Friday night after I got home from work, my hus­band won­dered if maybe we should go on a hike since Saturday was going to be a nice day. Thursday we had gone for a hike up a small hill in town, so I fig­ured that we’d do some­thing similar.

Not Quite.

He started plan­ning out our trip, and then run­ning around the house gath­er­ing things up. It wouldn’t have been too bad, except that it was already 11pm, and he wanted to hike a moun­tain.  

I’ve never gone up a real moun­tain before, a real hike. We’re not exactly in shape for that kind of thing. We have been say­ing we wanted to get in shape, so why not. It wouldn’t kill us.

Right?

Well, it didn’t kill us, but on the way up it sure felt like it would. By the time we made it down, I was beyond tired enough to think that it might kill me.

The hike was 2.9 miles up what to me looked like a nar­row riverbed, com­plete with lit­tle stream still run­ning down the rocks! We didn’t make it all the way up to the sum­mit, but if we’d tried it, we would have been much worse off.

We took the Old Bridle Trail up Mt. Lafayette (New Hampshire, USA), and then back down again. There is a loop, but my hus­band did that last year with some bud­dies and they were up the moun­tain for about 9 hours. He did some cal­cu­la­tions in his head, and said we would have taken about 2 hours longer to do the same.

I wasn’t up for an 11 hour hike. 6 hours was enough. Plus, the loop would have had us climb­ing up full scale water­falls. No thanks.

The begin­ning of the trail, doesn’t look so bad yet.

Yep, climb­ing up these rocks.

Just climbed up that, killer on the thigh muscles.

This is the trail going up. Yes it’s about a 45 degree angle, yes there’s water on it. It’s not a smooth as some of the ones we encoun­tered, but really? This is about the part of the trail I started doubt­ing our sanity.

Pretty views on the way up though.

That ridge there? Pretty sure we walked that.

Just out­side “the top”. Not the top of the moun­tain, but as far as we got. We stopped at the Greenleaf hut for some lunch before head­ing back down.

That’s the sum­mit. Still pretty far away from where we made it to. Next time, he says. D:

Overall it was a good day. I felt ter­ri­ble because we had to keep stop­ping on the way up. I was exhausted, out of breath, and just couldn’t do it. Thankfully, my husband’s not in great shape either, so he needed just as many breaks as I did. His guess is that I needed to stop about 25% more than he did, and if I hadn’t stopped him, he’d prob­a­bly need to stop more any­way. On the way down is a dif­fer­ent story.

He’s 8″ taller than I am, so all those rocks I had to scale and stretch to climb up, were a jump to get down. It hurt the back, the knees, and the ankles to jump down a moun­tain. So, I went slower. To him, it was just like going down stairs. We only stopped twice on the way down, because I made him, and he kept hav­ing to stop for me to catch up. If I wasn’t there, he’d have run the 3 miles down the moun­tain and have been as happy as a moun­tain goat. Going up, he let me lead so that he could catch me if I stum­bled.  People on the trail kept pass­ing me, which I didn’t mind, but toward the end of the day he was get­ting annoyed that I kept stop­ping to let them go.

I really didn’t like hear­ing them com­ing up behind me. I had a hard enough time find­ing my foot­ing, with­out adding the anx­i­ety of being run over to it. These peo­ple had hik­ing poles and were run­ning down the moun­tain as fast as my hus­band wanted to. I think I was mostly cranky because I was overtired.

At the end, he said I did really well for my first hike but that we need to get in shape. No secret there, and no argu­ment either. He’s plan­ning to take me around to work on my bal­ance and climb­ing abil­i­ties, in addi­tion to our car­dio to get our endurance up.

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