When people plan a multi-day hike, particularly for the first time, there is a temptation to treat the route like a pot of miles that needs to be emptied. You look at the total distance, divide it into daily stages and then start wondering whether you can squeeze a few extra miles into the early days so there will be fewer left to do later.
That is what I mean when I talk about "banking miles": deliberately walking farther than you need to in the hope of getting ahead of your schedule and making a future day easier. On paper it can look incredibly sensible. If you cover 22 miles instead of 18 on Day 1, surely you have just made the rest of the trip four miles easier?
The problem is that your body does not work like the spreadsheet. Those four miles have a cost, and on a multi-day hike you carry that cost into tomorrow. Tired legs, sore feet, a developing blister or simply not eating and recovering properly because you arrived late can make the next day slower, which is how people end up banking miles on Monday only to spend Tuesday giving them all back.
Twenty miles also sounds much easier when you are sat on the sofa looking at a map than it does after three days of walking, when your socks are wet, your pack suddenly appears to contain bricks and there is a headwind for reasons that feel increasingly personal. The aim of planning your first multi-day hike is not to squeeze the maximum possible distance out of every day. It is to build a trip you can keep walking tomorrow.
Start with the distance you already know
The best place to begin is with your own recent hiking rather than somebody else’s daily mileage. If you comfortably walk 15 kilometres on normal day hikes, planning 30 kilometres every day for a week because somebody on the internet did it is an ambitious jump, particularly once you add a heavier pack and the cumulative effect of doing it repeatedly.
Think about the distance you can currently complete while still feeling reasonably human afterwards. Could you eat, sort your kit and get up the following morning ready to do something similar again? That is a much more useful benchmark for a first multi-day hike than the longest day you have ever dragged yourself through.
You also need to allow for all the things that do not appear in the distance total. You may sleep badly, spend longer navigating than expected, stop to deal with your feet, wait for food, check into accommodation or lose half an hour trying to find the shop that Google insists exists. A one-off 20-kilometre day and the fourth 20-kilometre day in a row are not the same thing.
Do not try to win the first day
The first day is particularly easy to over-plan because you are fresh, excited and probably convinced you have packed brilliantly. It can feel like the obvious time to get ahead, but it is also the day when you are adjusting to your pack, learning the rhythm of the route and discovering how long all the little bits of your day actually take.
Starting with one of your biggest stages can leave you carrying tired legs, sore feet and an irritated shoulder through everything that follows. I would much rather finish Day 1 thinking I probably could have walked another few kilometres than arrive exhausted and realise I have another week of doing this.
If the route allows it, give yourself some margin at the beginning. You may discover that you are moving faster than expected and can adjust later, but it is much easier to add distance when you are feeling good than to undo the effects of an unnecessarily huge first day.
Distance is only one part of the day
Once you have a rough idea of sensible daily distance, look at what those kilometres actually contain. Twenty kilometres on a flat, well-made trail can be a very different day from 20 kilometres with 1,000 metres of ascent, rough ground, repeated steep descents and sections where navigation needs your full attention.
Elevation is one of the first things I look at after distance when I plan a multi-day route because climbing changes both the effort required and the time a stage is likely to take. A day can start and finish at roughly the same altitude while still containing a surprising amount of ascent if the route spends the whole time going up and down, so look at the total elevation gain rather than comparing only the height of your start and finish points.
Then look at the terrain. Clear tracks let you move very differently from bog, boulder fields, rocky paths or repeated steep steps, while exposed ridges and river crossings may introduce conditions where you deliberately slow down. Weather adds another layer. Heat can make an ordinary distance feel enormous, heavy rain can make the ground slower and every stop more complicated, and strong winds can completely change exposed sections.
This is why dividing the total trail distance into equal daily chunks rarely gives you equally difficult days. Your stages should reflect the ground, not just the arithmetic.
Your pack changes things
Carrying everything you need for several days changes the equation again. If you are camping, a tent, sleeping system, stove, food and additional water can add a significant amount of weight. Even if you are staying in accommodation, you will probably carry more clothing, chargers, toiletries and supplies than you would on a normal day hike.
Before the trip, walk with the pack loaded roughly as it will be on the trail. A bag that feels perfectly acceptable when you lift it around your bedroom can develop a remarkably personal vendetta against your shoulders after 800 metres of ascent, and a training walk gives you time to adjust the fit and question whether every item really deserves to come with you.
It also gives you a much more realistic idea of your pace. If your usual day-hike speed changes with a full multi-day pack, that information belongs in your planning rather than being discovered halfway through your first stage.
Plan the bits between the walking
One of the biggest planning mistakes I see is treating a multi-day hike as though the walking is the only part that takes time. In reality, every day also contains the admin of keeping yourself moving: finding water, buying food, drying wet kit, charging electronics, washing clothes, setting up camp or getting between the trail and your accommodation.
