Post-Trip Report

Check your overall level of conditioning. If you are out of shape, then start using the stairs on a daily basis. Walk one mile every evening for a few evenings. Then walk two miles every evening. Then three miles. After a while you can knock out ten miles before ten o'clock in the morning.

If you get sore large muscles, then it might be that you are not warming up to start, or you are not cooling down to finish. Also, you may be shy on electrolytes.

Try increasing your fluid intake by 50% and see what happens. Drink half water and half sports drink (your choice, Gatorade, Cytomax, Vitalyte, whatever).

You don't need to report this, but how is your body weight? If it is high, then that might account for sore feet, or maybe you have fallen arches. It could be anything. Bad boots?

–B.G.–

What kind of shoes and insoles are you wearing?

i am 5'8, 165 lbs. not fat. a little "padding" but mostly normal.

i have the salomon xt wings 3. great trail runners.

i am probably just out of shape. i work at the computer and rarely work out or exercise, other than hiking on the weekends.

I get similar soreness and aches when I put in longer days. I'm still pretty young, but don't exercise enough, i.e. my trips are usually harder than my training. I walk frequently around town, up to 10 miles about 3 times per week, but never gaining as much elevation as I do in a 10 mile day on the trail. I've found that by the end of summer I won't get sore like I did in May, but come next year, I get that initial soreness again. I haven't been able to convince myself that avoiding that soreness is worth the effort it'd take to start running or weight training again. :)

yeah, my whole lower body is so sore today at home. no way i could hike a 3rd day yet.

Just wanted to say you've got some great looking photos up on your etsy page. Also, I have some family in Fremont, small world. As someone just learning about photography and using a DSLR (Canon T3i), is it typical for photographers to do the bulk of adjusting/altering photos in Photoshop, or do you tend to do most of the work in the field and then make only small adjustments in software? I tend to get stuck on trying to make the color and lighting appear as natural as possible in the field, since I'm not very experienced making changes in the editing software yet, but it seems that to really get my photos to the next level I need to learn both? Cheers.

You really want to shoot RAW files and bring them back to the computer untouched. In Canon DPP, you can tweak the color balance, contrast, or whatever you want, then convert into TIF or JPEG files. Also, after a little practice, you can tweak the files only slightly and get perfect results. If you need to tweak them a lot, often that shows up in the finished image. Oh, and make sure that you have color calibration in your monitor and your whole system.

–B.G.–

yeah, just capture the raw data on your camera. (make sure to shoot in raw format). and then do all your adjusting later on your computer.

If you need to bump up your conditioning, one of the best things you can do for yourself is to walk absolutely everywhere you possibly can. (Obviously the extent to which you can do so is really dependent on where you are and how your life, commute, etc. is structured.)

I started walking to work every day back in October after I got a new job in the city. It's about 2.5 miles each way, so I end up walking about 5 miles a day. Even after a few months, I was seeing pretty serious muscle development in my calves and was a lot better toned. The other thing it's done for me (and this is probably a bit more directly to the point of your post), is that it's gone a long way towards conditioning my feet to walk longer distances. I think that what you're describing isn't all that uncommon for people that aren't necessarily putting a ton of mileage on their feet- if you're not in a position where you're on your feet all that much, it's probably not that surprising that putting in 10-ish miles won't make your feet feel great.

For the most part, the stuff you're talking about will go away with time.