Thru-Hiking: When to plan and when to let it go?

+1 for realizing S#!+ will happen and
+1 for aspiring to not over-plan things.

On my own (shorter) trips and when being a remote trail angel for others, I'd say a well-organized list of supply drops, drop box contents, and your presumed schedule is almost always VERY helpful. You don't know WHAT you'll need or WHEN or WHERE you'll need it, but you can expect to want more of some things, less of others, and some gear failures along the way. Make it easy for your support back home to pull the Larabars out, put something else in and buy trail shoes 1.5 sizes larger and ship them out to you.

If it helps you relax, remember that if you don't bring it, someone else on the trail will have. And if you didn't read something in a trail guide, someone else will have. And whatever *it* is – tent, sleeping bag, water treatment – someone has done with whole PCT without it.

You are correct that by about day 3, all planning goes out window.

However, the value of the planning, isnt the plan. Its the education one gets by the process of planning.

Equipped with pertinent info, you are now able to improvise and plan and execute however needed.

Last time I did way too many drop boxes…this year I'm doing less than half of that, I got sick of the food I packed and absolutely hated chasing after post offices and their weird schedules. I'm planning less, taking less and training more. And getting eyes, dental and all my physical once a year doctors visits, vaccinations like tetanus, done long before I leave this spring.
Enjoy the things you have now, like hot running water, learn how to stretch and eat well, take more care in your daily routines and enjoy where you are at.
Worrying and fussing puts you neither here nor there. Breathe, relax and get happy cause an amazing, awesome adventure is coming your way!

I'll see you at the start then….as I am out this year too.

I plan extensively – then don't stick to it. Just going with the flow seems to be fine, it all works out.

Spending a bit more time on the PCT planning as I am coming from the UK, so Visa's, permits, understanding the USPS, managing $, flights, and all of that is involved.

The PCT is kind of this hiker wonderland where even if you do no planning you can just talk to the other hikers around you and copy what they're doing so don't worry so much.

I made a big plan for the whole trail before I left with where I intended to resupply and where I intended to send boxes (Kennedy Meadows, a few stops in OR and the northern part of WA) and that was helpful. I think that's all you really need, is a rough idea of where you need to send the boxes and for how many miles. You can send them yourself from towns on trail or have someone else do it. I mostly stuck to it but changed a few towns and added some extra stops. I started May 2nd and predicted I would finish about October 5th but ended up finishing September 20th, so you may hike a lot faster than you think.

The best thing when I did it was arming myself with the information I needed to be flexible. I carried the yogi town guide ripped into sections and would check at night to see whether I could get those new socks at the next town, if it had a big enough grocery store, where I could mail my bear can home, etc. I told my folks how much food to put in my boxes when I was on the trail so that I didn't have to try to guess from before the hike. I used Craigs PCT planner (and later met him in WA!): http://www.pctplanner.com/ it's pretty awesome but don't sweat the miles/day if you don't have to.

I did the PCT with minimal planning and it worked out very well. I didn't have Yogi, but the PCT Atlas gave me enough of a feel for what was coming up. I wouldn't read too far ahead, just enough to know how many days to shop for at each stop and what the leg after that might be like. There are only a couple of places you have to mail supplies ahead and as long as you do that two stops ahead you will be fine. You can also update your gear along the way, ordering two stops ahead of where you are having it sent. Just be sure the retailer know to send it USPS and not UPS for most locations and check their shipping times. The Atlas has the basics on shipping locations, I believe Yogi is more thorough.

The 2013 Pacific Crest Trail Thru-Hiker Survey
Advice hikers have for future Pacific Crest Trial thru-hikers.

The gist of it:

Just do it!
HYOH (hike your own hike)
Don’t over-think or over-plan it
Don’t stress, it all will work out – the trail provides
Have fun; slow down and enjoy the little things
Take pictures of everything (especially people)
The message here is clear: relax, people. Don’t worry too much about planning or what is going to happen once you get on trail (because all your plans will fall apart).

One big thing you can do is eliminate a few things that cause plans to be scrapped. You can walk a lot, with your hiking boots, so you don't get blisters, or find you can't do the planned mileage. Walk walk walk, with boots and a pack on. Climb a big mountain two weeks before the hike.

"You can walk a lot…"

What if you just start slow.

You could do some walks ahead of time, or just do those walks as part of your thru-hike

Maybe just walk 5 or 10 miles per day, or have some zeros in the first couple weeks if you got overly tired, gradually work your way up to longer days?

do some uphill miles with a heavy load, that is your best bang-for-the-buck workout wise.
lists are good, up to a point.
what the f's wrong with a larabar. "don't like" is not a problem. "don't like" is a luxury. mongols would eat another mongol.
all that stuff david said.
if you are actually ready to go 90 days out, my hat's off to you .. rock on !
but include perhaps, that if you can't take care of yourself, you're not really in a position to take care of others.
and if with mongols … do not drop the soap.

good luck,
v.

Maybe just walk 5 or 10 miles per day, or have some zeros in the first couple weeks if you got overly tired, gradually work your way up to longer days?

Yes you can do that but plan on carrying lots of water between sources.
I heard it said that if a non fit person starts the same day as a fit person that a month into the hike they are both will be at the same level of fitness. But I'm not so sure of that. Some folks started really fit and went superman/woman after that and I never saw them again……
The long thru hikes are a five month endurance event. From what I have seen and done, a person can start in reasonably good health and get very very fit but there are risks of things like overuse injuries due to not having put in enough time beforhand. Tendons and ligaments take much longer than muscles and lungs to adapt. Years in fact. And its not really about making those milage choices that you think you might have, it's about making time between water supplies and or having the ability to carry enough through the longer stretches. So it's a fine balancing act of carrying more water/weight, to take more time, or carrying less water and being able to endure the stresses of higher milage.
I carried more water and went a moderate pace the first 700 miles. I was fit but I knew I was not fit enough. Not my first rodeo. And I only used one water cache the first 700 miles (hot day, underestimated my needs, blah, blah) cause I'm a bonehead purist, don't believe in relying on caches, and was so early I did not think there would be any caches (there was).
So my advice is get as fit as you can and see how you do.

ahhhh…

you're saying that right at the beginning, in southern California, in the desert, there are large distances between water sources, so you have to do quite a few miles per day in order to make it to the next water source.

so you need to be in pretty good shape right at the beginning

and if you did short mileage days at the beginning, you'de have to carry a huge amount of water, which would weigh too much

Yes. "Too much" is up to the individual.

I had my 2011 PCT hike planned out to the max. Had the full schedule, airline tickets for the return book, resupplies boxed and addressed. I held my schedule within a couple of days and with the exception of my Sierra resupplies all was well on that front. BUT, 2011 ended up being a bit interesting on the snow front so I had to work a bit harder to maintain that schedule so in some respects "my plan" went out the window.

the part of my prep that I would never have skipped was testing myself and my gear extensively before the thru. I was on a fairly fast schedule so the trail was not the place to learn. My goal for the prehike training was to never have one of my five toughest days on the thru hike. Not sure I accomplished that, the day around Glacier peak kicked my butt, but this was incredibly important to establishing mental toughness. When you are confident you can do something it really changes your frame of mind.

Have a great hike. It is a beautiful trail.