Training To Section Hike The Appalachian Trail - Interview With Tisha

In this episode, I interview Tisha, a psychiatric nurse practitioner from Mississippi and longtime Summit Strength client. Inside she shares how she trained for and completed a section of the Appalachian Trail, solo, after her hiking partner suffered a serious injury on day one.

​She covers 14 months of preparation, the roadblocks she navigated including a hurricane and motivation slumps, and how personalised strength and conditioning for hiking got her through one of the toughest trails in the United States without a single ibuprofen.

Episode Transcript:

Q: Do you just want to give me a little bit of a rundown around who you are, where you're from, what do you do, and what is your background in hiking?

I'm Tish. I live in the United States in Mississippi, about an hour north of the Gulf of Mexico. I am a psychiatric nurse practitioner. I work for the federal government in the Department of Veterans Affairs, so my patients are all combat veterans that have returned from various wars. It's rewarding, but you need time away from it. That's kind of how I got into hiking and backpacking. I've always liked to hike and camp, and probably a year and a half or two years ago I decided to start putting them together and started backpacking. That's when I found your podcast first and then your Facebook group.

Q: When we first started working together, what was the initial goal you were wanting to train towards?

I've always had it in my head that I wanted to start section hiking one of the long trails in the United States, either the Pacific Crest, the Appalachian, or the Continental Divide. Initially I was going to start section hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, but when COVID hit it became logistically impossible to plan because we didn't know if we'd be able to fly out there or how we'd get to the trail. My hiking partner and I changed course and decided to start section hiking the Appalachian Trail. That became the goal probably about halfway through our training together.

Q: Tell us a little bit about the training you did through Summit Strength. What did your program look like?

When we first started I was doing several training sessions a week of what I'd call phase conditioning, starting off with lighter exercises to get used to moving with a pack, aerobic stuff, and then gradually progressing to more challenging workouts like bike intervals, loaded pack walking, and lots of strength training for the core and the legs. I think we started with four or five days a week initially. It was a really well-rounded program that hit everything.

Q: Was there anything different in there which you hadn't done before?

I had not done a lot of bike interval training. I'm not a fan of the bike, but I understand its place. And I had never done loaded pack walking on an incline before. That was totally new. I was very naive in thinking I could just put a pack on my back and go. It is not like that.

Q: Throughout the process, were there any roadblocks along the way? And if so, how did you overcome them?

There were a lot of roadblocks. My work schedule changed pretty dramatically and I had to reconfigure the workouts. Probably halfway through I lost a bit of my motivation. It went from something I was very excited about to something I was unsure I had time for with how busy work was. And then a hurricane came through in October and put me out for several days. There was a lot of damage to structures around my house and we were without power for about a week and a half. It really turned into something where I thought, maybe I should just put this off. Rowan was fantastic at working me through that, keeping the goal in mind, and meeting me where I was. He let me reconfigure the workouts so I could still progress without feeling overwhelmed by everything going on around me. I don't want to say I overcame the roadblocks, because I certainly didn't do it by myself. It was definitely a team effort.

Q: Can you remember specifics of what we did to adjust around those times when motivation dipped and the hurricane hit?

Rowan was really good about saying, okay, if all you can do is 20 minutes of walking a couple of days a week or a stretching session, that's enough. There was a period where we just did stretching exercises a few times a week, just something to keep the habit formed so I didn't lose the progress we'd already made. Those stretching sessions really helped keep my joints healthy and were also a great stress relief, almost meditative. Once we got over that hump we gradually started adding sessions back in, the strength training and pack walking and aerobic work, as I was ready for it.

Q: Tell us about your journey of testing your gear, because I know there were a couple of fun incidents there.

Where I live it gets very, very hot in the summertime, well over 105 degrees Fahrenheit with humidity at least 95%. I bought a one-person tent and decided to take it out in the summertime to test the gear. I hiked six miles in, planned to spend the night and hike six miles out. Right off the bat it was muggy and hot. I put the tent up and was fine until bedtime. When I got in the tent I realised it was small, tight, and not very well ventilated. It quickly turned into a miserable trip. I was lying there trying to talk myself into staying when it started raining, so I couldn't take the fly off, but it was so hot inside I couldn't stay in. I ended up sitting outside the tent in the rain and finally bailed around midnight. At first I considered it a failure, but after talking to Rowan and some other hikers, I realised I'd learned something. I figured out that tent wasn't going to work before I was stuck with it on a real trip. I sent it back and got a much better tent. In looking back on it, it was a fantastic learning experience. It's funny now. It wasn't funny then.

Q: Talk me through how the trail itself went.

