[at-l] Melissa's physical impact of hike requestion...

[sloetoe at yahoo.com (Sloetoe)]

I'm maybe more worried about the physical element (or feel like
I can prepare more for that), and I'm one of those people who,
when I started planning, thought that it was something that
would put me in the best shape of my life at the end.  The more
I read and talked with people, however, the more I realized that
wasn't the case.
### Melissa, if you can run a marathon, you can walk the AT --
BACKWARDS if you want. There is NO reason a throughhike should
tear down your body -- ANYONE's body. People who say this, as
JimO has, are completely wrong, and harmfully so, because their
self-fulfilling prophesy sets *them* up for disaster, and leads
*others* -- like you -- to either defer a dream, or attempt it
with "I failed cuz!" waiting in the wings. Talk to me, Mags,
Flyin' Brian, Sweeper, or others WITH A CLUE about how to treat
your body as if it's actually doing something special. It really
doesn't take too long to find hikers who're also marathoners and
ultra-marathoners -- people who understand "endurance" is not
just mental toughness, but physical *attentiveness* too.

> I've thought long and hard about my motivations, and I think
they're pure, or at least soundly reasoned and truly felt (my
heart is pure, or as pure as it can be, as a questing knight
would say), but I keep thinking about the marathon I ran and how
moorless I felt after that physically.  Maybe it's a completely
inaccurate comparison.
### Not at all. And as far as the "moorless" thing goes,
"post-marathon blues" is way-common if you set one race as your
goal, without another in back of it. JimO and Mags and I all
mention it; have something to work toward, every day, just as
you did while hiking.

> Maybe I should just stop thinking about it and jump on Atkins
immediately post-trail.
### And end up double-dipping in depression and mood
disorders???


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