Oregon Unsupported FKT Data – Distance, Steps, Heart Rate, and Sleep!

Renee’s recently-completed unsupported hike of the Oregon section of the PCT amazed me! She set a “Fastest Known Time”, started with a pack that weighed about 35% of her body weight, dealt with 100º+ temperatures and snow (often in the same day), and managed the mental challenge of being mostly alone for 2 weeks straight. The most impressive part of her trip was that it was entirely unsupported — among other limitations, this meant she didn’t stop along the way to resupply her food or collect water from man-made caches. These factors all made her trip more challenging than our typical style of thruhiking.

We both track and analyze all of our hiking data closely (see the map she made of her trip, here), but I (Tim) am our resident statistician, so I got to dive in and make some plots! The data analyzed in this post come from her Garmin Fenix 7 watch, which she wore the whole trip. It tracks miles, steps, heart rate, and sleep. Let’s dive in!

Daily miles walked and backpack weight

The total number of miles that Renee walked each day generally increased, from about 25 at the beginning to her longest of over 40 miles. The the biggest driver in Renee’s increasing mileage was pack weight. Every day she ate some of her food, which lightened her load.

Below is a plot of her daily mileage and backpack weight. For mileage, each day is shown as a blue dot, and there is an orange trend-line that shows her mileage increasing. The grey line shows approximately how much my pack weight decreased. She only weighed it on the first and last days of the trip, so values in-between are interpolated. When she started out her pack weighed 38 lbs including all of her food and 1.5 liters of water, and when she finished it was only 12.2 lbs. When looking at the data this way the pattern is clear: as her backpack got lighter, her mileage increased.

Speed

It is easier to walk quickly on flat terrain than hilly terrain. Below I calculated Renee’s average speed each day (miles/hour), and compared that to the average amount of elevation gained each for that day. Overall, her average speed wasn’t dramatically impacted by flatter terrain, but on the three flattest days of the trip, there is a definite increase in her speed. This effect was especially pronounced on day 13, which was the least mountainous day of all and the one where she hiked the most miles.

Daily steps

Renee had some days with HUGE step counts. They say walking 10,000 steps/day is healthy. On Renee’s biggest day she took 78,081 steps. Unsurprisingly, the number of steps she took in a day was closely related to the number of miles she walked that day.

Heart rate

We got new watches last year with heart rate monitors built in. This was a big upgrade from our previous watches that didn’t track heart rate. I was excited to dive into the data to see how her heart rate varied during the trip. At the level I analyzed, there wasn’t much to see. Below I’ve plotted her max, average, and resting heart rate every day of the trip. There are no major trends, except for maybe a decreasing trend for her average heart rate as the trip progressed. If I went through these data at a finer scale — by the mile or even by the minute — it would probably be obvious that Renee’s heart rate was higher when she was climbing hills than when she was on a flat stretch, but in terms of day-to-day variation, there weren’t any patterns that jumped out.

Sleep

Renee’s watch tracked how many hours each night she spent sleeping. She averaged just 4 hours and 57 minutes of sleep each night, which is terrible! She has said that she usually sleeps better on backpacking trips than at home, but her body was so sore on this trip that falling asleep was extremely difficult. One of my favorite stories Renee’s told me from this trip is that she was mildly hallucinating by the end, and she even spotted the Tin Min next to the trail which cheered her up during a hard stretch.

Walking efficiency

When analyzing our data from the 3,000-mile CDT, we saw some very interesting signals related to walking efficiency. The shorter our steps were, the faster and farther we walked. This was more pronounced than the relationship between elevation gain and speed. As we covered thousands of miles on that trail, our walking became more efficient and our steps became shorter.

Renee’s data from this trip shows the same trend, but it is not statistically significant. The plots below show that she did tend to go move faster when her steps were shorter, and she moved slower when there was a lot of elevation gain, but since this trip was only 14.5 days (instead of 121 like the CDT), there aren’t enough observations to say for sure.

Excess miles walked (compared to FarOut Maps)

The numbers Renee reported each day while on her trip were based on the FarOut Map/App’s measurement of the trail. In reality, her GPS always clocked that she walked a little bit more than what the map said. The first half of Oregon is very dry compared to the second half, so she frequently had to walk a little bit off of the trail to collect water from a spring, stream, or lake. You can see that for the first half of the trip she usually walked about a mile more than the distance on the map, and she did fewer excess miles during the second half. On days 8 and 14, she walked farther off trail — these were the days when she was worried she wouldn’t have enough battery in her power bank to keep filming for the whole trip, so she did longer detours to reach public outlets and charge. (Charging at public outlets does not count as support according to fastestknowntime.com, the body that tracks these records).

More data!

We enjoy doing these analyses after each one of our major trips, and we’ve learned from them! The biggest learning from our CDT analysis was that shorter steps = faster walking, and that pattern held true here. This analysis also demonstrated just how little Renee was sleeping, which she’ll try to address if she goes for a record like this one again. The data analysis from our CDT hike is here, and GPS maps from all of our trips are on their respective pages of this site: PCT, CDT, PNC Oregon FKT. For even more GPS tracking data, you can find Renee on Strava here (or me, here).