Bay Circuit Trail, just keep walking....

Earlier this year my doctor told me that I was fat. Fair enough. I am. She told me to loose weight. OK. I took a walk. A hike actually. I had recently read about an ambitious greenways project here in The Commonwealth called the Bay Circuit Trail. Like any ambitious project there are real and theoretical ideas about it, most importantly to me, where it starts. Theoretically, it starts on Plum Island in Newburyport. As far as I can tell, you have to walk along the roadway for quite some time before getting on a "trail". There are a lot of "proposed" and "temporary" sections up there until you get to the Rowley area, where the trail goes into the woods and stays there until Boxford.

It was an easy jump for me to choose "Section Hiking the Bay Circuit Trail" as a goal for this spring. I did so for numerous reasons including:

• Health and Fitness (loose some of the weight)
• More Outdoor activity
• Train like you fight: I wanted to do more mountain hiking and even some backpacking this fall)

I set out from the doctor's office to the trail that very same day. It hurt but I did several sections of trail over the next two weeks. Each section was about three miles. What I did was park at a trail entrance and hike until the next major road crossing, where I could later park and continue on. My leg and food really hurt doing this, but that was not unexpected as I was recovering from a minor motorcycle crash ( the reason that I went to the doctor to begin with). What I DIDN'T expect was to find out that the reason it hurt so badly was that I was in fact, hiking on a broken leg!!

So I took a couple months off to do physical therapy and let my leg heal up some. 

This week, I decided that I would fill in some of the gaps of trails that I missed on the north-easter portion of the trail before I had to do the portion that is a Road March between Boxford and North Andover.