Warren Doyle Knows More About the Appalachian Trail Than Anyone. He Hates What It’s Become.

In the late nineties, Doyle was dating a woman in West Virginia, Sally Swisher, whose teenage son, Sam Swisher-McClure, was a competitive cross-country runner. Doyle tantalized him with tales of his hikes, plus his antimaterialist invective and love of nature.

They began to hike together, finishing a 64-mile span of the AT in 24 hours before Swisher-McClure graduated from high school. The youngster soon raced across Vermont’s Long Trail alone, setting a new FKT on that trail, just as Doyle had done five years after his 1973 AT conquest. Together, they turned their ambitions toward the AT in the summer of 1998, exactly 25 years after Doyle broke the record. Doyle trailed Swisher-McClure north, meeting him at road crossings deep in the woods in a van and sometimes hiking with him. The teenager made the trail’s halfway point in 24 days, putting him well ahead of the standing mark.

But he’d trudged through obstinate foot pain for days. After one faulty step on a rock in Pennsylvania, the trail’s most notoriously tedious state, he knew he was done. Swisher-McClure never learned if it was a stress fracture or extreme tendinitis, but he never again returned to the AT for long stretches. Doyle and Sally Swisher soon split, but Swisher-McClure holds no grudge, just pride at their effort.

“Frustration isn’t the word, but I felt disappointment. I poured everything I had into it, and I couldn’t go any further,” says Swisher-McClure, now a radiation oncologist in Delaware. “That’s what I was looking for: to test my limits, to find out where that point was.”

Their failure marked the start of a new chapter in Doyle’s relationship with the trail—the one that has truly bolstered his status as the Appalachian Trail’s aging sage, even getting him into The New York Times. He has become both coach and crew for some of the most impressive endurance records in American hiking, using the ATI as a kind of incubator and scouting combine for talent.

Jennifer Pharr Davis was just a nervous new college graduate when she attended the ATI in 2004 in preparation for her first thru-hike. Like so many of Doyle’s students, she’d found it after an elementary online search—How do you hike the Appalachian Trail? In class, he spotted toughness in her, and she detected a warm and funny mentor underneath a gruff exterior. He spent a year helping to train Pharr Davis ahead of her 2008 endurance record, which stood until she broke it herself in 2011. Doyle doesn’t hide his pride in their relationship; during the ATI’s five days, he mentions her two dozen times.

“He is one of the few people who looked at me and said, ‘I think you can do something almost no one else thinks you can do,’” remembers Pharr Davis. “He sees potential.”

A decade after Doyle supported Pharr Davis’s first record, he spotted potential again. A Portland pianist and marathon runner, Liz Derstine had read starkly different opinions of Doyle; Pharr Davis had praised him in her books Becoming Odyssa and The Pursuit of Endurance, while Scott Jurek, who had courted controversy as he broke her record in 2015, recounted a tense standoff in the rain with Doyle in his book, North. (Jurek didn’t consult with Doyle before his record run and, as he told me, “felt like he was spying on me.” In turn, Doyle now calls Jurek, with audible disdain, “one of those Western runners.”)

Wanting to decide about Doyle for herself as she eyed a record attempt, Derstine attended the ATI in 2019. As other hikers walked six or so miles each day, she ran ahead, gleefully turning in double-digit jaunts with a full backpack. Doyle was impressed. Off and on for the next year, he carted her to different sections of the trail, testing her stamina. On July 7, 2020, she struck out from Springer Mountain, covering the Doyle-mandated 69 miles that first day. He met her 427 separate times during the next 51 days as she raced ahead. “I never was late,” Doyle says, beaming.

“It was just fun for him, timing me to see how fast I could go,” Derstine says. “It’s really fulfilling for him to see people fulfill their dreams. That’s been his life’s work.”

The relationship was worth it, Derstine says, if not always easy. Doyle insisted that sleep was only a psychological need and that she could do without much of it, even as she suffered the effects of intense sleep deprivation. She fretted about hiking during the COVID pandemic, but he saw it as a valiant act of defiance. And when she expressed doubts on her blog about the wisdom of a 69-mile gambit a few days after it happened, he took offense.

“He told me it rubbed him the wrong way, because it seemed like a comment on his planning,” she told me. “There’s a lot of stuff Warren shares his advice on, like the psychological aspects of hiking. But he doesn’t have personal experience with the physicality of running.”

I wondered if supporting such record quests gave Doyle a sense of authority and dominion over the trail, especially since he no longer hikes himself. “Everyone wants to feel useful, especially as they get older,” he admits. “If an educator feels useful, he is going to try to enable success for willing learners. I choose my willing learners.”

These days, Pharr Davis considers Doyle a family member, someone she loves even if she disagrees with the finer points of his sometimes coarse approach. His place in AT lore, she thinks, should be secure.

“He has given more miles to the Appalachian Trail than any other hiker and more hours to people who want to hike the trail than anyone else,” she says. “He deserves ownership of that place and our record, whether he wants that or not.”