New Audio: How an Appalachian Trail Thru Hike Wrecked my Health. SOBO 2023

hello welcome back thank you for joining me um I'm going to be redoing this video um on sort of how the at wrecked my health I'm back in Canada now uh from Cuba we were just down there for a bit uh resting and relaxation because the body needed to heal and it was just a great place to sit in the Sun and do nothing and have people cook for me because it was an all-inclusive which was the plan so um but I did a video down there talking about how uh the at wrecked my health and there was a lot of wind we kind of hit some stormy days there and everyone was at the pool so there was a lot of um audio I was hoping it wouldn't be too bad but a lot of people were having some difficulty with it and I did want to make sure this information got out to you because I think it's important I don't think it's talked a lot about um so I thought I'd redo it for you and you can watch either one uh they're pretty much going to contain the same information uh except this one will just have clear audio and and a very boring background no palm trees back here which is sad I wish we had palm trees in in Canada but not natively grown anyway so that being said I'm going to talk about how the at wrecked my health so it's you know it's not clickbait per se but there's a lot about the at that was beneficial for my health and that was not beneficial for my health so I want to kind of go over those now this is my own personal experience um obviously I did this uh Soo we started in June and we ended in November I and well I turned 50 over the trip which is why I took the trip was to kind of reset my health so you know that places me in sort of a per menopausal woman uh category now that's specific to me but this does this information you know can carry over there's a fair bit of general information but just keep that in mind that this is is my experience um I am not a big muscular woman I don't gain muscle very easily uh so that also had an effect as my personal body composition as to how you know this kind of played out but take that uh information as you will and I will share my experience with you so first of all um before starting the trip uh I did some pre-training for about five months prior I knew I had some muscle imbalances because I had done some Shakedown hikes here in New Brunswick Canada uh we have the Bay of fundi which is a about a 60 kilm about 50 60 km um hike which has a lot of up and down it's pretty steep and intense so it was a great training ground uh for the at because as we know that's all you do in the at is go up and down uh I really experienced that um that being said I did notice on those Shakedown Heights I had a lot of knee pain a lot of IT band pain so the outer outer part of your thigh and the knee so when you're going downhill you notice that pain is really intense and it just you don't want to flex your knee to a certain point because it just it really hurts um and a lot of people I did notice uh at least in the start a lot of people got off because of that uh they just they thought they were young enough they thought they were healthy enough and didn't have any imbalances and suddenly that reared its head and I don't know if you can outtrain it on the hike maybe you can um I think maybe if you're younger you probably have a greater potential to I didn't think I could so I trained before and I must say it worked um I did have some pain afterwards but that was just from overuse because your body's just not used to hiking so many miles every day all day and although we did start off with some smaller miles uh about probably about anywhere from 8 to 12 was the average for the first little bit and then we ramped up although we had a few big days in there uh off the start not intentionally uh but that's just how it worked out um but I did find that when I use some KT Tape to support it it worked out fine um but I didn't have any knee pain that prevented me from continuing so I will link down below the training plan that I used um like I said I went to a physiotherapist and I got something specific for my needs uh it might not be the same for you now that being said it also took me about a month and a half to get my trail legs uh some people say it takes a month some people say it takes a couple weeks it all depends on how quickly you build muscle where you're starting from your age all of those factors um so for me it took me about a month and a half before I got those Trail legs really going before I could really amp up those miles but in order to get Trail legs you have to have a certain a few things in in place uh one obviously your ability to grow muscle your nutrition has to be in there um you know those things help they don't prevent but they help so I'm going to talk about nutrition first because that it was the one thing I noticed very early on now obviously with backpacking you're you're trying to choose the lightest weight Foods so and these us to carry a lot of dehydrated stuff ramen noodles packs like that um so you're missing a lot of vitamins and minerals in that kind of food it's high salt content which you're you're going to sweat out so the salt content I don't I didn't even factor that in it didn't really bother me at all and it probably shouldn't do unless you've got some really high blood pressure then that might be an issue but I think for the most of us it probably doesn't factor in because we're going to sweat it off anyway or hopefully you'll drink enough water and flush it out through your kidneys um but the minerals and and vitamins are definitely something that you lack so I definitely would recommend taking a multivitamin and I did have one but what I didn't expect were some of the other uh vitamins that I needed and I noticed pretty early on actually probably starting in the 100 mile that I was lacking some calcium and