Post #2135: Anything worth doing is worth overdoing.

I have recently completed three stiff mountain day-hikes. Hikes where I was worn out, and then some, after just a few hours of hiking.

On my last hike I met a 74-year-old guy who was doing real backpacking. That is, days-at-a-stretch, carrying-kit-and-caboodle mountain hiking.

I handed him an apple, so I know he wasn’t imaginary. And it got me to thinking: If he can can do it, can’t I?

Answer: Nope. There’s no way I can go backpacking. Not due to the weight of the pack, but because my joints can’t recover fast enough from the pounding. I need days (plural) of recovery time after a mountain day-hike.

There’s no way I could do this two days in a row. Which, practically speaking, rules out backpacking.

This is not your father’s Oldsmobile.

By now, either you already knew, or you’ve figured out, that these mountain day-hikes are nothing like taking a walk on flat, even ground.

To put the effort into perspective, the calorie burn for these mountain day-hikes is similar to that of running a marathon. The most common cite I saw for marathon runners was 100-150 calories per mile, for the typical participant, depending on weight. That translates to 2600-3900 calories (plus 385 yards) for a marathon. Versus, for these recent day-hikes, based on my measured average heart rate of 106-109, for typically 4-5 hours of walking (plus lunch!), which translates (via Omni Calculator, 66 year old 190 pound guy, rounded) to 2400-3100 calories for the mountain day-hike.

With that as context, not eating breakfast before my first hike was obviously a mistake. I now eat before, during, and after these hikes.

Chuck in the rough terrain, the uphill, and even the downhill, and this is not a walk in the park.

I disbelieved the day-hike calorie estimate, so I triangulated it several ways.

Calculators: The high end of my day-hike calorie range squares with about half of on-line calculators for “calories burned during hiking”. The rest cluster at almost exactly half that. I suspect the low estimates are due to a technical glitch, because I noted an unresolved ambiguity regarding how hike distances should be entered (out-only, or out-and-back/round-trip/total distance). I’m guessing that’s why the calculator-based estimates cluster at 3400 and 1700 for me, for a typical hike.

Gym benchmark. Near as I can tell, an hour of hard aerobic workout at the gym is 700 calories. Knock off 100-150 for basal metabolism (for what would have been burned in that hour, anyway). Call it a net 550 additional calories, burned to fuel the exercise. Hiking feels about the same, to me, in terms of the cardio effort, and/or I push myself to that point, where possible, on the trails. For sure, my max observed heart rate on the uphills would do me proud at the gym. The downhills provide some respite on the cardio, but you’re still (e.g.) picking your way down a steep rocky trail. So call it 400 to maybe as much as 550 per hour, net, or 1600-2750 for the 4-5 hour mountain hike.

Arguing against the accuracy of this calorie estimate is the backpacker’s rule-of-thumb of carrying a pound of (dry) food per day. Do the math, and that means you slowly starve to death as you hike, because you cannot cram a required 5000+ calories per day (for a full day of hiking) into a pound of (dry) food. (E.g., 5000 calories of pure sugar weighs 2.8 pounds. 5000 calories of peanut butter — arguably the most energy-dense food you can eat straight-up, short of deep-fried butter — is 1.8 pound. Butter? 5000 calories is about a pound and a half. You get the drift.

A “section hiker” — somebody who does a week or two of hiking at a time — those hikers can afford to lose weight as they hike. But this makes it a mystery how through-hikers (those who hike the AT from one end to the other) survive. Either they’re carrying far more food than that, or they’re eating a lot of calories at their periodic re-supply stops. Not to rule out both.

Explained: Why I cannot go backpacking

Here I sit, two days after my last hike, and many of my lower limb joints remain deeply unhappy.

Simply put, I can’t do two of these day hikes in a row.

Muscles? Sure, my leg muscles are tired the next day. That’s to be expected, but I could hike anyway, and I don’t think it would cause major damage.

My limiting factor is the slow recovery time of my joints. Two days later, and I’m still at the point where I don’t particularly want to walk anywhere, let alone on a mountain path.

Conclusion

If you’re fat, you can lose weight.

If your muscles are weak, you can work out.

But if your joints take a long time to repair themselves, there’s nothing you can do about it, save eating a wholesome diet and thinking pleasant thoughts. Take some vitamin D, or something. Or fish oil. Or snake oil.