This becomes particularly important on UK long-distance trails because rural services can be surprisingly limited. A village that looks close to your route on a map does not necessarily have a regular bus, a taxi available that evening or a shop that will still be open when you arrive. I have seen people book accommodation a few miles off a trail assuming they will simply order an Uber, only to discover that the app accepting a request and an actual driver existing are two very different things.
If you are booking somewhere away from the route, work out how you will get there and back before you pay for it. Check public transport timetables, taxi availability and the distance you would need to walk if neither exists. An extra three miles to your accommodation is still three miles, even if your guidebook has decided the day’s stage finished earlier.
Know where your food and water are coming from
The same principle applies to food and water. Look at each stage and identify the places where you can realistically resupply rather than assuming every village contains a permanently open shop and a pub serving food whenever you happen to arrive.
Opening times matter, particularly in smaller rural communities, as cafés or seasonal businesses may not operate every day. If a section is remote, you may need to leave in the morning carrying enough food to get through it rather than planning around a lunch stop that turns out to exist only between Thursday and Sunday.
Water needs the same level of thought. Work out what you need to start with, where reliable refill points are and whether you intend to collect and treat natural water. Streams can be seasonal and water sources shown in route information are not guaranteed to be flowing when you arrive, so on a route where supply is limited I want to understand my options before I set off rather than making that discovery when I am already thirsty.
Build in options to shorten a day
While you are looking at each stage, identify where you have choices. Could you finish early in a village? Is there a bus or railway station somewhere along the route? Is there a lower alternative if the weather makes a high section unattractive? Which sections leave you committed once you start them?
I plan escape options into every multi-day route because plans change. Weather changes, injuries develop, people become ill and occasionally a day is simply much slower than you expected. You do not need an escape route every half mile, but you should understand enough about the route to know what you can do if the original stage stops being the sensible option.
This is another reason not to spend the early days obsessively banking miles. Margin is useful. Arriving at a decision point with enough energy and daylight to choose between continuing and stopping gives you far better options than reaching it exhausted because you were determined to get four miles ahead of a schedule you wrote at home.
Give yourself time for your feet
Feet have a habit of becoming the main character on a multi-day hike. A tiny hot spot that you would barely notice at the end of a normal day can become a blister once you put the same shoes back on the following morning and walk another 20 kilometres.
Deal with problems when they are small. Wear footwear and socks you have already tested, give wet feet a chance to dry, change socks when it helps and carry blister treatment you actually know how to use. If something starts rubbing, stop and sort it rather than deciding you will look at it when you reach your accommodation in another four hours.
The same applies more broadly to recovery. Eat properly, drink enough and give yourself some time at the end of the stage to look after yourself and your kit. Tomorrow’s legs matter as much as today’s mileage, which is the part the "banking miles" mentality tends to forget.
Do not pack every fear into your backpack
First multi-day hikes also have a special ability to make people pack for every scenario they can imagine. Three spare outfits, enough snacks to survive a minor siege and several mysterious objects that seemed absolutely essential while packing can feel rather less essential when you have carried them uphill for six hours.
Preparation matters, but every item has to earn the effort required to carry it. Lay everything out before the trip and ask what job each thing is doing, whether anything is duplicated and whether you can wash and dry clothing rather than carrying a fresh outfit for every day.
Your first trip will teach you far more about what you personally value than any generic packing list can. Some things you will happily carry again; others will come home having enjoyed a very scenic holiday at the bottom of your rucksack. Use that information the next time you plan.
Leave some room for the trip itself
There is another problem with planning every stage at the absolute limit of what you can cover: it leaves very little room to enjoy where you are. Some of my favourite parts of multi-day hikes have been things I could not have put into a spreadsheet beforehand — a swim, a pub lunch, a conversation with somebody on the trail, a view worth sitting with for a while or an honesty shed containing exactly the snack I had been thinking about for the previous hour.
Those moments are part of why I love long-distance walking. If every day is a race to get ahead of tomorrow’s mileage, they become inconveniences you do not have time for rather than part of the trip.
Give yourself enough structure that the route works, know where you are sleeping and where the important constraints sit, then leave some margin inside the day. That margin is useful when something goes wrong, but it is equally useful when something goes unexpectedly right and you would quite like to stay for another coffee.
Finish with enough left for tomorrow
A multi-day hike asks something different from you than a big single day because you are managing your effort across the whole route. Some days will naturally be longer, some will be slower, the weather may force a change and occasionally 15 kilometres will feel suspiciously like 40. You do not need every stage to look identical for the plan to be good.
Plan around the walker you are now, not the mileage somebody else posts online. Understand the elevation and terrain, test your loaded pack, know where you will sleep, plan your food and water and identify the places where you have options. Most importantly, remember that getting ahead today only helps if it has not made tomorrow harder.
There is very little glory in banking five extra miles on Monday if Tuesday morning you cannot face putting your boots back on. I would rather finish a day with enough energy to enjoy where I am, sort myself out properly and wake up wanting to walk again. On a multi-day hike, that is the pace that gets you to the end.