Sam Cooper had just trekked 7 miles (11 kilometers) through a rain-sodden stretch of the Appalachian Trail when he sat down outside a little country store in Pennsylvania to take on its ice cream challenge.
Nearly 40 minutes and 2,500 calories later, the dairy farmer from Chapel Hill, Tennessee, was polishing off the final titanium sporkful of chocolate chip cookie dough on Tuesday and adding his name to the list of “thru-hikers” who have celebrated the trail’s halfway point by downing a half-gallon of ice cream.
By the end Cooper, 32, whose trail name is Pie Top, was calling the experience “pure misery.”
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