Ep. 6 Can you set a world record for hiking if you can't even stand up? With Carl "Professor" Stanfield

Hello and welcome to episode six of The Ultra Posty Thoughts in My Head Podcast. I am your host, Adam Lee. Thank you so much for being here. I can't wait to share this week's conversation. The guest lined up is Karl Professor Stanfield. And Karl is on a quest this year, my friends. A quest to hike 11,000 miles. It's 1.26 miles an hour or two kilometers an hour for the entire calendar year. So looking forward to sharing that conversation in just a few minutes, I have to thank his cousin Nathan Franklin for giving me the tip. I was chatting with Nathan on Reddit of all places about something entirely different. And he told me about what his cousin was up to and it was immediately clear that I needed to reach out and share the conversation on here. Because what a cool quest he is on. Before we get to that, just a little bit of housekeeping here for the newsletter. Couple things coming up this month on March 30th, I'm going to release the what trail running means to us all feature that you all submitted responses for, 30 of you did that and thank you all so much from the bottom of my heart. You all gave me such great material and I have such a clear plan on how to share it now because of how great it all was. So thank you, I can't wait to get that out. It's been a pleasure to read all of your submissions and to start putting it together. Thank you all very, very much. And just before that comes out, as I said on March 30th on Sunday, March 27th at 12 p.m. Pacific, I'm going to be hosting the UK run chat on Twitter. So log on join chat and we'll shoot the breeze and tell some stories on there. I'm looking forward to that should be a lot of fun. And quickly just before we get to the interview with Carl, have to shout out Coast Mountain trail running, they hosted the Run Ridge run event last weekend. It was such a great time and a couple of people from the who submitted responses to the newsletter did really well. Andrea Burley and Sarah Carter and the women's 13 kilometer race both beat the previous course record finishing one two and Simon Widman in the 25k finished third. So great weekend super exciting to see that was so much fun to be out there. These hosts such great events. Thank you to all the volunteers that were there as well. It was just wonderful to be out there and running with with all of you. But today is all about Carl. Let's get to that now. Today's guest is Carl, Professor Stanfield. Carl calls Birmingham Alabama home and is an author at Trek.co. He loves through hiking, having completed the Appalachian and Pacific Crest trails. And here in 2022 he's attempting to hike 11,000 miles and finishing time for his 30th birthday at the end of December 11,000 miles at 17,703 kilometers for reference. Carl, thanks for taking the time today. Yeah, my pleasure. Happy to be here. I really appreciate it. I've got a couple little distance comparisons. I'm going to drop in with the questions here just because I got a real kick out of it. So you're going the equivalent of New York to LA 3.94 times. Naturally you're hiking right now because that's what happens when you have to cover 30 miles a day. How's it going out there? Give us an update. Yeah, sure. So things have been awesome so far. I am a little bit behind on miles, but a little bit ahead of where I want to be physically. So I've got some miles to make up later in the year, but I'm okay with that. So the route so far kind of winds a lot coming up from Florida and even here in Alabama and Georgia. So there's been a few times where I've taken a road walk to cut off a few miles. So I'm on pace to actually get finally to the Appalachian Trail tomorrow. So I'm really excited to get to that and to get on like my favorite trail, the one that kind of started everything off for me, the one that's kind of near where I grew up. So yeah, things are great. Spear to definitely pretty high right now. That's awesome. It sounds like you're feeling physically really good and I imagine on a trek this long that's probably one of the most important things. Yeah, definitely. Too much in. Still doing okay. I'll take it. That's fantastic. Okay, so my next equivalency thing here is you're going the equivalent of London, England to Athens, Greece, 5.56 times, I get a real kick out of that. I read that you're doing a calendar year triple crown that makes up sort of the 11,000 miles and then some. Can you just tell us what that means? Yeah. So the, of course, the triple crown of hiking is kind of the big three most famous long distance trails in the country, Appalachian Trail, Pacific Crest Trail, Continental, the Viat Trail. And it's a big deal to do the three of those. Like that's kind of what a lot of hikers set out to do when they're hiking careers. It's like the big, the big three, the triple crown. I think there have been 13 people now somewhere around there that have done all three of those within a calendar year. And so that's the calendar year triple crown. And so I am attempting to do that and most people do that. It doesn't take the whole year to do it. There's just only so many months that you can hike those trails where the weather's okay. And so that's, that's like roughly March-ish until November-ish. And so I just kind of looked up like, well, what else could you do on the other ends of that to fill in the year and spend the whole year hiking? And so the prime season to hike in Florida is January. So that was a natural fit. And then North Carolina is one of my favorite states. And so I hope to finish here hiking across there after I finish up on all the bike trail. So I guess the challenge then in getting the 11,000 and the calendar year triple crown was actually finding enough to get you up to 11,000 and finding a climate that will actually allow you to get those miles in. Yeah, right. Right. So the calendar triple crown kind of has its own tight weather window that you can't do too much with without hopping around, which I may end up having to do. I'm hoping to go all straight through on all the trails. But yeah, so that just leaves other months and like what is kind of tolerable to hike in those other parts of the year. And I think I found something that'll work. The next equivalency thing I have here is from Anchorage, Alaska to Mexico City, Mexico. That's 2.25 times. And I read you had a quote, "If your dreams don't scare you, you aren't dreaming big enough." And you attributed that to one of the greatest adventures of all adventure athletes of all time, Heather Anish Anderson. You knew on your first through hike that this was something that means more to you than maybe you even thought it would, what has driven you to