Fitness Index

Page Index

Philosophical: Basis and Role of Physical and Perceptive Skills

Philosophical: Truth and Consequences: Loss of Skills

Philosophical: Restoration of Skills

Reality: Ekulytes tells it like it Is

Section Index

Injury Recovery Basics Page

Beginning an Injury Recovery Program Page

Building and Injury Recovery Program Page

Who's Program Page

Section Index

Free Weights

Bench Press

Curls

Flys

Multi-Size

Page Index

Personal History

Flexible Approach

2011 Annus Horribilis

Intro: The Program

The Standards

Section Index

Establishing a New Program

Starting: Walking Mid-Program: Walk-Jog

Top Level Fitness

Introduction

The Fundamental Skills of Physical Fitness

The basis and role of physical and perceptive fitness

Your physical state is an important part of your life. Some argue health is the most important part of life. I don't. Yet your level of fitness is going to determine your ability to access many environments, and your level of fitness will determine the character of your experiences during physical engagement with nature. Your backpacking experiences are going to be very different if you are exhausted and stumbling through nature than if you are fit and stepping strongly.

Proper fitness is your ticket to enter and engage nature with a minimum of discomfort. But that's only half of the experience. Your ability to perceive is the other half. Fitness will allow your perception to expand into the natural terrain, rather than keeping it solely focused on meeting the physical requirements and withstanding the pain.

The Basis of Human Physical and Perceptive Assets

Our basic physical and perceptive assets as humans were established by the physical construction of nature itself. We were designed to effectively perceive and engage nature with our perceptive and physical assets long before the social requirements of modern urban civilization generally degraded both.

The power of our abstracted perceptive abilities are so profound that our societies are able to subordinate nature with brutal efficiency. This ability to quickly master nature made our natural skills, the skills of dealing with nature itself, secondary to the social and technical skills required to deal with each other within society, and managing relations between societies.

The majority of the urban populations around the world have discarded their fundamental physical and perceptive skills. People have turned inward, into social life, and have generally abandoned natural engagement and its related skills. These skills remain within us, despite the changes in society that have made them all but irrelevant.

The Skill Set

Every one of us has within us the natural assets required to effectively observe, analyze, make rapid decisions, communicate, and engage all aspects of our natural environment while walking, climbing, crawling, or running across all the difficult natural terrains existing on this planet. We can do all of this while fully loaded, through all types of adverse weather conditions while communicating in complex groups. And while having a blast doing it.

We are quite amazing in our original natural habitat.

Humans have amazing natural physical and perceptive assets that mirror and compliment the requirements of our natural environment. These physical, perceptive, and their related social skills constitute the most effective combination of forces nature has yet created.

The power of our perceptive and physical skills have changed the nature of the game of life itself on this planet. We kicked Nature's Ass. Our basic perceptive and physical "skills" that first allowed us to see deeper into nature to live easy within nature, have now separated the majority of us from any natural experience at all, and this has hardened all of our lives. How ironic.

We have to work very few hours to survive in most natural environments, though we have to work endlessly to survive our fellow man.

We are currently in the process of determining if this particular force of nature, us, is a detriment or asset to both ourselves and nature.

Current Status

These same skills, which once made us the masters of mountains, tundra, forests, plains and savannahs, have now corralled the majority of humanity within massive urban centers. This urban concentration has made our lives worse, more insecure and more dependent rather than bringing a "better," quality of life, as claimed by economists. Economists cannot even perceive, let alone measure the priceless value of independent engagement with nature.

Natural engagement does not register on the economist's charts as an independent resource nor a fundamental value. Nature is consumed by the economists, not experienced.

This consequences of this economic definition of nature, when magnified by our industrial power's impact on nature, and multiplied by our vast population are tragic. Our impact on our natural environment has almost drained the mountains, tundra, forests, oceans, skies, and plains of the remaining bits of the rich web of life that filled them just a few decades ago, during the time-span of one generation. These environmental changes have serious consequences.

In the wild, the destruction of the last bits of nature are pushing the last indigenous cultures on our planet towards the brink of extinction. We are witnessing the loss of the last remaining cultures that clearly reflected the spirit of these last wild places through the beliefs and practices of their cultures. Bummer. This represents an irreplaceable loss of perceptive knowledge and experience along with the natural terrain the culture "explained."

In "first-world" America the loss of access to, and engagement with nature contributes to a wide range of physical and psychological problems. We have become obese, diabetic, psychologically unstable, and our children are now subject to premature heart attacks and stroke.

Psychologically, our population and our kids are half-crazy. ADD & a whole alphabit soup of psychological disorders are essentially our attemps to blame the kids for psychological consequences of the crazy unhealthy environment we have put them in.

A dangerously small percent of humanity is maintaining any type of engagement with their natural environment, let alone any contact with nature whatsoever. The vast majority of humans are now spending their whole lives within environments completely created by humans.

This is what is driving us crazy.

The Goal

The whole point of getting you off the couch and working through an escalating program of aerobic and weight training is to access the slumbering physical and perceptive assets within you. These assets are key to accessing what remains of the wild places inside of yourself and outside, in the tattered remnants of the natural world.

Viva la Difference

If you are confused by my defining "perception" as part of a workout program, let me tell you what I see. There are at least two physical realities and at least three perceptive realities. There is a physical reality created by nature, and one created by man. Perceptively, there is individual and social human perception, and there is inherent consciousness in nature.

You should be acquainted with all three, independent of how you explain or define them. Call them whatever you want, as long as you find your balance point between them.

