PCT: Daily Miles

Calculating our daily milage was one of the hardest things (in my opinion) about planning for the trail. It also took us the most time to plan for. Why It's Important to us:

• Determines when we should send packages so they arrive on time.

• Determines if we are behind or ahead schedule. -- We want to ensure we complete the trail by the beginning of October to avoid snow in Washington.

• Helps determine how much food we should send/pack.

• Provides an outline to family and friends, so they know where we are.

The Basics:

On average the hike takes 4-6 months to complete. We are not athletes, so we are shooting for 5-6 months to complete the trail. We want to start with lower miles and end with higher miles, but how many do we start with and how many do we end with??? How fast do we get our "trail legs"?

Putting Together a Plan

We decided to plan for 5.5 months. We are not in super good shape, but we are not in terrible shape either. We met in the middle and planned for 5.5 months. With our start date, April 29th, 5.5 months means our end date should be October 14th. This allows 168 total days out there on the trail!

To keep our bodies healthy, we need Zero days periodically. A zero days is day without hiking to let the body recover, rest, and take care of potential injuries. We estimate at the beginning of the trail, we will take a Zero Day about once a week, and over time, that will lessen to once every two weeks. That means we should have roughly 15 Zero Days on the trail, leaving us 153 hiking days. We have 26 resupply stops along the way. We only plan on doing half the milage on these days. 26 / 2 = 13. (even though we might have to hike, or hitch hike into town) leaving us 140 Hiking days.

Based on all of this information, our daily average miles should be on average 19 miles a day.

Total miles / Total Hiking days = Average Miles Per Day. The trail is 2,660 miles. 2,660 / 140 = 19. Using this Information: We should be hike an average of 19 miles a day, but at the start of the trail, a 19 mile day would really suck with the shape we're in! Pushing ourselves that hard in the beginning, might lead to an injury too! From our hiking experience, we feel like we can start at about 10 miles a day, or 50% of the average mileage we need to be at.

After a couple weeks, we will increase to %75 percent of our average. After a few more weeks, we should be able to hike 100% of our average. To offset the time/milage lost by starting at 50% of the average, we also increase our milage at the end to 125% and even 150% of our average.

We realize we are not going to finish hiking ~30 miles every day and that we are not going to be taking a Zero day every 11th day. However, we also don't plan on only doing 10 miles every day for the first weeks. We are planning on ourselves to average out the milage a little better with making up for some of the later miles at the beginning. this was just used as a helpful planning tool to allow us to plan our tip a little easier.