He spent 14 hours a day running and walking, eating noodles and energy bars, enduring June's heat and a hailstorm, mostly camping out but occasionally sleeping in motels and the homes of gracious strangers as he traversed the breadth of North Carolina by foot in a stunning 24 days.
Speed hiker Matt Kirk, 30, of Marion, N.C., raced along the 950-mile Mountains-to-Sea Trail in a cross-state journey that began at 9:25 a.m. June 1 on Clingmans Dome in Great Smoky Mountains National Park and culminated to the cheers of astonished onlookers at 1:15 p.m. on June 25 at Jockey's Ridge State Park overlooking the Atlantic Ocean.
Kirk's extraordinary trek was the fastest ever of the 23 hikers who have completed the state's longest trail that stretches from cloud-swathed, mile-high peaks through rolling farms and forests of the Piedmont to the wind-swept sand dunes of the Outer Banks.
"It's a feat that just blows me away," said Kate Dixon, executive director of the Friends of the Mountains-to-Sea Trail, in a news release. "Normally a thru-hike takes two to three months."
Fortifying himself with 4,000 calories and two gallons of water a day, Kirk maintained a comparatively torrid pace of 38 miles a day with his minimalist approach to his journey. He carried 13 pounds in his ultra-light pack, including an 8-ounce tent, shedding wool clothing as he dropped out of the chilly mountains and forsaking creature comforts such as his MP3 player, a radio and books. He did carry a cellphone and camera.
"My days were simple," Kirk, a McDowell County science teacher, said Wednesday. "Wake up, eat, pack up and start moving. I'd eat some more and keep moving. (At evening) I was pretty much ready to conk out."
He endured minor injuries that caused nagging pains, shin splints and stone bruises on the bottom of his feet as he clambered along rocky trails in the mountains. He suffered tendonitis in his Achilles tendon of his right foot. He went through three pairs of running shoes along the partly completed trail that passes near Asheville, Blowing Rock, Greensboro, Raleigh and New Bern. About 450 miles require walking on rural roads.
Keeping focused on his mission at times was harder than putting up with pulsating pain. "Trying to stay motivated on those days in the Piedmont where it was really hot and I had a long way to go. Yes, I did think about the option of quitting on more than one occasion. (But) I was still really having a good time out there even if I was at a low point."
Kirk got logistical help from friends, parents David and Patti Kirk of High Point, and his wife, Lily, who for a week drove their car through the steamy coastal plain, meeting him at road crossings and reinvigorating him with snacks and cold drinks.
Of 24 nights on the trail, Kirk camped out 10, mostly in the mountains, stayed in motels or was put up by friends or complete strangers. While hiking near Burlington, he fell into conversation with a couple at a farmhouse. A front-porch drink of water turned into a bed for the night.
Kirk got the idea of hiking the trail in 2001 after finishing the 2,100-mile Appalachian Trail (he hiked it again in 2007). He read trail advocate Allen de Hart's guidebook. De Hart, of Louisburg, and Alan Householder, then of Asheville, in 1997 were the first to complete the Mountains-to-Sea Trail.
Last year Kirk sprinted a lung-bursting, 300-mile-long mountain trail network known as the "South Beyond 6000" route, which connects the forty 6,000-foot peaks in North Carolina and Tennessee. He ascended all 40 on a continuous path in 4 days, 14 hours, 38 minutes, clipping 9 hours off the 2003 time set by speed hiker Ted Keizer, then 31, of Coos Bay, Ore.
The dash from the mountains to the ocean, he said, was more daunting because its distance was triple that of the South Beyond 6000 speed hike.
Nonetheless, Kirk said, the state's mountains, Piedmont and coastal plain appear far more striking from the secluded trail than through a car's windshield. "The state is much more beautiful than viewed from an interstate corridor," he said. "The first time smelling the ocean, having walked across the state, was phenomenal." All in a phenomenal 24 days, 3 hours and 50 minutes.
Read about Matt Kirk's journey on matthewkirk.blogspot.com