It is obvious that far too few people in our country have these factors in play, let alone balanced.

Everything has unfolded out of the inherent consciousness that constitutes the physical basis of reality itself. It's all frkn alive. We define ourselves, our principals and values, and our societies not but what we say, but by how we actually approach and use "it," nature, and how we use each other.

What we say and what we do are two different things.

The very same individual and social perceptive skills that have given us such rich access to nature's once magnificent resources are the exact same skills that we have used to create the mega cities that have stripped our country, our people, and our world of its values and its natural resources.

Our mega-cities also perform a cultural role: The physical size of the mega-city eclipses, if not completely removes any natural engagement or experience from the lives of millions of American children and youth. Raising the next generation, tens of millions of kids in urban wastelands is a really, really bad idea.

Our nation's fundamental human resources, consisting of our physical health, our perceptive clarity, and the democratic principals that Americans have traditionally depended on for the quality and basis of their lives have all been stripped bare.

The perspective that gives us vision can also blind us, and the planet that gives us food can also starve us. It's up to us.

The "Real" World

These mega-cities we created are based on an economic system dependent on the assumption that never-ending growth of populations of billions of people, engaged in a never-ending global mechanized-technological-economic mutual combat which is based on constantly producing more, packaging more, marketing more, and distributing more of everything needed to live a life of urban luxury within a completely human created reality.

All's you need to do is put your nose to the social grindstone, produce one link in this chain, consume the rest, and you can avoid nature for your whole life. Until, like our planet, you can't take any more.

This approach to life has eliminated the need for any contact with nature whatsoever. Nor are our fundamental perceptive and physical assets necessary to live this life of an urban "consumer." Natural "skills" actually get in the way, as they require natural engagement in a disengaged world.

Yup, that's "life." You just need to commute, put yourself into a cubicle, and consume (day I), commute, cubicle, and consume (next day), & repeat this pattern for 70 years, +/-. As a nation and as a species we have lost our way.

What a sad mental, physical, and social prison we have build for ourselves within this Eden of Nature. What meaningless lives of destructive consumption. This is an improper use of human physical and perceptive assets, and is a waste of the beauty and potential of our world.

It is a waste of our human consciousness. Restoring your physical and perceptive assets can show you the way back.

The Natural World

Backpacking offers a natural counter-point to the materialistic aspects of social experience. Backpacking will nurture your physical and perceptive skills while emersing you in a natural environment where you can access the elements of natural wisdom and balance within and outside of you.

We replaced nature's selectors with social selectors.

As soon as we "beat" nature, we began to beat on each other. Both our fellow man and nature's social "value," their very existence, and the ability of either to perpetuate themselves are now determined by how each serves social definitions of wealth and power. Nature, on its own terms, has been put aside.

Nature only survives if we see "social" value in it, and choose to allow it to exist.

If any man or nature itself does not serve a society's definition of wealth and power, they are cast aside. If they do serve our purpose, they are consumed. The character of this social behavior brings up a persisting question that has evolved in lock-step with our social evolution.

"Who gets the benefits of society?" is the inverse question of "Do societies operate for mutual or individual benefit?" We know logically that social creation was a mutual function aiding all of its member's survival. The defeat of nature instantly changed this mutual equation forever, and brought up the persistant question that is still battled over today: "who get the benefits of society?"

The contemporary answer to this question, and society's current philosophical basis is easily found by observing the reality of each era, defined by its contests and contestants. Though important, this "who gets the benefits" question is no longer the hard question, nor even the pertinent question anymore.

The hard question is the emerging question, which is not being asked or acted upon today. I refer to the mounting evidence that we have already "broken" the ecosystem, that we have already "broken" our mutual ties with each other and with nature during the course of our historical social evolution.

The hard & emerging question is, "Is the traditional human 'game' of blind pursuit of 'wealth and power' ending because we have broken the 'playing field' itself?"

Will the accelerating collapse of reliable seasons, of crops, of fish stocks, of bird populations, and of water supplies physically shock us into change? Will a new definition of "the game," of the goal of society itself rise out of the failure of the old goals, of the relentless pursuit of wealth and power in time to even recognize, let alone mitigate the social and environental damages caused by our practices?

That's the emerging question. "Is there a new "natural" survival impetus, a new perspective on the route to social survival emerging out of the quagmire of "social" irresponsibilities from within our "society?" Or is the era of massive urban centers coming to a close as did the age of dinosaurs, disasterously? Are people responding to the damages and dangers we have created?

Nope. Not yet. At least not on a large-scale. The age of the mega city is coming to a rapid close, but we have not socially recognized this fact yet. As the link above to Self-Reliant Living demonstrates, a few individuals are breaking out the social-material prison of our own making.

Yet our mutual assumptions supporting the social pursuit of wealth and power is still motivating and running our country, and will run our nation and our natural environment "into the ground," unless enough people recognize that our approach to life has gone seriously off-track and out of balance. We must mutually change our definition of the "meaning of life" to something other than gratifying our brutal greed.

A few hard questions are being asked by a few of those consumers who have been badly hurt by these "old" assumptions of endless natural resources fueling endless population growth via endless economic growth which fuels the endless growth of housing and stock prices.

The physical basis of this ponzi scam has already imploded, but people still believe in greed, and are working hard to reinflate this scam of endless growth. They are beating these tired old horses (our environment and our economy) to death. Our selfish beliefs and practices are on their last legs, along with the destructive economy they created.

