-  Today we are pleased to introduce Melanie Radzicki McManus as a part of the Wisconsin Historical Museum's History Sandwiched In lecture series. The opinions expressed today are those of the presenter and are not necessarily those of the Wisconsin Historical Society or the museum's employees. Melanie Radzicki McManus has worked as a news reporter at a Green Bay radio station, as a press secretary at the Wisconsin State Capitol, and as editor of two local publications. Since 1994, McManus has worked as a freelance writer and editor, specializing in travel and fitness. She has won numerous awards for her writing, most notably prestigious Lowell Thomas Gold and Grand awards for her travel journalism. Her book, "Thousand-Miler: "Adventures Hiking the Ice Age Trail," was recently published by the Wisconsin Historical Society Press. Here today to discuss and share stories from the Ice Age Trail, please join me in welcoming Melanie Radzicki McManus.   (applause)    -  Thanks for coming today. I'm really excited to be here because I love the Ice Age Trail, and I'm excited to share everything I know about it with all of you. To start with, I'm going to talk a little bit about the history of the trail and our National Scenic Trail System to give you a little bit of a background because if you're going to do any hiking, it's just really helpful to know how the trail came about, what it really is, how it fits into the National Trail Systems Act, and how it's administered. So, first of all, where the trail goes. This is the Ice Age Trail. It's roughly 1100 miles long. It is about two-thirds finished. So, today, it's about 650 miles of signed trail and about 350 miles of what they call connecting roads. These are areas where they're hoping to get land in the future for the trail, but they don't have it secured yet. So the Ice Age Trail Alliance, which is the governing body for the trail, has maps available where they show connecting road routes where you can walk from the end of one trail segment to the next. So if you want to do what's called a through-hike, which is hiking the entire trail, it is possible, but you will be hiking two-thirds on trail and a third on road routes. The western terminus, to the left, is in St. Croix Falls in Interstate State Park, which incidentally was Wisconsin's first state park, and it opened in 1900 or 1901. And on the eastern side, it is in Potawatomi State Park in Sturgeon Bay. The trail roughly starts, if you look going from the west to the east, it starts in St. Croix Falls and goes to the Antigo area. Then it loops down and goes all the way to Janesville, which is the southernmost point, and then it goes up, as I said, to Potawatomi State Park. And the route is roughly tracing the terminal moraine for the last glacial. Now, I'm going to get back to the Ice Age Trail in a minute. I'm going to talk a little bit now about the National Scenic Trails, where they are and what they are. So, sometime in the 1950s and 1960s, researchers, scientists, legislators were all talking about how Americans were working really hard, it was post-World War II, but they needed to take some time for recreation. And they were starting to learn how good it was for people to be outside and in nature, how healthy that was for you, for your body, for your mind. And at that time we had already started building a lot of the national parks. Those were started in the early 1900s with Teddy Roosevelt. But a lot of the big national parks for Midwesterners, unfortunately, were out far west with Yosemite and Glacier and Yellowstone, Acadia in the east. So the researchers and scientists and congressmen said let's start developing some trails that people can get outside. Walking was becoming popular. And so they decided to come up with three types of trails that could be developed: National Scenic Trails, National Cultural Trails, and National Historic Trails. So in 1967, Congress passed the National Trails System Act that said let's get some of these trails out there, and let's get some Americans out in the outdoors. Now, a  So I headed off on my merry way. I'm going to go back one minute too. When I was talking about through-hiking and through-running and records, a couple things I want to say. So, through-hiking is starting a trail and hiking it through to the end in one attempt. Now, that doesn't mean you can never get off or never stop hiking. Many people will take a day, a rest day a week. Some people, you know, if you have a wedding and you just can't find a convenient time to schedule your hike and you know it's going to take you two months or something, you might get off on a weekend to go to a wedding or a graduation or one set of hikers took off a week when I got, that week that it was the 90 degrees when I started. This group of hikers, two hikers took off because it was just too hot. And in many trails, the bigger long distance trails, like the Appalachian Trail, Pacific Crest, and even the Florida Trail, which is about the same size as ours. They give you a year. They say if you do this trail in 12 months, you're considered a through-hiker. So I'm actually through-hiking the Florida National Scenic Trail right this very minute because I hiked a bunch in January and March and May, and then they tell you not to hike until November/December because it's just too hot and buggy down there. And so if I decide to go back down there, which I'll probably have to go in the holidays which will be hard, but if I can go there and finish by, I think I started January 7th this year, in one year I'll be considered a through-hiker. And the Ice Age Trail doesn't quite-- They don't really have rules. So I suppose technically if you hiked from one end to the other over years, you could say I'm a through-hiker, but the general understanding is that you're going to be doing this-- Try to do it in one attempt and within a year. Section hikers, that's you can hike the entire trail in sections. And you can get a wonderful thousand-miler award and get your name in stars or in lights. All kinds of things. And that's what most people do. So if you decide, hey, that's going to be my goal, especially maybe your two young children there, grandchildren, who are starting to hike, you can, they have great, the Ice Age Trail Alliance has wonderful materials. They have a map, a huge map of the state and the trail. You can put the dates you're hiking. You can go out and hike a section at a time and just tick it off, and whenever you're finished, whether it's, two years, five years, 20 years, you can fill out a little form on the Ice Age Trail Alliance website and submit it and you get your designation as a thousand-miler. So that's what most people. And if you section hike, you can do it in any order that you like. You don't have to go in sequential order. And then, onto the record-setting fast packing, the one thing I wanted to mention about that, when Jason talks about his through-run or I say I ran the trail, no one, no matter how talented, ever runs an entire trail like that. So there's just another speed record set on the Appalachian Trail. What that means is you run when you can, and when you're running it's very slow jogging. It's not like running a 10K race where you're going six-minute miles. You're jogging slowly. But there's some spots where you just, physically the terrain is such, you can't run. There's some pretty big boulders in a section called Grandfather Falls. There's bit boulders in the Dells. You have to walk up those. And just in general, even if you are running, say, a shorter, maybe a 10-mile trail race, the thought in those is that you go faster in the long run if you walk up the hill. So even your winners of those races will generally walk uphill when you're on trail. So some people just have this image of, you know, how could you possibly run? You're not really running all the time. Jason estimates, when he did his 50 miles a day, that he was running 60% of the time and walking 40%. I would say my figures were actually flipped, walking 60% and running 40%, because I had some other issues with some foot problems and things where I coul