If I could walk 500 miles.....

At the beginning of the week I flew to Manchester NH to begin my journey towards the White mountains to do some backpacking on the Apalaician Trail. It had been about 10 yrs since I had done anything like this and although my lower back and hips were plenty ready due to a rigerous yoga regiment, my knees and ankles however weren't ready for the abuse of my weight plus a 35 lb pack hammering down on them as I hiked up and down over numerous mountains and rugged terrain.
My hike is over for now. It was really nice, it rained for the first 24 hrs. I ended up hurting my knee on the 2nd day and hiked on the rest of the day, by that evening the pain was excruciating I stopped to camp in a nice flat clearing by an ice cold spring fed stream. I spent the evening reading "Poised for Grace" which is sort of an interpretive study on the Bhagavad Gita by Duglas Brooks and using cold water from the stream in my drinking pouch to cold-compress my knee. The next morning I woke feeling like some one had smashed my right kneecap with a sledgehammer. I spent about an hour easing in to movement while I prepared breakfast (apple&oatmeal!!! My fav!!) and broke down my camp. By the time I got my boots on I was feeling pretty confident in my knee and decided to continue on even though I was at a road crossing(stubborn). I had looked at a topo map and seen that the next 10 miles were gradual hills in comparison to what I had done the past few days, so of course I chose to push on even though the weight of my pack alone created a shooting pain from my knee in to my heel. I hiked about 3 hrs at the pace of a snail covering about 1.8 miles in the first couple of hours by 2 pm I had been hiking 5hrs and only gone 4.8 miles. I was at a road crossing and had paused to let a truck pass by, In A split second I left things to fate and decided that I would throw my thumb up, if the truck stopped I would leave the trail, if not I would continue on. The old truck stopped and two scraggly backwoods logger types said "it's yer lucky day! You wanna lift down to the store?"  so I hopped in and had a dusty 15 min ride in the bed of the rickety pick-up. They dropped me at the store and after sharing experiences on that particular stretch of the trail they took off. I called my family who were about an hr away, for a ride.