When asset prices (stocks, bonds, mutual funds, housing, labor costs) reach the price levels that can actually be supported by the earning power of the American middle-class, shit is going to hit the fan.

This era of human society being dominated by the greedy is ending, and ending badly by the looks on the faces of both man and nature.

But let's get back to the "emerging" question. Have we broken the "playing board" itself? Have we critically damaged the environment?

The Game

The answer is "yes," we have already created a permanently altered, unreliable natural environment stripped of natural resources, our financial "wealth" is almost worthless, and "societies" around the world are now composed of vast cities full of grasping consumers sitting upon broken natural and social infrastructures. Our social and natural worlds are both failing to support an unimaginably vast population who are themselves motivated by the desire to consume ever-more in a world that has ever-less.

These trends are roaring towards each other like two powerful locomotives on the same track.

Presently very few people or institutions are addressing either the personal or structural consequences of the long-term policy of building vast cities full of (now unemployed) consumers, nor how these assumption of endless resources fueling endless growth are the source and means of our growing environmental, social, political, and economic disasters.

In the final analysis the blame for this is on us. It is our mutual greed that motivates and enables this system of greed. Our greed has undermined the balance in our society between mutual and individual benefit at the same time it has destroyed any balance between our society and nature.

We have traded our most precious assets, our political and environmental security, for fool's gold. Regaining your share of our lost natural treasures starts with restoring your physical and perceptive assets.

To see you need eyes...but first you've got to give your eyes legs and lungs to actually carry your perspective into nature.

See it Now

If you want to see the last bits of unaltered nature, you're too late. Everything has changed everywhere. If you want to see what's left, the fragmented tattered remnants of the "old" ecosystem that remains, you'd better get going right now.

This planet's remaining bits of its classic and ancient ecosystems are going to be completely gone, completely transformed, within 20 years at the very latest. They are being stripped of life right now. Within 20 years there will not be one spot on the planet that has not been radically altered by the radical changes the weather and the seasons are undergoing. If you want to see the last remnants of the old natural world, you better see them now.

If you want to see the environment that created and nurtured your fundamental physical and perceptive assets, you better get in-shape and get-out now. Fitness, the way I approach it, is all about building a bridge to perception.

As the last remnants of our ancient environments are dissappearing, so too is your chance to perceptively and physically engage and experience the same natural environment that our ancestors engaged throughout human history. You will not be able to walk their walk once the natural environment we shared is gone. If you don't want to see it, no big deal.

Nature will not miss us. Our basic perceptive and physical skills long ago turned away from natural reflection in favor of dealing with, manipulating, and controlling each other and our society. Our few remaining ancient natural assets have been alone in the city for quite some time now.

The disappearing Skill Sets

The lazer-like focus of our perceptive and physical skills on "social applications" have not just degraded the perceptive and physical skills we once used to engage nature. Intellectually, our modern pre-occupation with playing video games, watching movies, being constantly connected to the internet and phone, and constant listening to an ipod are poor replacements for physical and natural engagement.

These modern uses of our perceptive assest have dulled our senses.

Physically, the growth of American urban areas have almost completely eliminated our kid's chances for natural contact and physical engagement as they grow up. Kids who do not have a wild field with a creek running through it, or other ample natural contacts and physical activities, are being denied access to their vitally important observation and engagement skills. As most kids grown up in vast cities without natural engagement, they grow up without accessing or learning how to use their basic perceptive and physical skills. This has had serious physical and psychological consequences for the kids.

The kids have gotten obese. They have gotten highly frustrated. They have become dull and inattentive to their environment. They vast majority of today's kids have poor observation, analysis, engagement and reaction skills. And it is getting worse.

Billions of people will live their whole lives in mega-cities never having experienced the reality or feeling of engagement with nature. The costs of this loss is hard to measure but very easy to see.

I believe this lack of natural engagement is a main reason that 50% of the American population is on, or has been prescribed antidepressant and/or anti-anxiety medications. The Chinese peasants are jumping into the nets trying to kill themselves. What is clear is that the social reality we have created for ourselves is sufficient to drive the majority of us psychologically crazy and physically sick. There is some good news.

It's Still out There, It's Still in You...

It's still out there in nature, and you still have the physical and perceptive skills inside of you to engage nature. Ancient physical and perceptive skills are still within you, and each of us. They are "hard-wired" in. Though your natural physical skills may be buried deep in fat and your perceptive skills dulled into submission by the obnoxious sounds, smells, and experiences so common in our vast cities, they are still there. We are just going to have to dig them out of your fat ass.

As our physical and perceptive skills have been dulled by physical and cultural de-training within our social environment, so too can we resurrect them through physical and perceptive engagement with our natural environment. Er, well what's left of it...

As billions and billions of individuals have become physically and perceptively drowned in the rising tide of mega-cities, constant urban growth also continues to physically drown nature.

The radical changes brought about by massive urbanization have not just seriously unbalanced our society's relationship with nature and damaged our fundamental ability to live with each other, but massive urban growth is the weapon that has eliminated the last bits of the Revolutionary Legend that American Society was based upon our citizen soveregnity, our general welfare, our mutual cooperation, and our mutual defense of each other's individual rights. These noble principals have been practically transformed into a system of mutually assumed and assisted greed, selfishness, and corruption.

We have put the ends, our own individual personal gratification, before the means, consisting of our general welfare delivered through our once principled democratic political process.

The physical and perceptive experiences of life on the trail counter all of these pernicious social, physical, and political trends.