magnesium because I was getting muscle cramps um restless legs kind of some tingly toes and whatnot that weren't due to temperature relation related um so I was I was noticing that um and I was craving uh certain foods now obviously when you eliminate Foods out of your diet because like vegetables and fruit because of the weight um you're probably going to Crave them anyway but I always try to listen to my cravings and I was really craving like orange juice so I think I was deficient in vitamin C again you don't get that in ramen noodles um like you can supplement ways to do it but uh I was I ate a lot of those uh weles little Gummy candies because there's lots of sugar in them and they have vitamin SE oddly enough so I ate a lot of those gummy candies and they were really good um but I would would also when we took Town breaks I would buy one of those big jugs of orange juice with the calcium added into it and I would drink the whole thing uh there's a lot of calories in there there's a lot of sugar in there um I wouldn't recommend that on a regular basis if you're not through hiking but I did it and it was great um and I did later on supplement with more calcium and magnesium and I found the cramps uh definitely went away the nerve pain that is something I'm going to touch on in a little bit but uh because that's kind of a different thing um but with those vitamin deficiencies as well one thing you have to be careful of are your electrolytes uh definitely I think required on an at hike especially when it's hot out and you're sweating a lot uh your body needs those salts uh for nerve transmission for muscle uh incorporation so you really do need to have electrolytes I didn't find a lot of great ones on the trail I was kind of saddened about that um I think I used one from Walmart I don't remember what it was called uh I like the taste of it really it was kind of it I mean there's there's lots of different kinds out there but I didn't really love them um so that was a shame but I definitely always had electrolytes on me um always at least had one electrolyte to drink a day probably two when it's got really hot out um and I always made sure I drank at least some during the Rainy because it rained for the whole first two months and you don't really want to drink a lot of water when you're wet head to toe you figure it just kind of absorbs Through Your Skin it doesn't um so you do still need to drink because you are still sweating um so you definitely need to keep your salts up and I I had my electrolyte drinks certainly uh during the Rainy time as well um now surprisingly I did not get sick at all I mean exercise does increase your immunity um so that's a bonus some people did get sick uh I didn't find too many people got sick it was more a lot of injuries and infections that happened and that's something you have to be careful of uh now because it rained so much uh last year I think they had this was their 35e record for rain level for June and July in Maine and New Hampshire so yay um and our feet were pretty much soaked constantly for the first two months um the only time they dried out is when we took zero days and we took a fair number of zero days just because mentally you need to not be in the rain and you want to be dry and just because you got so sick and tired of being wet and cold it sucked um you really got to embrace the suck there but uh some people who would get blisters and wouldn't take care of them very well might increase to a staff infection or a fungal infection because your feet are always s spping wet and gross and they stink um I didn't get that because I early on on after the 100 mile I picked up a new pair of Camp shoes the zero drop shoes so I made sure every night that I took my shoes and socks off and dried my feet out really well cleaned them so that they didn't get any weird funky infection um because we have staff on our skin it's just part of everybody's normal bacteria on their skin um and sometimes some people have more than others I'm one of those people so whenever I add a scrape chances are likely it's going to get infected um so you got to be really careful about cleaning those things things so they don't increase into you know uh some problems where you have to get antibiotics I know a few hikers who did have that issues um and because being a nurse they would come to me and and ask me and I'd be like no you need to go get that checked out or keep it cleaner and I would give them some stuff to take care of it um usually something like a Neosporin and Al alcohol wipes will be just fine for those types of things you just have to stay on top of it uh and keep it clean and dry but you know if your nutrition level is very low it's hard for your body to fight those off so you know extra vitamin C is great for that um it also helps with inflammation in the knees cuz well we all take uh you know vitamin I ibuprofen and I did take that on occasion too because it just you know you just sometimes you need what they call the uh hiker heroin which is essentially you take Advil and IBU or ibuprofen and manine Tylenol and Advil at the same time and yes it can be done the process through different things not medical advice but that's what I did um and let me tell you we'll fall asleep very quickly on that that being said um I did find that again when you went into town uh for people who were sort of craving foods and wanted to to bump up your nutrition levels uh they would um consume a lot of calories like so you would get your vegetables and your fruit on your town days and then they would eat very little on their hiking days and that worked for some people it did not work for me I can't eat that much in one sitting uh I eat all day but I can't eat that much in one sitting so taking those extra supplements was really important for me so I would take later on I figured out I needed not only the multivitamin