On Food 3

Having now made it over 1000 miles by foot this year, I'm finally starting to figure out food and what I should have been doing the entire time.

The biggest problem with the advice I had been following was that it was aimed at high performance, thus assuming that the audience was already built for hiking. As a novice hiker and generally unathletic person, only now learning at 40 the difference between aerobic and anaerobic energy, there was an important piece missing: adequate protein intake to build the muscles needed to highly perform.

Typical advice for building muscle is to eat grams of protein equal to your body weight in pounds daily. Strider and I started this regimen, more than doubling our protein intake, and after about two weeks it's noticeably easier to hike for ten hours a day and with less muscle soreness.

It's a wonder we made it this far without the protein we needed. In the summer the heat was a bigger limitation, but as we approach the highest peaks of The Whites and the wilderness of Maine, temperatures will drop and cardio will be high again. We expect to summit Mt. Washington on Wednesday, with potentially freezing nights.

This is being filed under "things I wish I had known at the beginning."