RE: [Philmont]: Hiking Pace

From: Bushur, Gregory J.
> From past experience within both Troop and Crew- During our training
> hikes the last 2 years preparing for Philmont this past August we
> discovered that if the Crew allows the "fast movers" to set the pace
> several events occur that are not necessarily good. The faster hikers are
> hiking faster, and within their comfort zone, sometimes because they
> are bigger, have longer strides, are in better physical shape, or are
carrying
> less weight (either proportionally to their body weight or otherwise). The
> rest of the trail crew can then 1. allow them to disappear over the hill
and
> out of sight, destination unknown. or 2. try to catch up. If 1. then who
> knows if 2. then the slower crew members will have to increase their
> pace, sometimes almost running in order just to catch up, then after a
> few minutes, repeat the process.

We tried something new for our crew in 05, and it worked VERY well.
I had the crew leader assign a "leader" and a "navigator" for each day
on a rotating basis. These were #1 and #2 in hiking order. I advised
our crew leader to always pair a slow hiker with a fast hiker. As the
leader and navigator necessarily had to stay together, the slow hiker
set the pace, regardless whether he was lead or nav. As we set this
as our expectation right up front, we had no issues with buddies wanting
to hike together, they knew they would only have to do this on their
one or two days as lead/nav, and the rest of the time they could be
in whatever order they wanted, except behind lead/nav. I chose
sweep for myself to make sure that if anyone did truly lag, I could
control the pace if the boys didn't do it themselves. I only had
to intervene a couple times when the lead/nav team was a little
quick.

Perhaps on your training hikes you could try this but switch the
lead/nav every rest break. The boys were soon competing for
being able to be the next lead or nav, since that was their only
opportunity to hike in front.

Oh yeah, I also used my advisor veto powers to place our other
adult in the #3 slot, and the boys, knowing they simply would
be hiking that way, had no problem with it. We had no problem
keeping together, and the boys, knowing the expectation would have
no exceptions, accepted it and enjoyed themselves.

Regards
Don Roberts
Philtrek 05

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Received on Fri Jan 13 01:08:00 2006