[pct-l] Weight Management and Walking

[CHUCK CHELIN]

Good morning,

A hiker will not be well-informed by studying science’s best efforts to
describe and replicate human motion.  State-of-the-art in this field is not
only juvenile, it is infantile. As Jacqueline Stevens once said, “Clean
equations mask messy realities that contrived data sets and assumptions
don’t, and can’t, capture.”  My 2-year-old grandson innately displays
better, smoother, and more efficient walking and running than the best of
any of the robots that scientists and engineers have described and
developed.

Similarly, while human flight has been phenomenally successful in terms of
speed and altitude, etc. – much of which was developed by those Americans
who seem to dislike science – absolutely none of those achievements come
anywhere close to the functional flight control sophistication displayed by
an average bird in the wild.

Scientists have the disagreeable habit believing only what they can
formulate, and they tend to denigrate and dismiss anything that does not
fit their predisposition.

Hiking is only marginally about energy consumption, i.e. fuel management.  Via
resupply we can have all the fuel we want and need, but total weight is a
problem.  For a week or so a hiker can endure the effects of high weight,
but eventually the weight – body, gear, consumables, etc. – will cause
distress.

We all get to decide what we weigh going up the trail within basic
parameters of our physical size and skeletal structure.  The sum of what we
carry -- the “skin-out” value -- is certainly important, and it’s the first
number to fall under scrutiny, but levels of body fat and muscle are also
manageable to a great degree.  Considerable muscle mass from weight
training isn’t useful for a serious long-distance hiker, and should be
attrited over time, but that happens automatically when weight training is
reduced or discontinued.

Conversely, a reduction in the sum of body fat is difficult.  The dichotomy
is that the most amount of fat usually exists at the beginning of a long
hike where it is least well tolerated.

An aspiring ultra-lite long-distance hiker should give more serious
attention to getting the body fat down to 15% certainly, and preferably to
10%, and devote less time trying to re-learn how to walk.

It’s amazing how much more smoothly, efficiently, and comfortably a slim,
ultra-lite hiker can move carrying a light load compared to a fatter person
carrying 60-70 pounds.

Steel-Eye

-Hiking the Pct since before it was the PCT – 1965

http://www.trailjournals.com/steel-eye
http://www.trailjournals.com/SteelEye09/