I can’t go backpacking. Not because of the weight of the pack. But because my joints need days of recovery time, for every day I hike.

Likely, that’s a sign of age, and isn’t going to get any better. I’d best plan accordingly.

Addendum: Jello, and lots of it.

After perusing the scholarly literature on diet and dietary supplements for reducing joint pain, I came away with the impression that nothing makes a huge difference. But that maybe you can tweak things in your favor.

One line of strategy is to ingest substances that are thought to suppress inflammation. But this boils down to eating your fruits, vegetables, nuts, and fish oils or other omega-3 fats. Plus maybe a few exotics (curcumin, borage oil, or whatnot). Eat the Mediterranean diet, more or less.

And even then, it’s not like you’re building better cartilage, you’re just suppressing inflammation. Slightly. It’s hard for me to see these as much more than a natural alternative to popping ibuprofen every day. And, it seems to me that, as with popping painkillers, even if they are effective, you’ve got some chance of merely masking your symptoms, while your cartilage continues to degrade.

A second line of strategy is to provide the exact set of amino acids that the body needs to build cartilage (or tendons or whatnot), in the hopes of nudging the body in the direction of actually growing better joints. This includes your classic glucosamine and chondroitin joint supplements, as well as various types of protein supplements such as gelatin or hydrolyzed collagen (which is, as I understand it, the same protein as gelatin, merely broken down further, resulting in a miscible powder that won’t gel.) I’m sure there are others.

The circle is complete once you recall that commercial gelatin is made from animal connective tissue. So (e.g.) Jell-o (r) allows you to eat animal tendons, in abundance, without the chew.

What stands out most, from the clinical literature, is the dosage. Test subjects were typically given doses amounting to half-an-ounce to an ounce of the protein supplement being tested, daily. That’s equivalent to 15 to 30 of the one-gram (1000 milligram) capsules sold as supplements. To summarize, if any protein supplements work, at all, to reduce joint pain, the “required dose” (or maybe the “typically tested dose”) is vastly higher than you’d get by taking a capsule or two a day of some patent-medicine supplement.

In the context of getting a recommended 4 ounces of protein a day, one ounce of the the chosen “joint-friendly” protein makes it part of your diet, not a supplement.

Practically speaking, the only way I can see myself stuffing down a mega-dose of some targeted protein is with hydrolyzed collagen. Same amino profile as horse’s hooves, but provided as a cheap, odorless, tasteless powder that mixes readily with cold water and does not gel. (Though, by reputation, it affects mouth-feel of the liquid (e.g. coffee) its dissolved in.)

I mean, yum, right?

A prior success-with-protein episode nudges me in this direction, as well. For sure, a chronic lack of protein can cause you problems. Fixing that by adding whey protein powder to my diet (along with continued weight-lifting) reversed upper-body muscle loss during extensive weight loss. I lift as much now as I did when I was fat.

Post #2023: Protein supplements and building muscle mass.

Not sure that reasoning-by-analogy is rational here, but I’m now going to try the same thing with “hydrolyzed collagen”, for my joints, alongside “whey protein”, for my muscles.

First, it provides protein at a cost equivalent to “hamburger at $3.50/lb”. That’s for 5 pounds at a time, from a seemingly reputable company via Amazon.

Two, it’s basically food. It could have been Jell-o, but wasn’t. It’s been cooked until the proteins have been broken up. Some say that makes it easier to absorb the aminos. I don’t think that matters unless you have medical condition that limits your ability to digest proteins. Instead, from my standpoint, it means that I can easily do with this, what I already do with whey protein — mix it into my coffee, and use it to bulk up sugarless chocolate pudding.

Three, that’s the dose scientists were looking at, to see if targeted protein supplementation worked or not, for helping the joints. Not supplements. Not a couple of capsules of stuff a day. Replacing maybe a quarter of your protein intake, with the joint-targeted protein (in this case, more-or-less, gelatin).

Finally, as it turns out, whey protein — that I’ve been eating for about half my daily protein intake — is deficient in a few amino acids that are key for building collage and related joint tissue. So, plausibly, I may have given myself a diet that’s great for building muscle, at the expense of repairing joint tissue. In any case, it’s plausible that I’m getting such a slow recovery because I don’t get enough of the key amino acids for building joint tissues, as I eat now. And that an ounce a day of hydrolyzed-whatever will fix it.