Let's get Out There

This physical fitness section of this trail guide is designed to help you find and bring out the basic physical and perceptive assets nature empowered you with, to allow you to reconnect these assets with their original context and purpose.

I can't tell you what you will find or express on your voyage. I can't tell you who you are. You are unique. But I can show you a path to physical and perceptive engagement with nature that will lead you to a different aspect of yourself, a different perspective of who you are in relation to yourself, society, and nature. If you choose to explore it.

The bottom-line is that you are a carrier of these fundamental physical and perceptive skills, the legacy of your ancestors and a reminder of your potential. Either you use 'em, or you don't.

It's your choice.

Your Thoughts, Questions, Comments, and Experiences are Valuable

Each page in this Physical Fitness Section is linked to the Physical Preparation-Mountain Conditioning Forum, where you can post up your comments or questions about all the topics in the Physical Preparation section of this trail guide. The Welcome to Backpacking Physical Fitness Forum page is this page's Forum.

It's Easier Said than Done

It may be time for you to begin to draw these fundamental physical and perceptive skills out of yourself, and put them back into the natural context that created them. What it will take to get you back on the trail depends on the state of your current physical conditioning, your perceptive common sense, and will ultimately depend on how seriously you take your obligations to your physical and perceptive potential. This will not be an easy journey if you are recovering from injury or a long spell on the couch. But it will offer extended deep satisfaction.

If you are in decent or declining condition, it may be time to stabilize your state of fitness by building a stretching, aerobic, and strength training program that suits your status and goals.

If you are in good or great shape, keep it up. Do what works for you. Head over to the gear page and start figuring out how to properly gear yourself up. If you're just getting started with a fitness program, or are recovering from a tough injury, I may have some helpful information for you on the following pages. Tailor the information to suit your circumstances and needs.

Physically, it's a lot easier to get out of shape than get back into shape. It's always going to be a struggle to get in shape, but the joys of long-term physical engagement far exceed the pains. Interestingly, each confirms and validates the other, clarifying and explaining the value and definition of a healthy relationship between pain and pleasure.

Physically, once we get off the couch and recover from our injury, we will focus on building long-term sustainable patterns of stretching & flexibility, upper body strength, and aerobic fitness. By long-term I mean lifetime. My goal is to maintain physical and perceptive engagement with myself and nature as a cornerstone of my life.

Natural engagement brings physical and perceptive experiences that will offer joy and meaning that rewards the blood, sweat, and tears you shed getting back into shape and putting yourself on the trail. Nature provides a context and balance we have yet to properly reflect in society. Maybe you can do it for yourself.

You will access natural experiences outside of yourself and find things within you that cannot be found in the urban environment. You just have to make yourself fit for the job.

Take it Easy

We are in no hurry. We are establishing patterns of exercise and activity that will continue for the rest of our lives. Therefore we are in no particular hurry to reach a particular "goal," as the trail is the goal. The means and ends of backpacking in nature are deeply interrelated, and enjoying one is enjoying the other. Getting there is the fun. And the pain.

This will give us the time and patience to manage our injuries, avoid re-injury, and gradually work through our various weaknesses. A consistent approach means we have no need to rush, which decreases the risks of damaging ourselves during our recovery through re injury, overwork or burnout.

The physical goals of this program are simple: We are beginning a slow and steady progress from serious injury and/or extended periods of inactivity to bring ourselves first to basic recovery, then develop a solid workout program, which will be our starting point for building a regular training regime. This level of fitness will obtain and maintain the ability to deeply access nature with a backpack. Our backpacking trips will allow us to occasionally work ourselves up to the top echelons of fitness and perception.

The goal is to obtain and maintain excellent overall conditioning to preserve our ability to access and observe nature. Getting back into shape is not physical work alone.

We are going to learn how to reliably monitor our injuries, our metabolism, and our body's responses to increasing exercise. We must come to understand our body's responses, and modify our pace and program as necessary to prevent injury, find the correct balance between proper rest and recovery balanced against the stresses of an increasing work load. This is very important to prevent injury and re injury as we begin, and expand, our program.

As our program evolves through healing and rehabilitation into a strong training regime we will begin to invert our perception from internal to external observation. We must develop the ability to observe the external terrain we are crossing as closely and as accurately as we are monitoring our internal physical status.

We will turn our attention to external observations, observations about the nature of the terrain, the patterns of tree growth, the movements of wind and water, and how life ties all of these elements together within the range of our perceptions, rather than just internally monitoring our physical status. But before we can look outward we must understand how our bodies are responding to exercise.

The first steps of this physical and perceptive journey is going to be accurately observing the physical consequences of our first stretches and exercises. Before anything else we must learn the difference between productive and debilitating pain, between pain that is a natural part of rehabilitation and gaining fitness, from pain that indicates continuing injury or expanding inflammation. The former pain can be carefully worked into fitness, while the latter type of pain robs us of fitness. Both types of pain require proper rest and healing.

A goal of your training to to prepare you for the rigours of the trail. Just throwing yourself in without preparation subjects you to greater risk of injury. You want to experience no dehabilitating pain on the trail. These injury and fitness issues must be worked out and tested for reliability during training prior to your backpacking trips.

As our internal perception becomes sufficient to monitor our muscular and metabolic status during hard work, and our fitness level rises sufficiently for safe and happy long distance backpacking challenges, we will again turn our attention to perception. But the next steps will be treated in the Art of Walking and Trail Skills sections, which are all under construction...

