apparently I did whitney for some reason

  • wakeup: 2 am 
  • leave hotel in lone pine (best western frontier motel): 3 am
  • arrive at portal: 3:35 am? 
  • poop, get stuff packed, take photos...
  • actually start hiking: 3:56 am
  • summit: 12 pm (yeah)
  • finish: 7:30 pm 
thoughts: 
  • probably not doing that again. apparently from 2012 I forgot how hard it was. 
  • the starlight at the start is absolutely beautiful. holy crap. like stepping into the little dream world of mine where you can see into the heavens and every night there is a meteor shower. it was like that made real. you could see nebulae and so many stars. 
  • by mile 10 or so, you start to think "I am never going to get off this mountain" because your brain is cooked but you have to get to the summit then all the way back down 
  • my watch said 22.2 miles, not 22, and that extra 0.2 sucked
  • i almost got eaten by a horsefly at the summit, but was saved by a brown bird 
  • i was farting a lot. so much freaking farting. eventually i had to stop because it was going to become sharting 
  • i am pretty sure i hallucinated someone talking to me and a lady hiker behind me in a bright red coat (she vanished a few minutes later) 
  • I thought I was going to fall to my death at the windows when scrambling over the talus with sheer dropoffs on either side. 
  • but the view into sequoia national park, and technically visiting it sans pass, is insane. 
  • I had an excruciating stomachache on the 99 switchbacks and forced myself to eat anyway, but had to loosen my belt, so now I have identical bruises on both of my biceps 
  • at the summit I felt mostly okay and could even dodge the horsefly as I tried to eat my steak and cheese sandwich. on the way down, i started to get an excruciating headache and could barely walk.  
  • we kept having to stop and gasp for air before continuing, so many of our miles near the top were around 45 minutes. 
  • I had to filter water, it's just not possible to bring enough even with a totally full pack. if I get violently ill in the next few days, we know the beFree doesn't work (but it almost certainly will be fine) 
  • many of the switchbacks turned into a literal river on the way back down ...but hey, water to drink 
  • my back hurts and my calves hurt and my wrists hurt and my feet hurt and my quads hurt and my hamstrings hurt and my arms hurt. oddly my glutes feel great and so do my abs.
  • my brain is sluggish right now and I greatly await the return of full cognitive functioning because this is annoying. 
  • people almost always drop out on this hike. we lost 2 at mile 6 and 1 at mile 9 which is actually not terrible. 
  • Most of the good lone pine restaurants close comically early. The rest of the group didn't finish for another hour after my dad and I did and by then we were stuck with McD's. 
training: 
  • 61 mpw running with occasional cutback weeks
  • 1-2 miles per week of that were on trails
  • walking 1-2 miles per day, but 6 on Sunday rest day
  • 16-20 mile long runs 
  • lifting 6 days a week, hypertrophy PPL 
  • yoga 7 days a week
  • balance board, grip training, nightly PT, all the auxiliary stuff
was it enough? honestly, not quite. though even if i had hit 70mpw it probably wouldn't have prevented the ams. 


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