Pretend Crest Trail


I have been overweight since getting married.  I’m a traditionalist, obviously, that’s what’s supposed to happen.  As Cerys of Catatonia once sang “I’d rather stay single and thin”.  Well I sacrificed a flat stomach for love! 

So twelve years later that two stone, that 25 pounds, that 10 kilos I could do with losing just has to go.  Due to my strange contract at the University of Derby I had time off to try a special diet:

The PCT Diet.

This involves, as I can see it from all I’ve read about people on the trail, walking lots and lots each day and not getting enough to eat.  So I tried it…

Day 1:  Miles 14

Day 2:  Miles 14

Day 3:  Miles 14

Day 4:  Miles 14

Day 5:  Miles 8

Day 6:  Miles 14

Day 7:  Miles 5

Day 8:  Miles 13 (ran most of this one.  I got fed up walking)

 

Now this is perhaps a little off the pace for a hike of over 2600 miles in a weather time limited walk of 6 months.  You need to be doing 100 miles a week which has to take into account rest days and picking up supplies.  But 83 miles in the first week is a good warm up level.  You aren’t supposed to take off so fast: you destroy your feet with blisters and then go and decide enough is enough and pack it in almost immediately.

However there are some other big differences between my walking and a PCT walking.  I did a lot of it on the flattest ground you can imagine, following an old train track.  Hardly the stuff of 6000 feet ascents every day. And I was sometimes not carrying a pack at all or if I was, one that wasn’t very heavy.  Add to that the nice mildness of English weather, the fact I could go home later and shower and sleep in a bed and have fresh clothes, then it isn’t very PCT like at all. 

I was aware as well that the most I had to fear from creatures of the forests or farmlands was that cows might chase my dogs or my dogs might chase the sheep, and then the farmer would chase all of us: it wouldn’t be the first time.

However to mitigate these and many other PCT like short comings I decided to limit the amount of food I had falsely.  PCT hikers don’t ‘diet’ intentionally, they can just never get enough food for the calories they burn.  I could easily be getting fatter every day even if I was walking thirty miles.  I do love my chocolate!  So two meals a day and no snacks.

I also did a lot of speed walking, well over 4mph, which I hope never to have to do on the PCT its self.  14 minute miles for eleven miles is much harder than running the same distance, which I did on Day 8 because I couldn’t face any more bloody speed walking!  And there is the point that after the days walking (sometimes over by 8am) I then had a day of jobs on the computer, shopping, doing things with my son and house work, which oh so wonderfully you can forget about on the PCT. 

Oh but I did get blisters (one in the shape of the trail!) and a blackened toe nail...That felt pretty PCT.


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