but a calcium and a magnesium supplement as well uh some people might need even an iron one if they're not getting enough of that I have good iron stores like I said I took a um or maybe I didn't say I did blood work prior to going on the trip because I was curious to see where my blood work would be because I was planning to take blood work after um so I would um I'll compare it later on at the very end I'll kind of go over some of the things I expected to see happen and some of the stuff I didn't expect to see happen with my blood work um which was quite surprising but I'll talk about that later anyway um um so yeah so you go into town you eat all your fruits and veggies and then whatnot but that didn't work for me that might work for some people not my not for me okay and moving on so the next one is obviously your muscles um your muscles are being built and broken down at the same time as you're hiking if you're not getting enough protein which I I mean there's so many protein bars and protein supplements I took protein powder and added it to my oatmeal every morning which also had some vitamins to try to keep my protein up so I don't think I was too bad in being protein deficient there are lots of ways you can get it through nuts lots of people like that um nuts are heavy but they're great sources of fats and like walnuts a lot of people like peanuts cuz they're super cheap um and they have extra salt and people like that so you know whatever works for you um there's lots of protein bars you know the tuna packets and whatnot but I found like protein bars they're so overprocessed and they don't some of them just taste awful there weren't some bad ones out there I'm going to give you that but I did get sick of them pretty fast um as well as the tuna packet so it was really hard to get good nutrition just because you got so sick of the food and some people that's not a problem they are creatures of habit and they will eat the same thing every day all day and I thought I was one of those people turns out I'm really not um if it's food I really like yes but it's hard to really love a mountainhouse meal or ramen noodles with packets of tuna again and again for me if you love it awesome you'll probably do do just fine I was not one of those people um but you definitely do need to make sure you're getting enough protein to build your muscles otherwise your body is just going to cannibalize itself uh to keep that energy going to get you through the hike and because of that and because it's hard to get all those calories in you will lose weight um um now the amount of weight you'll lose is variable like Jeff lost 30 lbs I lost eight um so huge difference and I'm like very tiny compared to him like 5' 3 120 lb and he was 6'2 and 200 lb so you know huge variation we were I honestly think I was eating more food than him um CU I can like I said I eat all day and I will literally I had my snack bag I was eating all day long um he tended to eat just big meals at one time but everyone you know loses weight differently I did find if you had the weight to lose you were probably going to lose it um women tended to reconfigure the weight differently so their body composition would change more than men men just kind of leaned out and looked like they belonged in a concentration camp like they literally were so thin a lot of the men I found you could see their abs pretty quickly women didn't seem to lose it like that um now I certainly didn't but again stress levels cortisol levels in your body will ensure that you just just the way that we're made um will hold on to a lot of weight because it wants to prepare for babies even though you're nowhere near having babies but or at the end of that cycle to not even be able to but still the body weight or the body will want to hold on to that so I held on to mine pretty tightly um I did grow some muscles and my body changed and kind of leaned out a bit but I didn't lose what I thought I was going to lose and maybe that was because we got the van and my nutrition improved and I could get extra calories and maybe I indulged more than I thought I did either way it doesn't really matter but your body will change differently probably than you expect it to unless you're a guy and then you're just going to lean right out cu I did notice that right when we were in uh Southern Maine there was a young woman and we were asking questions and maybe it was inappropriate to ask how much weight she lost because she was near the end of her trip and she said she really didn't um she was a young woman but she did notice she had a lot of muscle cuz she threw around her pack like it was nothing and she had a big bear canister in it so her pack was Heavy I mean I started off with a 27b pack and ended up with about a 20 lb pack um so my weight changed in my pack a lot and what I carried and and maybe that had something to do with the calories I burnt off cuz a few of the other women I started with they leaned out really heavily at the end of it they were quite quite skinny um they definitely need to add back a lot of calories uh they could each use at least 10 15 pounds back um but you know so everybody's different the one thing I did notice um now I I gained a lot of muscle in the lower half of my body so all those great hiking muscles but if I'm not hiking I lost muscles like for those activities that you don't need those muscles for I don't have that strength anymore so this is where the part parts that kind of wrecked me I have no upper body strength anymore we went back to the gym uh shortly after we got back and wow I can't bicep curl bench press any of that about half of what I could before so I did lose a lot of the upper body uh muscle mass and any of the lower body that wasn't specific to hiking so I can hike like a mad woman now I can go up those mountains my cardiovascular improved immensely hugely I