Eight Days in the Grand Canyon (Supplement 1): My Physical Take-Away

A few months ago, I was texting with a friend of mine and I mentioned that I'd been working on getting in shape for our trip to the Grand Canyon. (See previous post for a full account of the adventure.) He immediately made fun of me: he had seen the trip and knew it was motorized -- not a paddling trip like one we had taken on the pretty deadly Upper Gauley river in West Virginia, a few decades ago -- so he good-naturedly accused me of being dramatic. I shared a laugh at the joke; but I told him that I really wanted to be in shape for the side-hikes and other physical challenges of the trip. And the heat. (Though, there really was no preparing for that heat.) 

For a few months, I went, every day, to a three mile system of trails near my New Jersey home. I'd wait for the hottest time of the day (or, at least, not worry about how hot it was) and I would walk my usual paths and then speed-climb a central hill (the lazily-named "Blueberry Hill") two or three times before going back to the trail head.

On the Canyon trip, as a result, I was pretty proud of how I held up. I felt strong on the trails, the whole time. My back was good (occasional issues there, in the past) and I suffered no aches and pains. (I had started out taking Advil, preemptively, at night, but I stopped that on the third of eight days.) My cardio was pretty solid the whole time: no excessive panting with climbs and camp setups/breakdowns; no insane heart-thumping. 

It all raises the question of the connection between weight and fitness -- a question that has been a central one for my wife and me for the past year or so. 

I am simply not at a weight I want to be. I'm at least twenty pounds over, by my standards. Maybe, at this point, I have to admit that I have been telling myself a lie for years: that wanting to be thin is not out of vanity. I think it may be, but I also think that might be okay.

I used to say that my desire to be thin is a result of two things: 1) How I feel. 2) Having this notion that I have a "thin mind," so I want my body to follow suit. It just helps with social clarity. 

Well, when it comes to No. 1: I feel pretty good now and it is because I have been moving. I'm 54. My joints and muscles feel good. My back is fine. I can motor along on a trail or scramble up rocks with the best of them... If I keep my regimen of hiking and stretching up, I should keep feeling this way. 

Then, I see myself in pictures, and I think: Who the heck is that? He looks neither like the guy in my head nor the guy in the mirror. (I can only hope that it's true about pictures adding ten pounds and some quick research shows it is probably true, so I got that going for me...) Sometimes I look at pictures of myself and tell my wife that I look like Peter Griffin, from Family Guy. I say this to be funny, but it also kind of hurts the old pride.

I do have thin mind. That, I keep in shape with constant exercise. I may not be a genius, but there is certainly no belly flab in the old mellon. 

Maybe I need to see all of this as a prompt for a separation of thought. I used to look at diet and exercise the way we are told to: as partnered weight-loss efforts. For me, it's better to think of them as separate goals: Exercise makes me feel good, physically; weight loss makes me feel good mentally. 

And both are important, right?

In the end, I guess it is more important to be strong than to be pretty. We'll see where that takes me. 

Choosing One's Most Difficult Act

I have mentioned before that I take a half-hour walk each morning at 5:30(ish). The benefits of this are many, but I am certainly not going to become a health blogger. (Before I do that, I should probably stop eating takeout food three nights a week...)

But there is one benefit that occurred to me this morning on my walk. At least, I think it is a benefit:

The most difficult thing I do every day is self-imposed. For me, it's getting out of bed at 5:30 in the morning. The actual action; that 10 second struggle of lifting my big, fat, sleepy head off of the pillow, swinging my seven-hundred-pound legs out of bed and wobbling (and I do wobble) down the hall and out the door is just plain miserable. I hate getting up early more than I hate just about any other mundane activity.

There is good in this; there has to be. There is, of course, the simple satisfaction of knowing that I have done it. Also, it is a kind of life-control implicit in the act. I determine my most difficult moment of the typical day. (I say "typical," of course, in exclusion of unpredictable things that could be much worse and sometimes are.)

Maybe the practice of walking at an ungodly hour is not unlike that of martial artist who punches a tree over and over in order to toughen his hands and his mind. It's not a great act, in and of itself, but the repetition of the act lends itself to slowly accumulating strength, both within and without.

I'm sure this cannot be an original idea -- that choosing one's most difficult act of a day is beneficial -- but I don't think I have heard it articulated before. Somewhere in my head (sometimes subconsciously and sometimes in full awareness) the things I do during the day are easier by comparison. Stop at the store for milk when I would rather go right home after work? -- drive the boys to an activity? -- go shopping for winter clothes? -- bring the car for service?

Meh. It's not a cold, solitary walk in the dark of a morning before a busy day... I already brought that on myself.

The Forever Pill

You know the old cliche -- the young person asks the old person how he has stayed so strong and vibrant and the old fossil says something like, "Clean  living!" or "I ate oatmeal with cinnamon and a splash of whisky, every morning, for ninety years..."?  It occurred to me, last night, that this is a very desirable fantasy: the notion that we might, possibly, be able to pin health success on one clear-cut thing. In reality, the fact that this is impossible is sometimes the reason why we give up on the things that we know are good for us. I know it's the reason I do.

You know? Like, if I exercise every day, science says it will make me stronger and it will even extend my life. If I exercise every day, I will feel better -- that is for sure. But, before long, I will forget how bad I felt before I started to feel better and the impact of the exercise will now begin to be lost on me. I feel the way I feel; exercise is part of my life. Why not skip a day here or there? Thus begins the downward spiral.

There's no certainty to it, even if this doesn't mean (and it doesn't) that we should ignore the findings of science. Marathon runners drop dead in the middle of races, once in awhile. Sedentary fat people sometimes live to a ripe old age.

One of my relatives once had a heart attack in his fifties. The doctors told him he was lucky he worked-out on a regular basis, or it could have been worse. Do they know this for sure?