Blog de Puree

I’ve got an eight mile hike on Mt. Monadnock in New Hampshire coming up in May with some friends. Thanks to my “Army” knees, I have to put in some training time to get them accustomed to hills. And it doesn’t help that I sit on my arse in front of a computer all day to “pay the bills.”

Going up will the easy part; that’s just conditioning. It’s coming down that hurts, and that’s where I need to find the best pace and stride that works to minimize the pain in my knees. Unfortunately, the contours of of mountains don’t always cooperate. Having never been to Monadnock, the best thing I can do is get myself ready for four miles up to the approximately 1,200 foot peak, and four miles down.

A glance at a topographical map is pretty helpful. We’ll be taking the Pumpelly Trail, which comes up the mountain from the north. It follows a long ridge line to the summit, but there’s one steep and gnarly looking spot that gets you from the lowland to the ridge itself, roughly 1/2 a mile long, that has to be respected on the way up and especially coming down.

In Amesbury, we’ve got a great training spot for hikers called Pow Wow Hill. Formerly an old Native American meeting place, it’s about 300 feet and has steep streets going up to the top. Just four trips up will get me to the desired height, but it’s certainly not eight miles. Hiking around Amesbury’s exercise trails, public golf courses and neighborhoods with my rucksack on should do the trick.

I just hope that Amesbury residents can get used to a guy hiking around town with a massive internal-frame pack on. This past Saturday I was out and some poor lady was so intrigued by what I was doing that she almost got into a car accident.