Training for my 2026 Northville-Placid Trail Hike

My Northville-Placid Trail hike is still five months away, but it was a brutal winter and now that the snow has melted in Western MA, I’m excited to start training again.

NPT Training

I consider my training for this hike as an extension of a pre-existing routine; I usually stay in shape all year round by:

a) perform physical work

b) strength training three times a week

c) hiking

my work

I am a postman in a very mountainous town. I typically walk 8 to 10 miles a day while carrying mail and packages. Honestly, this gives me a great foundation of general fitness that translates very well to hiking. I remember walking mount equinox I was in Southern VT with my wife last summer, and my Fitbit metrics for the hike were comparable to a work day.

strength training

I lift weights three times a week. For my job, I try to avoid exercises that cause a lot of systemic fatigue. Going to the gym at the end of a long day is hard enough: If there’s an exercise in my schedule that I dread because it crushes me, the likelihood of skipping my workout increases dramatically. I generally lift in four-week mesocycles followed by a week of deloading. From week to week, I try to add one rep or more weight (5-pound increments) to each set, and increase the number of sets for each exercise throughout the mesocycle, based on how my body is recovering. Typically, I start each mesocycle by doing 2-3 sets per exercise. After four weeks of training, I do a deload week where I reduce everything by 50%: half the weight, half the sets, half the reps. I can usually squeeze all of my loading week’s exercises into a single gym session that lasts about 20 minutes. After two mesocycles, I change exercise selection to keep things fresh, changing movements that have started to feel stale. Rinse and repeat.

Here is my current program. My local gym is a small Planet Fitness, so my exercise selection is a little limited, but I make it work:

Day 1

weighted pull-ups

Incline bench press

leg press

Calf Raise with Leg Press

Hanging Leg Raises

Day 2

leg extension

leg curl

Seated Calf Raise

Superset A1 Biceps Curl

Flex Superset A2 Diamond

Day 3

pull-ups

Chest press with machine

rowing machine

Dumbbell Lateral Raise

Hiking

The law of specificity tells us that the best training for hiking is… hiking! Last winter I didn’t do much hiking, but I still did a batch of walking in the snow, uphill, both ways, at work. That being said, this is probably the area I need to focus on the most, but that’s okay, because I love hiking! As long as it doesn’t require skis.

I started walking again in earnest as soon as most of the snow melted. I have been increasing the mileage of my walks week by week and have one full walk per Monadnock-Sunapee Greenway Trail scheduled for the end of the month. This weekend, I’ll load my backpack with all the gear I’ll be carrying at MSG and do a moderate hike to get used to carrying that load. Then it’s up to MSG to find out how prepared I really am for the Northville-Placid trail.

More on my plan for that hike and the gear I’ll be bringing with me in my next post.

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