Last weekend was quite a blur, and the week which followed was no slacker either. Consequently I’ve had a couple of posts queued up which I haven’t made yet, this one being one of them.
Very early Friday morning I flew to Atlanta where I had a completely full afternoon lined up. It started with a lunch meeting to which I arrived precisely on time from the airport. After a completely full day I treated my parents to dinner at Amalfi, a really nice little family run Italian restaurant on the south side of Roswell. Like me, my parents were in town to see the Greatest Kid in the World perform in the Nutcracker Ballet.
The next morning we got up and went shopping, but that’s a subject for my next post. After shopping we drove to the small town where the GKITW lives and watched her perform in the Nutcracker, did our traditional after show dinner and then drove back in time to crawl in bed at midnight.
I was up again at 4:00 am to catch a 6:10 am flight from Atlanta to Dallas. I was headed back because I wanted to join a day hike in Mineral Wells, Texas with a new group of friends. Landing at DFW at about 7:40 gave me enough time to drive the hour and a half out to Mineral Wells and get a little breakfast along the way.
As the map shows below, we actually started our hike in a tiny little “town” called Garner, Texas. How Garner qualifies to have any designation at all on the map is kind of hard to understand. The best that I could tell it consists of a church and a convenience store across the road from one another. That’s it.
Anyway, we entered the trail at Garner and walked toward Mineral Wells. The folks I was with are part of the same backpacking group that I made my aborted camping trip with last month. Healthy this time, I was eager to get my hike on and see what the day would be like. The weather could not have been better. It was a little breezy at first, bright blue sky and a high of 75 degrees. We were planning for a solid 14 miles, which is trail length from Garner to Mineral Wells and back as you can see:
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The hike was exactly what I had hoped for – about as physically aggressive as you can get on flat land without running. Our pace was somewhere between 3-4 miles per hour the entire way out and back. The trail was about as wide, smooth and flat as you can get. It is an old converted rail bed that has had the rails and ties stripped out so that folks like us can enjoy a long walk.
We made three stops in our 14 mile trek. The first and third were at a small park dedicated to Vietnam War helicopter pilots. Apparently the Mineral Wells area was where the Army trained helicopter pilots for quite a long time. The second stop, ironically enough, was at a McDonald’s on the eastern edge of Mineral Wells. There we were, doing some awesome healthy hiking and we go and stop at Mickey D’s. I had a cheeseburger and a small Coke. Most everybody else had an ice cream sundae. Obviously we were burning it all off, I just thought it was funny that we hiked through the Texas countryside with great exercise and scenery and a McDonald’s was our halfway point.
After that we headed back, and the last few miles our bodies started to protest the pace and distance. 75 degrees started to feel a little hot in the sun when the breeze stopped. Also, we never slackened our pace, going just about as fast as we could the whole way. A couple of us started to run low on water, and they in particular were feeling it. As far as that was concerned I was fine. I had my 100 ounce Camelbak and though it was getting pretty light the last few miles I felt plenty hydrated. It was obvious that we were sweating a lot. In five hours of hiking I had to pee only once while drinking almost three quarts of water and a Coke.
My adaptation to our speed was another matter. My legs were getting sore before we ever reached our starting point, which was a big warning sign that caught my attention. By the time we got back I was definitely feeling it, and once we stopped moving while we formed up around our cars to say chat a bit and say goodbye the alarm bells were going off. My legs were getting cramps just standing around. After a short while we all loaded up and headed off to our various destinations.
After driving nearly two hours to get back to Uptown I parked the car in the deck and went to step out of it and stand up. OUCH!!
Feet, legs, lower back – they were all very angry with me. I was stiff as a board. Shuffling slowly up the apartment I must have looked like a physical therapy patient. And I was exhausted. A vegetable really. I was so tired that I couldn’t even think clearly. I took a long hot bath to try to make the muscle aches a little better and it did help. As I sat there and soaked it occurred to me that my legs were actually more sore after this hike than they were after climbing Pike’s Peak! It had to be the pace. Pike’s was grueling but slow. We were moving when we went to Mineral Wells and back, and that had to be the cause. The good news – my knees were perfectly fine, which is further proof that all my exercise since September is really paying off.
The rest of the evening was a collapse into exhaustion. Originally I had planned to cook a dinner and chill out like I often do on a Sunday night, but there was no way in heck I was doing that last Sunday. Standing long enough to cook a dinner was out of the question. I can’t remember what I ate, but I sure didn’t cook it.
I tried to watch the Cowboys-Giants game, but by half time it was obvious I wasn’t going to make it to the end. I had started the day at 3:00 am Central Time, literally hiked my butt off, and stayed up until about 9:00 pm. A pretty solid 19 hour day! I hobbled to bed and slept a deep dreamless sleep for about 10 hours before waking up. It wasn’t enough. I was slow and dopey and achey all day long, but still really glad that I went. That level of exertion was actually exactly what I was looking for. I’m going to keep pushing myself harder and harder until I can do… I’m not sure what. Some really cool fun adventurous stuff. And I’m going to enjoy it the whole way!