go this far with it? Yeah. So my first through hike was something that was big enough to scare me. Doing Appalachian Trail was really, I mean, a bit outside of my comfort zones, enough to be like, I don't know if I'm capable of this or not. And then having done it, the next hike was a little bit easier. And I like to find pockets where I can kind of challenge myself and push bigger miles for a few days and see what that felt like. So I've really enjoyed the physical challenges of it. And so going into wanting to check off and do the third trail, it's a totally different beast. And maybe it is, I think it would be enough of a challenge to do on its own, but I kind of wanted to up it and have just a really monster of a challenge to take on, because I just love being challenged and pushing myself physically. So this seemed like a good way to do it. And I'm at a point in my life, so I turned 30th into this year. And so I feel like I'm kind of running low on my peak years of being able to rely on youth for some of this stuff. And so it just kind of made it feel like, well, now seems like as good a time as ever. If not now, then when, right? Exactly. Exactly. Especially like a couple COVID years have kind of cooped up a little bit, like let's get out there and let's go. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. You only get one kick at the can, so to speak. So you might as well go. I have to ask, have you felt like you've been anywhere near that limit at all? So far, the first few days were very tough. So each of the first four days, I went to bed, not knowing if I'd be able to stand up the next morning. Oh, boy. Just jumping right down into the keys. I didn't start in as good a shape as I would have liked to either. And the roadblock was just brutal. And the sun, the first few days, I was drinking 10 and 11 liters of water a day, which is like 22 pounds of water, just stopping in gas stations and filling up and drinking. I just like wasn't used to it. It was really humid down there, and I was getting cooked from the pavement. It was hard. And I, I mean, each day I felt like I could keep going, and so I did. And then my body kind of adjusted to that. My body still needs to adjust to mountains, so that's coming up. And I, yeah, fortunately with doing something this big and having the scale of an entire year to do it, there's enough room for a little bit of ebb and flow with time. So it doesn't have to be 30 miles every day. I can take like a 20 mile day or even a 15 mile day and then sprinkle those miles onto the next few days or make those up here and there. And so there's enough room to rest when I need to and little pieces. And so it's been kind of fun playing around with that. That's to figure out how to recover and being able to finish a day, like just starting a day early and finishing at like two or three o'clock. Kind of feels like a rest day when I'm off my feet for 20 or so hours after that. So it's cool. And I really like the logistics of it and kind of playing around with that sort of thing. That's fun. I wouldn't have thought of that until you mentioned it. Obviously, when you're, you know, you don't, you don't have a chance to, to train and acclimate, you're, you're kind of just going in at new, you're acclimating while you're doing it. Yeah, yeah, right. Okay, my next equivalency for my up here in Canada, you're going from Sydney, Nova Scotia to Vancouver BC 2.95 times. Are there any moments looking ahead? You know some of these trails. Is there anything you're really looking forward to or are you just trying to sort of stay focused in the moment? Yeah, big question. The thing I'm looking for, have been looking forward to the most, um, this whole time is getting back to the 18. And so I'm so stoked that I'm doing that tomorrow. Nice. It's just like it, it's just so nostalgic getting back to, um, my, my first trail that I did that was a long trail and getting, I'm just excited to reduce some of those miles and just the energy around the trail and having other hikers out. I saw a few people hiking in Florida. I've seen, I think maybe two people since I've been on the Pinhoti trail. So during the day, I haven't seen many people. I've met up with a lot of people in the evening, which has been great, but there just hasn't been much hiker culture on the trails so far. So I'm really looking forward to getting to a place where there's going to be hikers everywhere, um, and people to talk to while I'm walking and just energy excitement of people out there on the trail for their first time or their fifth time, um, but just really getting into trail culture. I'm so excited to get back to it. I can appreciate that completely, some, some socialness while you're out there. The appellation or Appalachian trail. Then is that where you're expecting that to pick up quite a bit? Yeah. So I, I'm expecting the, um, the first few weeks at least to be, uh, pretty packed with people and then I think I'll be going fast enough that I won't see many folks again after the first month or so. Um, but then hopefully the same thing again when I get to the PC key, I'll be hitting that in kind of its peak season. Um, and at that point, hopefully can get to and get around some folks at some point in the trail where I can like hike with people a few days in a row. Um, because like on the PCT 30 to 35 miles, isn't that crazy to do? Uh, consistently, there'll be plenty of people doing it. And so I hope to actually get to hike more than just a few hours or three miles of people once I get out there. Got you getting with a group for a bit kind of thing. Yeah, exactly. That's been one of my favorite things on my other trail so far. Carl, your adventures are so wild. I, I wish you the best of luck. How can people follow you along? I am being pretty concise right now. I'm just taking to Instagram. And so that's at soft Carl. So PR, underscore, C-A-R-L, um, and I'm, I'm doing just about every day. So far, I've had very good service being on these loads. You can hear it right now, um, it'll be a little bit spotty. You're coming up soon when I'm actually in the mountains for long stretches of time. But so far, I posted just about daily on just kind of what's going on out here. Right there on Instagram. Excellent. So now people know where they can follow along. Perhaps if you're a game for it, maybe I can touch base with you in a few months and update everyone on the podcast as well, because this is so cool. Yeah, I'd be happy to definitely do that. Fantastic. A huge thank you to Carl Stanford for joining me while hiking on this crazy quest and a huge thank you to all of you for listening. I am Adam Lee and I hope you'll join me next time for another episode of Ultra Posty Thoughts in My Head.