The whole point of gaining the physical skills to penetrate nature is to give yourself the phyiscal platform (you!) from which to observe and experience its natural wonders. If we are straining under the fear or reality of exhaustion, it's really hard to enjoy the view. If we do not have the observational skills to match our physical skills, and visa-versa, we are shortchanging ourselves.

Thus the wisdom of physical engagement and fitness begins to make sense intellectually, on its own as an esthetic state in its own right, as well as being the physical basis, one of the classic approaches to higher levels of consciousness.

Throughout human history cultures have recognized the spiritual value of individuals subjecting themselves to sustained periods of natural exposure. Going back to what made you is a persistant topic in human cultural and spiritual history.

I'm beginning to treat some of the observational aspects of backpacking in the Trail and Camp Skills section and the physical mechanics in The Art of Walking section. These sections are under construction.

Once you recover from injury and inactivity, and develop good physical and perceptive fitness you will have the physical platform from which to comfortably observe and engage the natural environments as you pass through. This, my friends, is an aspect of pure joy.

Here in the fitness section we are mostly looking at physical perception, or how you can understand and build a useable mental context for the physical sensations and metabolic stresses generated by physically engaging your environment. Physical perception is vital for proper analysis of a backpacking situation or making realistic plans.

Physical Perception

Physical perception can be pragmatically described as your basic understanding of when it is better to back-off and take a break, as opposed to bearing down and pushing through. Physical perception is the ability to understand the physical consequences of your exercise decisions (and eventually your hiking decisions), and will give you the self-knowledge to accurately predict the trajectory of your physical status over the course of your walks and runs, and eventually over the miles and days of your long distance backpacking trips across the High Sierra.

Understanding your body's capabilities before you hit the trail is vital to properly planning your backpacking trips. Monitoring your physical status as you hike the trails will allow you to modify your hiking plan to prevent you from breaking down during the trip.

After you gain some physical self-awareness and fitness you will be able to feel how your body and metabolism are responding to one step, to one mile, to one full hour of backpacking, and finally, one full day on the trail. This feedback is going to give you all the information you will need to predict exactly how your body will respond to every subsequent step along each subsequent mile for all of the days left in your backpacking trip.

Though backpacking is potentially physically grueling, this Fitness Section is dedicated to reducing those episodes to a meaningful handful. Experiences you will never forget.

Few activities have the potential to change the way you feel, the way you think, and the way you live. Rather than go through the brutal physical transition from city to nature and back to city over and over again as you continue to backpack, I strongly suggest that you maintain good fitness and sharp physical perception as a regular part of your life.

The Real Deal

Backpacking is a physical transformer, a time machine, a mirror, a trip through the garden of eden, a test, and a torture chamber, and can be all of these things at the same time or in rapid sequence. Backpacking will will reflect fundamental elements of beauty, joy, nature, society and pain through your mind and body. Being reasonably fit will avoid having the torture and pain predominate during your voyage, so the rest of the experiences can properly develop.

This whole fitness section is designed to give you a heads-up about the necessary physical work you must do while in "civilization" to obtain and maintain deep access to Nature without too much pain.

Therefore this section is dedicated to all of those who want to see the beauty of nature without too much brutality, and redirecting all the brutal suffering of unprepared backpackers I've seen on the trail to to the most beautiful experiences of their lives.

As you will most likely experience both the beauty and the brutality of the trail, I hope this section will help keep these experiences in context, and you able to continue on down the trail.

Understanding your level of fitness will help you properly set-up your daily hiking mileage, re supply options, and days off suited to match your specific physical capabilities and needs.

Truth and Consequences

The Loss of Skills

A brief physical history

The Mechanism

People in the US are in terrible physical and perceptive condition, and their ability to observe and engage their environment is generally very limited.

Our basic physical assets, our physical and perceptive skills degraded considerably when the majority of our population eliminated the natural environment from any part of their daily lives. This happened on the West Coast with the massive concentration and growth of urban centers during the past forty years. An American can now live almost their whole life indoors, while seated, within the vastness of a mega city far distant from nature.

This physical fitness section seeks to restore our basic physical and perceptive assets through physical re-engagement with the natural environment. My efforts are swimming against the tide of our never-ending urban expansion.

This recent loss of natural engagement on the West Coast of the US has also degraded our internal and external perceptive skills, as well as our physical skills. The people on the West Coast of the US have gotten fat and become disengaged from their environment and each other during one generation, within the span of one lifetime.

This is not a "legacy" we can be proud of passing along to subsequent generations of Americans.

The Situation: Fighting against Degraded Physical and Perceptive Skills

This fitness section will "set the table" so you have the internal physical preparation and the external perceptive skills to put yourself in a position to observe and reflect the operating logic of life on the trail, within nature, and that is buried within you, somewhere.

What you will see on the trail and in nature is quite different than the operating logic of our society within our cities, and especially within our mega cities. Your other option is getting into physical and perceptive shape on the trail, which never works out well. Though you may do it, you will suffer unnecessarily and miss a lot of cool detail in the environment around you due to the deep distractions of suffering. Getting in shape and sharp has other beneficial effects.

Trail Values

I believe perceptive skills tuned through physical engagement with nature play a critical role in formulating an individual's frame of reference and judgment. Engaging directly with nature provides a framework for interpreting experience that allows individuals to give a broader "context" to the character and values of their social experiences when they return to the social world.