can definitely you know go a lot more miles a lot faster um I tested this on the treadmill I went at a speed where it normally would have been running I was still walking so I bumped it up I went faster I increased the incline no problems didn't get winded at all so that surprised me quite a bit what also surprised me um with that is I increased my vasculature now if you don't know what that is it's it's just your blood vessels the ability for your body to carry blood throughout your body um which is your oxygen levels so I have mentioned in previous videos that I have rodes so I have very reactive uh small blood vessels in my fingers and toes the peripheries and it also means that I don't have hair on my legs because there just wasn't enough BL blood flow going to create hair on my legs and that's not a new thing for me it might be something if you have rains that you don't have but I definitely do um it's just I have very small blood vessels that being said when I started hiking I increased my vascul tremendously and now I have hair on my legs which is I'm so happy it's extra warmth for me I'm pretty pleased about it um some people might not be so pleased about hair on their legs but but I am um so that was a hug huge surprise so big bonus it does increase you know your vascul so I didn't expect that I did expect uh to to lose the muscle mass in the top of my body so that I'm going to have to rebuild which I'm kind of sad about because I'm a slow muscle builder even in my legs like all that hiking I expected to have some definition I have none it leaned out a bit but there's no muscle definition I didn't gain I saw some people I believe there's a famous hiker last year his name was Quadzilla he did all three the Triple Crown in one year which is insane so of course he's going to have big legs but he had big legs hence the name Quadzilla um and you know impressive but and even some of the other women and men you know you could definitely see some muscle growth there mine no I just look like I have a little thick still little disappointed in that but that's okay they're a lot stronger than they were for hiking now as well with the hiking and the strengthening is the bone building now if it's a small tiny woman in her 50s now gosh um osteoporosis is something I've always thought about so your bone health now when you put your bones under stress which is what hiking is you you're weighing put waiting you're putting weight on your back and you're hiking uphills it's going to put stress on your bones theoretically should be building your bone but you can only build bone if you've got the materials available now stress also will leech calcium from your bones so that your body can reduce its cortisol level so it's it's a fine balance um but the idea is to build your bones and that was part of my intent because I've always been concerned about osteoporosis being a very tiny woman um and having really tiny bones that's just my bone structure um and and so I I was concerned about that um that being said I think I did all right I didn't break any bones despite falling a lot and you know you all saw me Smash my head um I didn't break anything there I fell a few times on slippery rocks and you know certainly uh hurt the shoulders and the knees and but I didn't break anything and some people did break things so I'm pretty happy that none of my Falls led to a break and that my bones were strong enough hold up against a Break um so I think I did okay there but certainly that's one of the other issues that if you're depleted in calcium you might actually be doing the reverse of what you thought you were doing um so to be careful about that now uh the next issue that I found was nerve damage and this is one I didn't actually hear much about prior to going uh was that you first of all having the right shoes makes a huge difference I started off with a pair of hocas they were a little tight in the toe box I didn't think they were but between getting the feet wet all the time and the shoes were always wet um and your feet swelling because when you start walking your body is just not used to it um and I found my feet would swell a lot so my feet were way bigger than I thought they were going to be in my shoes and my shoes weren't big enough so my toes would poke out the edge started to poke out the edges and I actually broke the seams on them uh which is why I got rid of them earlier than later same with the second pair I thought I had a nice wide toe box and I could pull it off that didn't happen by the third pair I had a the toe pose that I had had a nice an extra wide toe box that was and I had to size up at that point more than I thought I did so by the third pair I had a good pair of shoes but by that point um I had compressed my feet as well as the swelling compress pressed my feet the nerves against the bones and just you know that maybe that they didn't get enough blood flow or I don't know exactly what caused the nerve damage but I ended up with num toes um not all of them and not all of the toe so just sections of my feet are now numb and that's actually pretty common a lot of people end up with numb toes some of them will call them cotton toes um and it's a weird sensation now some of them have I've gotten some of the feeling and The Sensation back some of them I don't I have talked to a few people who have had num toes and for them some of them have lasted a year or so now if you have ab12 deficiency that could be caused by a different reason and you might want to get that checked out I mentioned before I had my blood done vitamin B12 was not an issue for me so that's not the reason I have nerve damage it's mostly just due to overuse compression um um probably something to do with my own you know physiological vasculature in my feet um so everyone's going to be different but so I didn't expect to have nerve damage um so that was a