Persisting through the pain
Man’s 400-mile trek on Appalachian Trail to raise money for muscular dystrophy
NEWPORT NEWS — John Waite knew something was amiss during Day 4 of his two-week trek on Virginia’s 544-mile Appalachian Trail.
After 120 miles — about 40 on each of the first three days — the Newport News resident began feeling pain at the top of his left foot, through his lower leg.
“I kind of initially shook it off to just putting in some significant days, that I’m just sore,” Waite said. “I had this hope and prayer that I was going to wake up the next day and I was going to be fine.” But things got worse.
He was only able to do 10 miles the next day, describing the pain — especially while going downhill — as “excruciating.” But he still hoped to press forward toward his goal, icing his ankle and taking anti-inflammatory medication that night.
The next day, he managed the full 40 miles, but at a much slower pace. He trudged into camp at 10:30 p.m., after more than 16 hours.
“It got down into the teens that night, there were snow flurries, and my hiking pole actually snapped,” he said of the growing frustration. “I was like a wounded warrior coming into camp.”
Waite often pushes through fatigue and normal pain, he said, but this was different. He began to realize his quest to do the entire Virginia section of the Appalachian Trail — 544 miles — was slipping away.
Waite, a 42-year-old nurse practitioner at Riverside Regional Medical Center, had been planning this trek for about a year. Aside from the challenge itself, his goal was to raise $10,000 for Parent Project Muscular Dystrophy. That was in honor of Cole Terrill, an 11-year-old Smithfield boy with the disease and the son of one of Waite’s former co-workers.
Waite made a new goal — keep moving as long as he could. That would soon turn into a quest to do 400 miles rather than 544.
“I was just really down,” he said. “I was just really bummed ... It was a goal that I really didn’t want to let go of. And I knew I had to.”
Waite called his father-inlaw, Dr. Curt Alitz, a retired Army colonel and orthopedic surgeon. Alitz drove four hours to meet Waite on the trail the next day. “He did a trailside orthopedic consult,” Waite said, saying he was diagnosed with “a pretty bad tendinitis.”
Alitz, a triathlete who knew the importance of the trek to Waite, gave him some foot wraps and athletic tape. Alitz didn’t tell Waite to end the journey, but told him a mileage reduction was necessary.
“He’s not gonna tell me to keep going if he really thought I was gonna hurt myself, obviously,” Waite said. “But he also knew what I wanted to do ... and he was gonna try to help me do what I could to keep going.”
Waite slowly began to “accept that these things happen ... when you’re asking your body’s connective tissue to do so much.
“I took my own ego out of the picture, and I took a step back, and looked at the big picture and why I was doing it.”
“I remembered the fundraiser and Cole and people who aren’t able to do stuff like this,” he said. “I was just kind of able to reset my sights on a new goal, which was to keep moving safely.”
His crew — namely, friends Nate Hackett and Tony Bellecci — originally were expected to meet Waite at a set of pre-determined spots. But those meeting points “all went out the window” and new locations needing to be figured out. While Waite had a satellite-based GPS tracker, Hackett and Bellecci had to navigate the changes using paper maps.
“There’s no Google Maps out there,” Waite said. “They were using a giant Virginia Gazetteer Map.”
Waite cut his daily mileage to 20 — half his initially projected daily amount. And on all the stops, he said, he put his foot in buckets of ice water “as long as I could tolerate it.”
As the days went by — and the terrain got flatter as he walked north — his foot and ankle “began to feel better and better.” He gradually increased the daily mileage to the 30s, and he thought of pushing back up to 40.
“But I just kind of proceeded with caution at that point,” Waite said. “I was pretty much out of the window to get the 550 anyway. I’d already injured myself, so I had to rein that in.”
As time went on, he made a new goal of going 400 miles in the two-week frame. “We kind of started doing some mental gymnastics,” he said. “I said, ‘OK, if we can get here, here and here, we can make it to 400.’ ”
Waite cut out the Shenandoah National Park from the trek — a section of the Appalachian Trail that he had hiked previously. And he cut out a portion of Northern Virginia, too. He and his crew encountered other challenges — and kindnesses from strangers — along the way.
At one point, Waite said, a section of the Blue Ridge Parkway that appeared on the GPS to be open to vehicle traffic was closed because of downed trees.
Bellecci sent a note to Waite’s GPS device that said he couldn’t get through on the parkway, telling Waite he’d have to walk to the next meeting place — 11 miles farther. Then Bellecci was blocked from the next site, too, because of a locked gate blocking a roadway. That initially looked like Waite would have to walk another 5 miles as the sky turned to dusk.
But Belecci drove to a nearby National Park Service building. Though it was past 6 p.m. and closed for the night, a park ranger was still in the building, and Bellecci convinced him to go unlock the gate.
“They’re opening the gate,” Bellecci texted to Waite. “Hang tight.”
“That was super awesome,” Waite said. “They didn’t have to do that.”
Another night, in an area where camping was restricted, Waite and Bellecci came across a bed and breakfast, “Parr’s Camp.” They asked the owner if they could park Bellecci’s truck there to camp for the night.
“She wouldn’t have it,” Waite said of sleeping in the vehicle. “She said, ‘No, you guys are staying in here, and you’re sleeping in the bed tonight.’ So I got a bed and shower that night.”
He did the last 35 miles of the Virginia trail in one day.
His wife, Ashley, his three daughters, ages 21, 13 and 11, were on hand last Thursday night at Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia, as were his parents, who came in from Florida.
“And my two dogs, who probably showed the most outward excitement,” Waite quipped.
As of Thursday, the fundraiser for Parent Project Muscular Dystrophy had raised $12,800, exceeding Waite’s initial $10,000 goal.
“I had to learn how to be patient,” he said of the trek. “I really wanted to go (the full 544 miles), and I couldn’t. It was a lesson in humility and patience. But I call it a win-win in the end. The number was different, but the overall journey and mission was accomplished.”