This is because I believe that an individual's basic relationship with nature offers the ultimate reference point for measuring themselves, assessing their society, and understanding their relationship to society.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of individuals in our country have lost their personal fitness, they have absolutely no physical relationship with nature, and their social frame of reference has devolved down to nothing more than the pursuit of crude social dominance, crude self-gratifications, personal wealth and conspicuous consumption, of "success" as currently defined by our political and economic leadership.

These terms of "success" have proved problematic. The vast majority of "us" now have "values" and practices that are completely contradictory to the values and practices necessary to sustain a healthy body, a healthy ecosystem in the United States, a healthy economy, and we long ago left behind a healthy democratic society in hot pursuit of these false values.

Consequences of Disabling our Physical and Perceptive Mechanism: Evolution and Devolution

America's fundamental natural and perceptive skills began to seriously degrade when we removed ourselves from a predominantly natural context in the USA during the late 1880s. Twain called it The Gilded Age, and the values and practices born in this era did deep damage to America's values and physical beauty. You can track this destructive trend through American politics, economics, demographics, and literature. Booth Tarkington depicted the destruction of the American pattern of development in his scathing novel The Turmoil. The situation we find ourselves in today has evolved and grown through less than a century into the disaster we find ourselves confronting today.

The subsequent spread of these vast multi-million person mega cities across the country since then, up through the current era, has almost totally replaced every American's access to natural experiences and engagement with harsh social experiences all contained and constrained within a completely man-man physical environment. The changes in our physical environment has also altered, one could say lobotomized, our nations's fundamental principals.

A successful American life, once defined as your personal "life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness" is now defined monetarily, independent of your personal values.

America's growth of mega cities are the physical manifestations of corrupted spiritual and political values. These corrupted political and spiritual values have driven over a century of policy decisions that have put irresponsible growth and profits before our most fundamental democratic political principals and social practices. These corruptions have damaged our national character, have radically diminished our perceptive skills, and have ultimately devolved our average "citizen's" fundamental political principals to nothing more than a "consumer" in a corporate state. This corporate pursuit of endless growth, and the urban dweller's pursuit of endless consumption has almost completely destroyed the physical health and perceptive skills of Americans.

To offer a solid foundation for your principals you must first construct a physical and perceptive base for them. Backpacking will assist this endeavor.

We have created urban environments that neglect our ancient natural physical and perceptive assets. We have created a social "box," a social environment for ourselves that does not entertain or nourish our most basic physical, perceptive, and psychological needs. Far too many folk have gone both physically and spiritually sour in this environment.

As we have evolved a more and more massive and sophisticated society the "average" American "Citizen" has devolved into nothing more than yet another mindless member of our grasping herd of idiot urban "consumers."

The evolution of corporate consumer society has devolved the individual American.

Massive urban concentrations of populations are nothing new. They have formed since the rise of the first ancient city-states, and continued through the evolution of the Greek and Roman Empires, to the global tyranny of the British. We once despised and defied the British Empire, until our democracy fell, and we replaced them!

That was then, this is now

Until recent decades urban populations had always been a small percentage of our nation's, and the world's historical populations. Rural dominance offered hidden benefits that have now been lost.

The overwhelming preponderance of rural populations in every nation have always acted as a repository of common sense, wisdom, and social values while also acting as a social and economic anchor, holding the loftiest aspirations of the urban greedy in check. That is no longer the case in the United States nor around the the world today.

The majority of humans are living in urban areas for the first time in human history, dependent upon each other in complex abusive social, economic, and political relationships that are completely disconnected and disengaged from nature, physical fitness, basic observational skills, and democratic political principals.

Though we talk endlessly about how we are "independent individuals," our urban populations are completely dependent on complex global logistical chains for their simplest needs.

Now that massive urban populations have completely overwhelmed our country, we have completely lost the personal and political restraints "country" values and rural populations once represented. The common sense, wisdom, and the shared values that once held Americans together as a nation under common political values and practices have disappeared under the complete domination of urban consumers packed into massive mega cities.

The only shared personal reality among urban "Americans" today is their shared traits of mutual fear and greed, depending on if they feel dominant or submissive in a given situation.

Politically, this radical change in the disposition of our culture has brought about a radical change in who runs society. The rise of the mega cities has completely put aside the rural values, the rural wisdom, and rural common sense that gave birth to our Revolution, Constitution, and Bill of Rights, and once held the urban business elites somewhat in check. The Robber Baron's wealth and power was sufficient to flip the bottom-up flow of power in our Constitutional democracy to a top-down structure of power dominated by a new class of industrial aristocracy served by a corporate elite. We are now living in the Age of the Businessman, and all of its nasty consequences.

This change in demographics and leadership has in turn has changed the terms of American "Success." From a country based on the soveregin individual determining their own definition of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," we have been fed an "American Dream" based on the pursuit of wealth and power, through service to the wealthy and powerful who control our nation.

Generally, the terms of "Success" of the world's rural populations are quite different from the terms of "Success" of urban consumer populations and their business elites.

Our common terms of social success have been simplified by urban living and our business leaders down to mutual pursuit of individual self-gratification. This has not just been a problem for the US and its principals and practices. The problems of growing urban consumer mega cities are tearing the whole world apart, and setting rural wisdom and restraints aside around the world.

During the last 150 years larger and larger numbers of humans began spending their whole lives in mega cities surrounded by nothing natural. The majority of our global population now has no natural context. The majority of the world population alive today will spend the entirety of their lives surrounded by asphalt, concrete, and the noises and smells of millions and millions of other mutually selfish and greedy people.