big surprise and I'm going to assume it's going to come back nerves grow very or regain their growth very slowly um so that's not something I expect to happen quickly um you can certainly improve that with more blood flow massages that type of thing so so you know there are ways to help increase that um feeling return but you know it may not it's hard to say another unexpected way that the at kind of changed my health and I'm hoping it'll it'll come back is my flexibility I've always been a flexible person to be fair I did not do the amount of yoga I thought I was going to do on the trail I had full plans on doing this whole yoga routine at the end in the beginning and that didn't happen I did small bits of it um out of necessity because you really kind of have to otherwise you just feel like a little solid mass in the morning um so I did do some stretching but I found that my ankles or anytime as soon as you sit down after hiking you seize up and you you feel like a little Weeble wobble man person um when you get up just because your whole body has stiffened it takes a little bit to get moving um and especially the ankles and I still find mind that the ankles now I mean it's been I guess a little over a month a month and a half now since we sto you know hiking on a daily basis but I do find the ankles are still stiff in the morning um I'm increasing that now by doing a much more uh regular yoga practice as I had been doing prior to hiking um I do recommend doing some stretching while you hike it greatly improve your ability not to get injured and just to kind of keep that stiffness at Bay um and you know elevating your feet at night for those swelly toes because it's going to happen um finally the other way that the at changed my health unexpectedly was my bowel habits um early on I had mentioned in one of my fear videos that I was scared I might poop my pants because that was one of the rumors out there and a lot of people did have emergency evacuations I did not end up needing one of those but um the amount of exercise that you do does change your bow habits the way that you use the toilet will change your bowel habits if you're doing kind of a Squatty in the woods that is going to change your bowel habits um maybe not permanently but it definitely will and um I have found that out it's taking and the food that you eat and how you eat all these things are going to change your habits out there when your hiking and then when you come back it takes a bit of time for your body to go oh okay we're doing things differently again so just do expect that you know maybe when you come back you might be constipated and you had never been before maybe your body likes The Squatty Potty because you were used to doing it in the woods you know just things to think about um I hadn't anticipated that but uh that was definitely one of the things that came along with the trail so who knew right so that pretty much covers uh how the at wrecked my health not officially wrecked it but definitely changed it uh in ways I hadn't anticipated now I had mentioned quite briefly uh sort of I had a blood test done early on um my Bloods were great I didn't have any issues there but on coming back I had my blood redone and a few things I did notice is big surprise deficient in calcium um so I definitely have to up that I thought I was up upping it but I still obviously have not upped it enough so I have to uh increase that much more intensely now all of my tri glycerides my cholesterol type um blood values were okay but the overall cholesterol had increased and that actually shocked me I didn't expect that to happen and I think part of that would be due to the fact that the type of food I was eating was quite different uh I ate a lot more fast food just because it was convenient I ate a lot more burgers and stuff that I don't normally eat um it's not that I don't eat meat or red meat it's just I don't normally eat a lot of fast food Burgers because I'm not around them and I like the food healthy food the food that I cook um so I don't tend to go out for that food a lot but because we didn't have a home or our kitchen we ended up eating a lot more of that because it was convenient it was fast it was cheap um so and just the types of snacks that we would eat you're pretty much on trail you're going to eat whatever you want and so I did so my cholesterol level actually increased and I'm a little sad about that because I had like my triglycerides and my LDL and HDL com like individually are fine but overall like the calculated amount is is different so I like I said I'm a little saddened at that um my iron levels were still great uh B12 all those things were fine but yeah so you know that was a I actually hadn't expected the calcium one I was really hoping kind of wouldn't I thought I had that under control but even you know someone who knows what they're doing or who thinks she knows what she's doing you know is in the healthc care profession and had supplemented still didn't pull that one off enough so uh I'm definitely going to have to fix the calcium U deficiency but you know those are things you should think about um and sort of if you're planning your your trip for the next year uh might want to consider just looking at your own health and planning those things to occur or try to find ways to mitigate it so if you found this uh valuable give it a like and do subscribe and I will be still putting out a few more videos and for those who had difficulty in the last one I apologize I hope this helps uh with the audio and that you don't have to suffer hearing party ground party sounds in the background and the wind uh blowing my camera over so thank you for watching

Channel: Summit Sam

Views: 3,761

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Id: VYYe0g0XKPU

Length: 31min 27sec (1887 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 23 2023