[pct-l] Preparing for a thru hike

[Tom Holz]

On 6/8/2012 1:47 PM, mkwart at gci.net wrote:
> I think either last year or the year before someone at the
> kickoff did a presentation on being conscious of your walking gait. I
> thought this was a great idea because big structural problems in the
> body often start as small repetitive motions.
>
> --Fireweed

Fireweed, that was me at kickoff giving the talk :-).  This year several 
people from 2011 told me how they actively improved their gait on their 
thruhikes to fix chronic problems, similar to what you did, and similar 
to what I did in 2010.

This is how I think we should approach hiking--instead of seeing overuse 
injuries as "bad luck" or "poor genetics" or "poor conditioning" 
(although any of these things can be true), we should be actively 
investigating how to hike more efficiently, taking  responsibility for 
ourselves, and fixing problems before they turn painful.

People understand that food diets have a huge impact on our long-term
health years before any problems arise.  It's the same with movement.  A 
bad movement diet can hurt people both in the near-term (think about 
annual jogging injuries) and in the long-term (knee replacements, falls, 
back surgeries).

Bigfoot