This roughly 8-mile mountain day hike is good exercise, but not much more than that. It starts from the same trail-head parking as the last hike (where the Appalachian Trail crosses the steep, gravel, one-lane Morgan’s Mill Road, a few miles from Virginia Route 50).
This hike heads south on the Appalachian trail, to the Rod Hollow shelter. There are no views to speak of. But there’s a lot of uphill and downhill (2200 feet of elevation change), and a few nice creek crossings.
You have the option of turning this into a ten-mile hike, if you manage to get lost and end up backtracking on the trail. Which I did, with the help of the not-so-friendly rattlesnake pictured above.
In a better universe, rattlesnakes would be Day-Glo orange.
Luckily, a rattling rattlesnake makes a lasting impression. If, at some point in your past, you’ve managed to piss off a rattlesnake, and been rattled at, close up, you’re not apt to forget the sound.
If nothing else, rattlesnakes show that God has a sense of humor. Why else would you create this poisonous snake with a high-decibel warning system, then fit it out with excellent camouflage so that you can’t see the damned thing?
The microphone in my phone does not do it justice. But even with the distortions, you can tell that this isn’t something you hear in the woods every day. It sounds more machine-made than animal.
In any event, I heard this rattlesnake long before I spotted it. That’s typical, in my limited experience. It took about three steps for me to go from “what’s that odd noise” to “oh crap”.
In the course of those three steps, that rattling got a lot louder. That’s how you operate the volume control on a rattlesnake. If you’re having trouble hearing it, just step a bit closer.
Once I realized what I was hearing, I froze, and moved nothing but my eyes until I spotted the snake. It was maybe 20 feet away, just minding its own business, sunning itself next to the trail.
We looked at each other, the snake and I. Between the now-quite-loud rattling, and those beady little eyes, it was clear there was no way I was walking past it.
So I did what any red-blooded modern American hiker would do. I took a quick video — because, you know, photos or it didn’t happen. You will note that the video is brief. In hindsight, I’m surprised I had the presence of mind to take it at all.
I slowly stepped back a few paces, until the snake stopped rattling. Then bushwhacked a wide detour around it, and went on my way.
And managed to get turned around — I still don’t know how.
If not for the fact of this little wooden bridge, on the trail, I might still be walking south. I knew I’d already passed it, heading home. So when I came to it again, it only took me a few disoriented minutes to figure out that I’d been backtracking for some time. And that, contrary to my first impression, space aliens had not somehow built a new footbridge, on the path back home.
Between that, and getting off the trail earlier, I think I managed to stretch this 8-mile hike into a ten-miler. All told, it was 8 hours car-door-to-car-door, of which about 7 hours were spent walking. (And the remaining time was spent eating, as I finished 3 big PB&J sandwiches, 3 apples, and some candy, in the course of the hike. So, my average hiking speed was something like one-and-a-third miles per hour.
I was pretty beaten down by the time I made it back to the car. Which was part of the plan. In particular, my knees and hips were thoroughly sore from the hike, and had been for many miles.
Does heavy consumption of hydrolyzed collagen protein powder help my joints recover from hiking?
To my surprise, the answer seems to be yes.
My joints ached for days after doing the prior hike, to Hollow Brook Falls. More generally, this spring, it seemed like the more hikes I took, the worse my joints felt afterward. At any rate, after that prior hike (Hollow Brook Falls), there were a couple of days where I didn’t want to be on my feet, let alone walk anywhere, for the severe joint pain, particularly my hip joints.
But one day after this hike, and my joints are … fine. Just a bit achy. Not remarkably different from how they are normally.
The only change between last hike, and this hike, is that I’ve begun eating an ounce of this collagen-derived protein powder per day.
So, does hydrolyzed collagen help with repairing my leg joints, after mountain hiking? So far, my joints say yes.
My wife has given me a better, if less rapid test: Will an ounce a day of hydrolyzed collagen fix my fingernails? I have thin, brittle, splitting fingernails. Adding whey protein to my diet did nothing to fix that. I now realize that whey provides the wrong mix of amino acids for building collagen and other connective tissue. But hydrolyzed collagen protein powder provides the exact right mix, and in addition contains a good mix of amino acids for making keratin, the protein that makes up fingernails. If I have obviously stronger fingernails in a few months, after years (decades) of brittle nails, I will attribute that to the hydrolyzed collagen protein supplements.
Edit, the next morning: Answer, heck yes. I expected to be in pain for days yet, after that last hike. But here it is, the second morning after the day of the hike, and I’m fine. Pain-free, or as close as my 66-year-old joints ever get.
Instead of looking at to two or three more days of limping around, waiting for my joints to recover, I’m ready to go back out on the trail.
Maybe that’s a one-off fluke, but I don’t think so.
I now think my previous slow recovery was due, in part, to a diet that (accidentally) skimped on some of the key amino acids needed for rebuilding connective tissue. Now that I’m providing those necessary amino acids in super-abundance, my joints recover from a day of hiking much faster.
So it’s not unreasonable. Think of it as a supply-chain issue. I realize that, except for the nine essential amino acids, your body can re-arrange incoming protein to make all the varieties of amino acids that you require. But that process has to be a lot faster, and so able to complete far more effectively for the available protein in the diet, if you feed it the proper raw materials from the start.
And yet, as with whey protein for building muscles (Post #2023), I expected this to take weeks or even months to have any noticeable effect on my musculoskeletal system. For the simple reason that muscles (etc.) don’t grow very fast.
I did not expect it to help materially with recovery from the wear-and-tear of hiking, overnight. But it does. Or certainly seems to.
If anything changes to lead me to a different opinion, I will come back and re-edit this. But as of now, this stuff gets an enthusiastic thumbs-up from me. It’s now a permanent part of my diet, though I may dial back to more of a maintenance “dose” daily.
Conclusion
1: You are what you eat.
2: Chicken soup is good for you.
3: Eating an ounce of this cheap hydrolyzed collagen protein powder, per day, is like eating a half-gallon of rich chicken broth, per day.
4: Better, actually, because the protein fragments are shorter — and so, more readily broken down into their individual (and absorbable) amino acids — than is the relatively intact protein in gelatin, in chicken soup.
If my body’s joint repairs had been held back from a lack of the right amino acids in my diet, that should now be decisively fixed. This is vastly more protein than you would get in (e.g.) your typical dose of patent-medicine joint supplements.
It’s just a question of whether the resulting changes in my joints (and nails) are big enough, and consistent enough, that I can reasonably attribute them to this most recent change in my diet.
So far, the signs are looking positive.