The urban idiots have been unleashed around the world, their greed is now unchecked, and apparently un-checkable by any social or political restraint short of total collapse of their corrupt economy or our environment. We are in real trouble. I have a better idea.

Let's Go the Other Way

Let's go the other way. Let's engage our bodies, our lost perceptive skills, our natural environment, and each other. Let's balance our society and our experiences within nature. Let's stop feeding the growth of mega cities, and bring our population down to the levels our environment and political principals can easily support, with the majority of our population living within easy reach of a natural environment.

Let's go for endless balance, rather than endless growth. The former will bring endless an endless wealth of wisdom and rich experience, while the latter will bring endless poverty of mind, body, and environment.

The strength and wisdom we need to fix this mess is within each of us, all around us in the natural world, and contained within the genesis of our country. The question is, "do we have the character and persistence required to access our true natural and political legacy, and the balls to use it?" If not, our failures in nature and the corruption within the soul of our society will balance this mess out itself.

Being "good" and "doing good" are going to be two of the hardest and most thankless jobs on this planet for the next few decades.

Life on the trail shows that living well, that life itself, is its own reward.

Consequences of Mega City Culture

Experiences in nature, let alone any physical engagement with nature are no longer factors in putting together the average "American's" life, experiences, or values. This has had a very negative effect on our society, and especially on the development of "our" kids.

This lack of a natural frame of reference has contributed to reducing American Values and Practices down to nothing more than a series of crude material and emotional gratifications. It starts early.

Our kids favorite "pastimes" are shopping and eating. Their favorite "activity" is video games and the constant absorption of digital entertainment. You rarely see anyone below 30 who's attention is not directed to their phone or to their portable internet connection. If not "connected," the average young person has self-isolated themselves from their surroundings with a personal music device.

This life of disconnection and constant gratification has already dulled our minds, weakened our bodies, while our obese waistlines have swelled to record girths for every age group. Armies of fat kids are more connected to the internet and social networking activities than real social activities and their real environment.

Add the reality of social disconnection and isolation in our mega cities to the other elements of the physical and emotional terrain of urban life, and a terrifying picture emerges. The lack of physical and intellectual education in dangerous school systems, the lack of economic opportunity before the economic meltdown in 2008 (and none afterward) begin to paint a grim picture of the status of American society.

I'm not talking about the conditions of the massive poor population we have intentionally created during the last forty years. We did that intentionally. I'm talking about our middle class's lack of any social, physical, political, or economic security at all. If you did not see that the former led to the latter, you were either not watching or not honest.

Nature shows us something different about itself and each other than our buisness leaders. I strongly suggest that you get your kids some natural experience to at least develop their physical and perceptive assets in these chaotic times.

Greed and irresponsible growth are not a basis for social stability or a good life, despite the continual lies of the corporations, their lapdog press, and their corrupt politicians. Life on the trail shows us why we depend on each other, while the corruption of our "society" shows us why we distrust each other.

End Game

People who have worked hard for decades are finding out that everything they worked for, their house, their retirement program, and their 401Ks are worthless. You could say that they have been robbed. Or you could say they robbed themselves... Don't expect security when your lifetime of work, your life's savings, and your country's most fundamental principals were all based on lies and deceptions. Our polity, and therefore our economy only work for the most powerful players after we lost a government soundly founded on America's Constitutional political ethics and principals.

Backpacking counters these grim realities at their beginning and their end. Backpacking trains kids early to honesty, hard work, and simple pleasures. At the end of the day backpacking represents the deep emotional satisfaction honest living brings.

Backpacking shows how society can be both the foundation of individual freedom and security, rather than the source of unending dependence and insecurity. Backpacking shows you what you really need, as opposed to what you think you need.

Backpacking shows you what is most important in life, and gives us a glimpse of what we can be.

What we Are

Rather than understanding the simplicity of enjoying the fundamental pleasures of being alive and honestly engaged with nature and each other, the vast majority of urban "Americans" have come to distill life down to the material pursuit of individual selfish gratification, gross material consumption highlighted by excessive personal displays of wealth, vanity, prestige and "power."

These changes have have created an urban environment that is not just bad for our minds and bodies, it's frkn unsafe. Our massive mega cities are bad for us. They are bad for our bodies. They are bad for our minds. They are bad for our spirit and our principals.

We have generally become shallow individuals pursuing cheap gratifications in a hollow society. We can do much better than this!

This behavior has degraded us all. Now it has seriously damaged our polity, our economy, our personal health and our ecology. You can do your part to fix this mess by fixing yourself. The first step is to put yourself back into shape and then put yourself into a context suitable to the grandeur of nature you were born into.

Your main asset when backpacking is you, consisting of your physical capabilities, your perception, and your experiences. You started with these assets, and will end your trip with each being deeply enriched. These assets are the fundamental elements expressing your values when engaging either nature or society, and how you use them will be the final measure of your influence during your lifetime.

Backpacking orders these assets.

The Corporate Reality and your personal Return to Solid Values and real Experiences

The result of our pursuit of cheap self-gratification has transformed our beautiful natural environment into massive urban crap-holes which have made the average American's fundamental physical, observational, and intellectual skills irrelevant to any of our contemporary practices of industrial production and mass consumption of preprocessed crap. Food Crap. Media Crap. Political Crap. Fat people full of crap.

If this Crap Fest has left you both physically, politically, and spiritually dissatisfied, if not empty, it may be time for you to get in shape and get engaged with the real world of man in nature.

