Metro to Mountain Journal

At the start of the new year, I, like millions of others make promises, New Years Resolutions. This year my resolutions were rededicated to my health and the health of the planet. See: Home for the New Year, 1/2/09.

Summarizing I just wanted to make a few promises to myself: to eat better, exercise more, lose weight, and develop healthier and greener habits.

Sounds easy enough, easy at least if I used selective memory. Was that resolution, loose twenty pounds or conjugate twenty nouns? Well you don’t conjugate nouns; but it still could be easier to do than losing twenty pounds. Promises are hard to keep.

My wife and I have huge summer plans and we need to go into the summer in as good of physical condition as possible. We need to make our resolutions stick. We need to conjugate nouns and train.

We are too poor or proud for personal trainers, so my wife goes to the gym to work out regularly and I just try to increase my outside activities. The plan might work, but we have to be ready to climb/hike fourteen thousand foot mountains for about forty days in a row. Each day averages about eleven miles hiking with four thousand three hundred feet of elevation gain over a span of six to eighteen hours. From our past experiences I have found it difficult to do multiple days in a row without being in very good condition. My body always calls for a rest after a few days and excuses flood my mind. We need to train our body, mind, and soul to have the resolve to complete our goals.

The Plan

Maintain weight thru the winter to be ready for stronger and longer spring workouts.

Eat a balanced diet with no (or at least few) sweets.

Walk, bike, and run. Increase our aerobic activities.

Exercise, as in strengthening our cores.

Chores, make time for physical chores.

Train the dog too.

The Results

We have both lost some weight, but I lost most of mine from being sick.

We stopped going out to eat and with less choices seem to be controlling our diet. I might add though if peanut butter is considered a sweet then I have failed miserably.

I have been running each day for over a month without missing a day! Some days the runs have been longer than others, but I hope to work up to sixty miles a week before summer and without hurting myself. My wife does aerobic exercises (stairmaster, ellipticycle, treadmill, etc.) three days a week.

I try to exercise three days a week building my core strength. I think I am feeling stronger, but it is still winter and it is hard to tell. My wife goes to the gym often enough that an eighty-ish year old gentleman called her a "gym rat" just like him. She is getting strong.

We enjoy sawing, chopping, and splitting wood. And as we heat our house in the evening with wood we are regularly working at the wood pile. These kinds of chores help our strength levels.

The dog is going with us to Colorado. Though he will not be invited to climb the more technical routes, we are trying to get him in shape for the hiking routes. He exercises with me, but he sleeps the rest of the day. He is doing good but as it grows warmer he will not want to run any longer. I will have to find time to walk him longer. Oh, the dog is on a doggy diet also, he is trying to shed a few pounds before summer.

Overall I think we have done well with training. Right now we are trying to get in the groove before we hit it hard from mid-April through May. June will be more training with a pack on our backs until we start on the mountains in the middle of the month and hopefully by then we would have conjugated those twenty nouns.

Happy trails.