{"id":47,"date":"2016-04-23T15:37:41","date_gmt":"2016-04-23T15:37:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/montybillpct.net\/blog2016\/?p=47"},"modified":"2016-04-23T15:39:26","modified_gmt":"2016-04-23T15:39:26","slug":"age-guile","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/montybillpct.net\/blog2016\/2016\/04\/23\/age-guile\/","title":{"rendered":"Age & guile??"},"content":{"rendered":"

We have a saying at our house that goes like this:\u00a0 “Age\u00a0& guile beats youth & strength, but little & cute beats everything!”\u00a0 Well, we passed the little & cute stage a looooong time ago, and youth & strength is in the misty past, too.\u00a0 So we’re left with age & guile.\u00a0 Yes, to do a 3,000 mile\u00a0thru hike when you are 60, 70 or 80 years old does require a certain amount of guile (the GOOD kind!).<\/p>\n

So what’s our “guile”?\u00a0\u00a0 It’s taken us two thruhikes of the PCT to figure it out, but basically it’s these things:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Get enough rest.\u00a0\u00a0 We take a break midmorning and midafternoon, where we lie down and totally relax for about 15 minutes.\u00a0 We take an hour off for cooking lunch and lying down for awhile.\u00a0 We stop at around 5:00 for a cold supper before hiking on till 7:00 to make camp.\u00a0 And when we are in town for a resupply, we try to spend as much time just lying around resting as we possibly can.\u00a0\u00a0 We met Bristlecone, who was hiking the PCT at age 80, and he said his policy was “A full zero at every resupply.”\u00a0 Welllll, we tend to do neros, not zeros, but Bristlecone is on the same page with us.<\/li>\n
  2. <\/li>\n
  3. Train, train, train.\u00a0 If we don’t thoroughly train, we get blisters, we are sore and our knees hurt.\u00a0 Train means carrying weight (we are carrying 20 pounds right now) and doing around 30 plus miles a week.<\/li>\n
  4. <\/li>\n
  5. Trek poles!\u00a0\u00a0 There is no way we could hike without them!<\/li>\n
  6. <\/li>\n
  7. Shoes that protect our feet from rocks.\u00a0 As you get older, you lose the fat padding on the bottoms of your feet.\u00a0 It’s so not fair, but that’s how it is.\u00a0 (Too bad there isn’t some way to transfer fat from OTHER places down to our feet)\u00a0 We have found that we MUST wear shoes that have tough, protective\u00a0soles and foot protection.\u00a0 For us this year, that’s La Sportiva Ultra Raptors. They are reasonably light, but do the job on rough trail.\u00a0 We used to wear Vasque Velocity but sigh, can’t get them anymore.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    So that’s our “basic guile.”\u00a0\u00a0 This time, I am finding also that being older means I don’t sleep as well, so I am also bringing melatonin.\u00a0 Never used to need it, but now I do.<\/p>\n

    Countdown progresses: 4 days left to go!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    We have a saying at our house that goes like this:\u00a0 “Age\u00a0& guile beats youth & strength, but little & cute beats everything!”\u00a0 Well, we passed the little & cute stage a looooong time ago, and youth & strength is in the misty past, too.\u00a0 So we’re left with age & guile.\u00a0 Yes, to do […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-47","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-preparation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/montybillpct.net\/blog2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/montybillpct.net\/blog2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/montybillpct.net\/blog2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montybillpct.net\/blog2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montybillpct.net\/blog2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/montybillpct.net\/blog2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":49,"href":"https:\/\/montybillpct.net\/blog2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47\/revisions\/49"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/montybillpct.net\/blog2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montybillpct.net\/blog2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montybillpct.net\/blog2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}