PCT Planning · Pace

How many miles a day should you hike when you start the PCT?

Fewer than you plan to average, and the gap is bigger than most people allow for. The interesting part isn't the advice — everyone says start slow. It's that the cost of starting slow is a number you can calculate, and almost nobody puts it in their plan.

Every thru-hike plan has a pace in it. Twenty miles a day, say. That number then quietly generates every other date: when you reach each resupply stop, when boxes have to be posted, when you finish. And it is wrong for the first two to three weeks of the hike, because on day one you cannot walk twenty miles a day for twenty days in a row, no matter how fit you arrive.

That adjustment period is what hikers call trail legs. Tendons, feet and shoulders adapt to daily load in a way that gym fitness doesn't cover — which is why strong, well-trained people are just as surprised by week one as anyone else.

The cost of ramping up, exactly

Say you plan on 20 miles a day, and you accept you'll start around 60% of that — 12 miles — building to full pace over three weeks. How much does that add to your hike?

The answer is 4.2 days. And here is the part that surprises people: it would also be 4.2 days if you planned on 15 miles a day, or 25, or 30.

The reason the target pace drops out is that it's on both sides of the sum. Ramping means walking a fraction of your pace for a while; the days you lose are a fraction of the ramp, and the fraction doesn't care what the pace was. Over the ramp window you average halfway between your starting percentage and 100%, so you lose half the shortfall, for as long as the ramp lasts.

Which gives a table you can read your own plan off, whatever pace you walk:

Four to five days on a five-month hike is not a disaster. Discovering it in week three, with boxes already posted against the old dates, is more annoying than the days themselves.

Where the error actually shows up

The days don't accumulate forever. They build during the ramp and then lock in — after that, every remaining date in your hike is shifted by the same constant amount, all the way to Canada.

Here is a 20 mile-a-day plan with a three-week ramp from 60%, against the same plan with no ramp at all. Walking days from Campo, before any rest days:

Read the first rows, not the last. By Warner Springs — your third or fourth stop, barely a week in — a flat plan is already two and a half days optimistic. If you posted a box to arrive on the flat-plan date, it has been sitting there for two and a half days before you walk in, burning holiday from a 30-day clock. Do that at three consecutive stops and one of them is genuinely at risk.

The same drift lands on two other things that are harder to fix:

• The end date on your permit application. You are asked to estimate a finish date months in advance. A plan that never accounted for the first three weeks gives you a date that is wrong before you take a step. More on what that question is really asking.
• Every mail-drop send-by date. Those are computed backwards from arrival dates. Shift the arrivals and the posting dates shift with them — which matters most for the boxes someone at home is posting after you've left. More on getting boxes to the right place at the right time.

What week one actually looks like

Same 20 mile-a-day plan. In a flat plan, you'd cover about 147 miles in the first seven days. Ramping from 60% over three weeks, you cover about 98. Starting at 50%, about 86.

That's a difference of roughly 50 to 60 miles in the first week — two or three days of walking — between a plan that accounts for trail legs and one that doesn't. It is the single largest single-stretch error in most first-timers' plans.

So what should you actually put in?

There's no universal right answer, but there are sensible defaults:

1. Two weeks from 70% if you arrive fit and have backpacked recently. Costs about two days. This is the common case for people who've done multi-day trips with a loaded pack in the last year.
2. Three weeks from 60% if you're fit but new to consecutive big days. Costs about four days. Gym-fit, run-fit and cycle-fit all sit here — none of them prepare feet and tendons for daily loaded mileage.
3. Three to four weeks from 50% if you're starting from a desk, or carrying a heavier pack. Costs five to seven days, and is still the cheapest injury insurance available.

Two things worth saying plainly. Starting lower doesn't mean finishing later than the people who blasted out of Campo — a meaningful share of them are off trail or nursing something by Idyllwild. And this is planning guidance, not medical advice: pain that is sharp, localised, or worse in the morning is a reason to talk to someone qualified, not to consult a table.