Pre-Season Preparations, Part 1

As the backpacking season fast approaches, Roslyn and I have identified some ways to improve our backpacking trips. We want to improve our distance, reduce injury and fatigue, and become more efficient in what we do around camp.

The first thing to do is get back into shape for the backpacking season. We have slowly been adding more winter activities to remain in shape, but hauling a backpack up and down hills for 10+ hours a day puts a lot of stress on your feet an knees. Proper conditioning is one of the things we have decided to focus on to help reduce injury and fatigue issues.

Our plan has 3 main parts to it, each helping build towards a goal of doing repeated 20 km days with minimal soreness at the end.

Part 1 - Frequent Use

Part one of our plan is to get frequent use out of our feet and knees. We have been doing this by heading out for about 30 to 60 minutes every day after work in the city. We have been making sure to keep the pace fairly high and to do about 2 to 4 km every day. Since pretty much all the walking in the city is on pavement/concrete this has been helping keep our bodies in a lightly used state.

Part 2 - A Weekly Push

Once per week we have been going out for a longer walk in the 8 to 12 km range.Our goal for these has been to keep a brisk 5 to 6 km per hour pace up the entire time. We've managed to get out for the last three weeks now early on a Sunday, which has been nice. Our plan is to keep these up and potentially push out to a 15 km in 3 to 3.5 hours by the end of the summer. Since this is without any weight and usually on fairly easy trail its a good work out and helps with some of the cardio side of things.

Part 3 - Sprints!

Now that the snow and ice are gone (for the most part) we are going to add intervals into three of our daily walking trips. To start we are going to do a 10 to 15 second sprint every two minutes. This will help get our cardio and heart rate up, but also help by putting more force onto our feet and joints during the sprint. The extra load will help with conditioning over time.

That's our current plan to get back into shape for the backpacking season. Our main concerns are avoiding any injuries on the way there, as repeated stress injuries are fairly common when hiking/backpacking with lots of weight for long periods of time. Slowly conditioning ourselves back into shape should both help reduce the chance of injury and help us go further.