Day 275

Day 275 (AT 78): 19 miles

As I pretty much expected, I woke up pretty late today and still felt a hungover. It was pretty bad at first but this is where my raining came in. A key point of my training for this was that I would do my long runs every week on Saturday or Sunday mornings when I was still hungover and felt like shit. I figured if I could handle that then I could handle feeling like shit after big mile days on the trail too. I think it’s worked pretty well so far, but probably never as directly correlated as today.

It wasn’t a hard day of hiking but I knew with the late start it would be a very big day. I’ve got this pretty nifty system since hopping back on the AT where one day I’ll wake up at 4 and do a bit mile day and then the next day I’ll sleep in and do a little day. I’m surprised that’s persisted so far. I’d rather just be consistent.

Around noon I got to a steam that looked like it had a walkable beaver dam across it. I wish I would’ve just taken off my shoes and forded it. Near the other side of the stream the dam was basically just leaves on top of the water so I ended up getting my shoes a little wet and I also had to take them of while balancing on one leg on a skinny branch and it was just not an ideal situation. There was a guy behind me that got to the stream as I was crossing so I’m sure he got some laughs out of watching me. Later in the day I got to another ford. I didn’t play around with this one, just immediately took of my shoes and went across.

Around 5:30 I realized I was a little over 2 miles to the summit of moxie mountain. I couldn’t think of what time the sun sets because I haven’t really been paying attention. I just know it’s pretty damn early and there’s no twilight at all here. I really wanted to make it to the summit for sunset so I tried to run up the mountain, which was a little steep, as fast as I could. My toe flap got caught on a root and I took a pretty gnarly fall but I had no time to stop. I ended up making it to the top just after the sun had set but the sky was still beautiful.

My camera couldn’t capture it at all but the orange light over the mountain ridges off in the distance was something else. This was a rare moment where I stopped and enjoyed a spot for a while.

Song of the day: let’s get this party started-korn