FOOT GROWTH STUDY!!!!

You go, Jen!

Hi Jen

> Perhaps Roger would publish here at BPL…
I would absolutely love to publish this ! ! !

My only concern is that it is a bit late for my feet: I think they have done their big growth. :-)

But please everyone: participate! This is unique research which simply cannot be done just in a lab on a treadmill.

Cheers

I HOPE TYPING IN CAPITAL LETTERS WILL ENCOURAGE MORE PEOPLE TO PARTICIPATE.

Might I recommend attending the kickoff event for the PCT? You'll probably be able to sign up a number of folks right on the spot. If you can't, perhaps recruiting someone in the area to attend and sign up folks for you.

http://www.pcta.org/about-us/events/adzpctko/

Also, you should think about posting something over on Whiteblaze.net. They have a forum solely for the class of 2014 Thru-hikers so you could easily communicate with this year's thru hiker class.

Ryan

+1, ADZPCTKO would be a great opportunity for the study to get participant thru-hikers.

http://pct77.org/adz/

https://www.facebook.com/adzpctko

Thanks for the reminder of the kick off parties. I'll also post on whiteblaze…

"Thanks for the reminder of the kick off parties."

And you thought I was just another pretty (fat, old, profane, socially unacceptable) face.

I'll do it. I'm doing a PCT thru-hike this summer. Just a suggestion: you might want to have several end measurements over the course of a several weeks. When I got home from hiking the AT last summer, I couldn't get my running shoes onto my feet. About a week later, I could get them on but they were very tight. Two or three weeks after the end of the hike, they fit just fine.

Also might want to pay attention to past miles participants have …. when I was new to backpacking, my feet grew a half size or more permanently after only a few short trips…. waited a few years to see if my shoes that no longer fit but had fit for years previously would ever fit again and they never did … had to get rid of them and the foot size change was permanent and is to this day … the point being that newer hikers may have more dramatic results in feet size growth then those with more miles in their past …

Maybe a good excuse to show up at the PCT kickoff to recruit people. Now all you have to do is explain is explain your research expenditures for cases of snickers to pay people with!

Trace that's a great idea to include in the data crunching.

Part of my own hypothesis here is that SOME of the perceived foot growth actually comes from people being more in tune with their feet and actually sizing appropriately after a hike. Not necessarily meaning they had the wrong size before, but that their tolerance for even minor size complaints completely disappears after hiking (or as we get into our middle years and start wearing elasticize pull on pants and whatnot).

I know just even after each of my longish trips I really didn't want to wear tighter fitting jeans AT ALL…and frankly, Ive stopped wearing them altogether. I can't handle a stiff, confining fabric on my legs anymore. I want to wear adventure pants all the time!!!!

I strongly agree with the idea of leveraging the ADZPCTKO for this. Specifically, I'd contact the organizers, find them via:

http://pct77.org/adz/

If you can wrangle a sort of "station" there where you can get THE SAME person measuring peoples feet and SHOWING THEM how to measure them in exactly the same way (or I should say "ways" as I'd expect multiple measurements) — then you've hopefully got a whole lot of consistency in the results.

I suppose best (?) might be if the result could be a piece of paper with a tracing of the same foot (always left or right perhaps), and other data put on that same piece of paper.

The one downside with the PCT is that a lot of thru-hikers there have already hiked the AT. A related question is whether foot growth mostly occurs on the first long distance trip. So a key piece of data to include in the study IMO would be "what's the longest distance hike you've done before this one?".

Alternatively the AT might be a better place to do this if you could work out something with the folks at Neel's Gap:

http://www.mountaincrossings.com/

Specifically, ask the folks that do the gear shakedown to see if they can sort of enlist/enroll folks, and hand out a piece of paper with self-addressed envelope to do the same thing when they come back down Katahdin.

Hikers have done 30 – 40 miles when they get to Neel's Gap. PCTKO attendees will in some cases have done "none" and just been driven to Lake Morena park, but in fact those folks will have trained to varying degree, plus many of them will have done perhaps quite a lot of miles already on the PCT and then hitched back for the event. So ANOTHER question to ask is "how many miles have you already hiked/backpacked over the last month" — to further calibrate things if possible.

Tough to do a really, really clean study on this, but if you're going for it I'd encourage it to factor in everything that reasonably can be. Who wants to go to a lot of effort for really questionable results?

"The one downside with the PCT is that a lot of thru-hikers there have already hiked the AT. A related question is whether foot growth mostly occurs on the first long distance trip. So a key piece of data to include in the study IMO would be 'what's the longest distance hike you've done before this one?'."

Excellent point from Brian. IMO, understanding the specific conditions under which one might reasonably expect changes would be the most practically useful outcome. The more detailed the history, including previous activities, footwear, etc., the better.

Whatever was going to happen to my feet probably happened 40 years ago, long before I started long-ish distance hiking. Maybe I just haven't gone far enough at a time, but I don't seem to get any appreciable swelling on the trail or have experienced no apparent growth over the years I've been backpacking.

Cheers,

Bill S.