Since I am hiking 30km with no problems, it seems that distance is mostly determined by the first of the two digits. Last week I planned to hike 40km and I was pretty nervous, despite it was not even 5km more than my last record which was even on a two day hike. It turned out to be a 44km hike but my legs kept up easily. Then I planned to do 50km, only 6km more than last week, but I was nervous about it, again.
On hindsight, I had all the reasons to be a bit nervous as the 54 which I hiked turned out to be a bit too much. First of all, I made a mistake when calculating the route and it was actually 55 and not 50. This might have been a bit too much increase since last week so I planned to take some short cuts, also not a big deal as most of the hike I already did before. But the trail was poorly marked and there was a small part cut off and I had to make a detour! With all those side trails I hiked 54km, and the last couple hundred meters I even jogged to catch my train.
The long hike also made it a race against the sunset, I did not wanted to be out there in the dark so I decreased the lengths of my breaks and tried to increase the pace. All those things, in combination with the long distance, I actually overdid it a little. Even after a day of rest I had a little pain near the shins! From my running I know this can be really annoying injury that may take a long time to heal. I have been icing the shins and canceled my four day hike coming weekend…
Despite I had to push myself a bit too much, I am still happy with the 50+km, I would not have thought to get to this kind of distances when I started. Also mentally I pushed myself to a big success! I started out with a bad mood and it took about 15km to recover from that, but later when I was tired, I kept myself smiling which actually took a lot of effort. But I did it again, it is not the first time I write about my mental victory. I think it may be something I learned in all this hiking, during some of my first hikes I got sometimes really annoyed with the wind or the boring route or something else and it made me being happy to be back home. Now, I can deal with this kind of things much better. I have to find ways to use this positivism in other parts of my life.
Hike on!
Distance: 54/665/1500 (this hikes distance/total so far/goal to reach)
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