones in the UK I would just call it walking, or tabbing if it's at an aggressive pace. Old people seem to call it rambling, but that makes it sound a bit lazy I think.
While it probably became popularized in North America, it seems to actually be of British origin: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hiking
Almost all American English words are originally of English origin, of course ;)
However, Google Ngrams shows that the term "hiking" was very rare prior to about 1920, and the large majority of 1920s sources are American. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=hiking&year_st...
Compare hiking, hill walking, tramping, and rambling: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=hiking%2Chill+...
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The reason some experienced hikers (not talking about noobs here) carry small stoves on the AT and other trails is not because they haven't evaluated what they need. It's because "what you need" is about tradeoffs. Sure, you can consume raw food for the entirety of your hike, and some experienced hikers do this, but food aversion is a real thing. Avoiding it is worth the weight for some hikers.
You generally get more calories from cooked foods too. I suspect the raw food thing has more too do with being cheep/lazy/hard-core.
At the end of the day I never wanted to waste time boiling water/cooking food I just wanted to eat and sleep. I found myself eating cold even with a stove so I just dropped the stove.
I don't know anyone that has done it just to be hard-core.