We decided to start at the parking lot below Springer Mountain, hike up to the summit to see the terminus and the official first blaze of the trail, and then start from there. My hiking partner and I spent the night in a hostel, got shuttled to the parking lot, and started up. It is incredibly rocky, way more than I was prepared for. We got to the top, spent about half an hour up there, then started back down. I hiked just a little faster than my partner and said I'd meet her at the bottom. When I got down she sent me a message that she'd fallen on the mountain. When I got to her it was obvious pretty quickly that she'd seriously injured herself. She'd stepped on a loose rock, rolled and tumbled down the side, and fell into a tree. She was very scraped up and had a large bruised spot on her head. We called a shuttle, I took her to the hospital, and it turned out she had a traumatic brain injury. She's still having symptoms with dizziness and trouble finding words.

Q: After your partner's injury, you ended up continuing on alone. How did you mentally adjust to that?

I stayed off the trail with her for a day until her partner came to pick her up. They dropped me back on the trail at mile 20, which was the only spot I could be dropped off. I hooked in with some other hikers I met at a shelter that night and ended up hiking about 18 more miles on that trip. The whole emergency and taking care of my partner and getting back on the trail threw my days off a bit, so I didn't get to do nearly as many days as I'd planned. I'm a nurse with a mental health specialty, so I'm pretty good at compartmentalising. Once we made sure she was safe, I started planning: you're going to be by yourself, what do you need to be worried about? A lot of trips in my life have been solo trips, so being by myself was fine. Being by myself on this treacherous trail was something different, but I went through my gear, had my first aid kit, had my Garmin inReach Mini so people could track where I was, and reminded myself of what I knew about bears and animal encounters. When you're alone you have to rely on yourself and pay much more attention to your own safety.

Q: You mentioned you're scared of heights, yet you found yourself on some pretty exposed sections. How did you deal with that?

I love roller coasters and they go really high and really fast, so I applied the same trick I use to get myself onto coasters to get through those sections of trail. I would tell myself, if you hate this, you're only on it for a couple of minutes and then it's done. I would spot a treacherous-looking section and say, just keep your eyes on the track in front of you, put one foot in front of the other, and move through it. Then I would remind myself: you're here, you're either going to have to turn around or go across that. What are your options? On the rock faces and ledges, I would appreciate the views during breaks, but if I was moving and had to go over a rock face I did not look out, I did not look down. Keeping my eyes on the trail narrowed my focus and that really helped.

Q: How did the physical side hold up through it all?

I think it went very well considering I'm sort of a newbie hiker and my pack is probably a little heavier than a lot of people would carry. I felt like I managed it well because of the training with the heavy pack. I tried very hard every day to do my warm-up exercises before I started walking, take breaks every couple of miles, and stretch at night when I finished. I brought my cork ball and would roll out my feet and the muscles in my legs. What shocked me was that I did not have to take any ibuprofen at all on the trail. I was not sore at all, which was shocking given what I was climbing. Blood Mountain goes up about a thousand feet in elevation over less than a mile. Really pushing straight up and straight down. I really feel like the training prepared me, and I was very happy with how my body responded.

Q: Once you hopped off the trail for the last time, how did you feel and what was going through your head?

I was really sad. I think there probably is such a thing as post-trail depression. It's something I think about all the time. I'm ready to go back. I'm ready to keep going. So I was really sad to be coming off the trail, but also very accomplished. Maybe I didn't go as far as I wanted to and maybe things didn't go exactly as planned, but a lot of stuff in life doesn't go the way you want and you have to be able to work around that and through it. I still had what I would consider the trip of a lifetime, and certainly the first of many trips back to finish it. It was a weird mixture of very happy and very sad.

Q: What is the plan of attack for your hiking moving forward?

I'm continuing general strength and conditioning training, then in September I'm going back to finish the first 20 miles I missed. From there I'll keep knocking out sections of the Appalachian Trail. The nearest hiking trail to me is nearly an hour and a half away, so it involves a lot of travel, but I'll get them in where I can. There are also some other longer trails on my radar, the Pinhoti Trail in North Alabama and the Foothills Trail in the Carolinas. I'm just going to save up time from work and knock them out when I can.

Q: If anyone was in a similar position and considering stepping onto a big section hike, what advice could you give them?

First, research the gear you want to use and then test it so you have it all dialled in before you leave. Know how to light your stove, how to put your tent up, how your feet are going to respond in your shoes. I had a huge problem with blisters before and it was only through a lot of trial and error that I got that sorted. Don't be afraid to do a lot of trial runs, even just putting your tent up in your yard. Definitely get into a proper training program, because I really feel like the strength and conditioning work gave me a significant advantage over people just hopping on the trail with no conditioning. And don't underestimate the trail. People are going to get hurt, gear is going to break, you may have animal encounters. Make sure you're prepared for those things. Then have fun.

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