Training... No Pain, No Rain, No Maine

  I'm lucky.  I'm lucky I get to try to do this.  I'm lucky I get the support I do.  I'm also lucky I live near some really great National Forest and Wilderness Areas so that I can get out there and make my legs feel like frozen micro-waved mashed potatoes.  I mean that.  I've grown up a short car ride away from the highest point in the state, Mt. Cheaha, which looms, well, sorta looms over northeast Alabama from 2500 feet and I grew up tumbling around on its rocks  and swimming in the lakes and creeks at its base.
  
  I now live north of Cheaha sixty or so miles, following the border of what the geologists call the Ridge and Valley province where the land crumples up like the folds of a quilt pushed up on a bed.  These mountains were formed, an orogeny about 300 million years ago, when the plate now holding Africa slammed into the Eastern U.S. and rebounded.  It's a little known fact but the Appalachians were once the size of the Rockies, or the Alps.  What's left is the stubbed broken and rotten teeth of the peaks and crests.  These inner bones are mostly hard worn quartzites and other dense hard rocks that were once at the center on the mountain range.
  
  For the practical hiker this means that most of your hikes go in a phase.  You ascend the peak, sometimes switching back and crossing saddles till you reach the top of the ridge-line.  This means evil, evil uphill grades.  Then you cross the ridge line, woohoo, views, this is what you do it for.  Then you do the descent, also switching back and somteimes getting into a gap or two that will take you back up a secondary ridge to continue the hike again.  Then, you camp, or go home.
  
  So distance out here, especially training distance, is not totally measured in miles walked.  Which when you figure in the amount of switchbacks and dilly-dallying can make you really, really depressed.  It's all about the amount of elevation you cover.  I'm super serious.  Here we are making ready to traverse a Pinhoti section.
  

  Technically, this hike was only 6 miles long.  But I climbed one peak that was 1600 feet in elevation and climbed out of a gap that was almost that much.  When you come around the bottom of a switchback or the corner of a forest floor and see some big mean uphill that goes all the way up I usually just have to go to my happy place.  Mean hill, evil, evil hill.  I usually look like this at the beginning of my hikes.

  I don't have any pictures post-hike...  It's usually not something I'm thinking about as I flop onto my mattress and suck down diet soda.  I'll try to make it more of a priority.  But for right now, I'm hiking when the weather is good and maintaining an attitude on the days when my body is feeling like this whole thing maybe just might be bigger and crazier than something I can handle.  But, as they say... No pain, no rain, No Maine.