We have a saying at our house that goes like this:  “Age & guile beats youth & strength, but little & cute beats everything!”  Well, we passed the little & cute stage a looooong time ago, and youth & strength is in the misty past, too.  So we’re left with age & guile.  Yes, to do a 3,000 mile thru hike when you are 60, 70 or 80 years old does require a certain amount of guile (the GOOD kind!).

So what’s our “guile”?   It’s taken us two thruhikes of the PCT to figure it out, but basically it’s these things:

1. Get enough rest.   We take a break midmorning and midafternoon, where we lie down and totally relax for about 15 minutes.  We take an hour off for cooking lunch and lying down for awhile.  We stop at around 5:00 for a cold supper before hiking on till 7:00 to make camp.  And when we are in town for a resupply, we try to spend as much time just lying around resting as we possibly can.   We met Bristlecone, who was hiking the PCT at age 80, and he said his policy was “A full zero at every resupply.”  Welllll, we tend to do neros, not zeros, but Bristlecone is on the same page with us.
3. Train, train, train.  If we don’t thoroughly train, we get blisters, we are sore and our knees hurt.  Train means carrying weight (we are carrying 20 pounds right now) and doing around 30 plus miles a week.
5. Trek poles!   There is no way we could hike without them!
7. Shoes that protect our feet from rocks.  As you get older, you lose the fat padding on the bottoms of your feet.  It’s so not fair, but that’s how it is.  (Too bad there isn’t some way to transfer fat from OTHER places down to our feet)  We have found that we MUST wear shoes that have tough, protective soles and foot protection.  For us this year, that’s La Sportiva Ultra Raptors. They are reasonably light, but do the job on rough trail.  We used to wear Vasque Velocity but sigh, can’t get them anymore.

So that’s our “basic guile.”   This time, I am finding also that being older means I don’t sleep as well, so I am also bringing melatonin.  Never used to need it, but now I do.

Countdown progresses: 4 days left to go!