Take one look at 32-year-old Bakersfield College health instructor John Liccardo and you can tell he’s in good shape.

How good? Good enough to hike 224 miles of Sierra wilderness in less than eight days. Good enough to think about repeating it at a faster pace.

Good enough, in fact, to make the rest of us feel like blobs of fat.

Liccardo recently completed a speed hike of the John Muir Trail, a rugged route between Yosemite and Mount Whitney featuring high passes, pristine lakes and the highest point in the lower 48 states.

It was enough to capture Liccardo’s fancy the first time he learned about it.

“I was in a used bookstore and I came across a book about the John Muir Trail and so I started looking at it and I thought, ‘211 miles for the trail,’ I thought, ‘That’s runnable,'” he said.

Runnable enough for Liccardo to do it in exactly seven days, five hours and 18 minutes.

To go faster, Liccardo brought only what he figured was necessary to stay alive in an emergency. A pair of tights, a long sleeve top, raingear, socks, a hat and some snacks – that was about it.

“If I kept moving with…with all that stuff on, I’d stay warm enough that, you know, I wouldn’t die,” he said.

Heavier items like a sleeping back and cooking gear were packed in five of the seven nights by friends and family, who braved often brutal climbs and long distances to camp with him for a night before hiking with the heavy items out the next day.

“I was definitely indebted to the people who helped me,” he said. “Most of them had rough hikes and a few of them looked worse than me when they showed up.”

To keep everybody updated on his progress, Liccardo had them leave messages on his answering machine.

“Everybody had access, you know, live updates,” he said.

Despite his superb conditioning and all the help, there were times when Liccardo wanted to quit. Especially on the grueling 36-mile-long second day, the trip’s longest.

“I think I got a little bit dehydrated and I was throwing up,” he said. “It was generally pretty unpleasant.”

Another bad moment came below 12,000-foot. Pinchot Pass. Leaping across a swollen creek in the rain, Liccardo strained a groin muscle. He was within two days of the finish.

“I was cold, and I was wet, and I was exhausted and I just wanted to die,” he said with a laugh.

Most of the difficulties, however, were anticipated, he said. Take the heavily blistered feet, for example.

“You kind of just accept it, you know,” he said. “You bring a lot of duct tape and wrap everything up and just keep going.”

By the time he reached the end at 14,495-foot. Mount Whitney, Liccardo was ready for anything. The final climb to the top – a lung-or many – was covered at a run.
“At that point I was done, so I could do anything, because I was so happy that I didn’t have to sleep out another night,” he said.
Liccardo said the clouds cleared up just enough to give him a fantastic view.
His view of the trip as a whole was more ambivalent.
“At the time I was doing it I was, like, ‘I’m never doing this again,'” he said, while admitting that he might do it over “if I could sucker somebody else into doing it with me.”
He said he is considering doing the Pacific Crest Trail, an approximately 2,000-mile route from Mexico to Canada of which the Muir Trail is a short segment.
“If I did the same distance (as the Muir Trail), 200 miles a year, it would take me ten years to do the whole thing,” he said. “And that might be kind of fun.”
Just don’t plan on keeping up with Liccardo.