19.8 Miles – McAfee Knob

My friend Travis is thru-hiking the Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine. It’s awesome.

Today, I joined him and his “trail family” for a portion of the hike, particularly selected for its inclusion of the famous McAfee Knob overlook. Unfortunately, this meant that the mileage for the day would be longer than I’d like: 19.8 miles. A tall order given that my longest preparatory hike was just 10 miles of relatively flat trail and this hike would include a 1500ft climb over the first 4 miles and several more climbs after that.
We can do it!

It was a wonderful day, which was particularly nice as we’d been concerned about rain and their previous day had been a miserable day of cold, wet hiking over dangerous terrain. Today couldn’t have been more different.

Everything is awesome!

While by no means easy, I did pretty well through the first 18 miles or so. Then, on the final downhill stretch, my left knee decided it had had enough and I had to really slow down. A couple of ibuprofen and some flat trail worked it out a bit and we finished the hike after a bit more than 9 hours (including several photo and water stops and a half hour lunch stop).

I’ll see how my legs feel tomorrow, but the current plan is to take tomorrow off and then for me to join them for two more days of ~15 miles per day.

Oh, and I got over 3000 active calories (and over 50K steps) on my Watch.

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