Some people have responded to our empty-hearted society by joining the "church of exercise," dedicating themselves to exercising with all of the fervor of a religious zealot, or a common crackhead. Though good for you, exercise for exercise's sake alone appears to me to be a dead-end.

Exercise for exercise's sake alone is like understanding the tool that brings beauty, without understanding the beauty this tool brings. Though exercise generally counters the symptoms of the problem, (fat-lazy-stupid society), it does not address the root problem, which I see as us being disengaged from nature and each other. Exercise does not address this problem.

Exercise will sharpen your physical tools and make you ready for nature, but you must put these tools to use in nature and engage them to find the true purpose and amazing riches your physical and perceptive assets will bring you. There's treasure in them there hills! I mean skills... I mean that you've got to put your skills into those hills...

The vast majority of the American population has not responded to the growth of the sedentary life with neurotic exercise as some have, but have instead become incredibly fat, lazy, and even further disconnected from the natural environment.

I propose that you exercise with a purpose while you are in "civilization," and that purpose be to maintain, if not restore your ability to physically, perceptively, and spiritually connect with nature.

This site is my effort to give each of you the basic physical and perceptive tools to individually restore your personal legacy: the deep physical and spiritual satisfaction that engaging with nature will bring you. This trip starts from the bottom up, one bloody step at a time, from the depths of injury or lengthy inactivity.

This site will lead you to the fitness necessary for the trail, but you are going to have to do the hard work to put yourself in the physical and perceptive shape to make this trip of ours physically rewarding and spiritually valuable to you.

My hope is that you will come back from nature ready to contribute to a better society in real ways.

Top of Page

Restoration of Skills

Restoration of Skills

Nature, thought greatly diminished and really beaten up, is still out there.

Travel through nature will draw out the natural skills it so long ago endowed you with, if you let it, and nature will show you why we humans, and you personally, possess the particular physical and observational assets we enjoy.

We are just one part of a grand living natural puzzle. Our particular skills, our particular role in life fits perfectly within nature's context. But that's not enough.

As abstract creatures we have the capability to choose the role we play in life, to choose the values we live by, and our choices drive modifications to the environment which automatically reflects the wisdom and values, or the lack of them, behind our choices.

The failure of our values is easy to see: the pathetic status of our environment is a constant measurement of our choices. The social dangers in our cities, the open corruption of our politicians, and the destruction of our natural environment all reflect the surging responses, the failures of nature and breakdown of society caused by our own ignorance, greed, and brutality. We have created an incredibly dangerous situation.

Karma is a bitch.

Exercise is your individual "ticket" back into re-engagement with nature, if you point it that way. The following program is my own, developed over decades of injury, recovery, re-injury, and re-recovery. Fitness and engaging nature is a never ending cycle of ups and downs.

Thus my program is cyclic in nature, starting at the base point of injury or extended lethargy, with the goal of rest and healing the injury, then on to stretching and walking, and finally again running and lifting our way back up to top levels of fitness.

Those of you who have gone through this before realize how difficult and painful recovery can be. Thus I advise a very careful and slow approach to recovery, focusing on self-analysis and feed back while gradually building the long-term exercise habits that will be your foundation for restoring a life of long distance backpacking and natural engagement.

It's a long, difficult, and sometimes painful trip back to nature, but well worth all these difficulties. You will suffer a lot more over the long term if you don't work, than if you do. In any case, the rewards far exceed difficulties, but you must show great care not to damage yourself further, or damage yourself at all, while starting a training program.

Engaging nature, ourselves, and each other is why we're here, if you forgot. This is not a competition or a contest, so relax. Being rich in mind, body, and spirit is not a race. We are building fitness over the long-term, so there is no reason to endanger yourself with overwork. The key to our strength, endurance, and fitness is going to be based on our constant steady work, our careful observation and analysis of our injury and metabolism, ane is not based on throwing ourselves into occasional bouts of frenzied exercise.

But work you must, and you must take the first steps, which are the hardest. Our urban lifestyle has moved us far away from any balance with nature, so it has become incumbent upon each of us as individual citizens, and as humans, to put the first foot forward on the trail back to nature. Discretion is the better part of valor. You risk re injury if you overdo it, so approach your fitness program as a gradual development of strength and endurance over the long-term.

Being determined is good, if you use your determination to stop yourself from exercising when your injuries are in danger, as often as you use determination to press through lazy moments. A successful program is very achievable and rewarding if you carefully avoid injury while training. The rewards of achieving physical and perceptive fitness can change your life.

One reality, nature, is required to give context and meaning to the other reality, the urban crap hole. These two "forces" are locked in mortal combat. One is going to destroy the other, and I would not bet against nature, even when the old girl looks down. Especially when the old girl is down... I suggest that you seek nature out on its own terms before it comes for us in our cities on its terms.

Your fitness program will put you into position to see nature for yourself, and make your own judgments.

You've got to put in the blood, sweat, and tears required to balance your relationship between injury and health, inactivity and activity, society and nature, while making sure that your efforts restore and strengthen your previous injuries, rather than inflame them.

So take it slow and steady.

***

The physical practices described below and on the following pages are designed to get and keep you moving across a wide variety of natural terrains while maintaining the strength and presence of mind and body to allow you to observe, understand, and navigate safely as you travel.

For the rest of your life.

Let's get it on.

Top of Page

Mountain Conditioning - Mountain Planning

	The Silver King Creek ford.				Ari Springing off the root ball!
	Ari at the end of the root ball.				Toiyabe National Forest, Carson-Iceberg Wilderness.

***

Besides its physical, perceptive, and spiritual utility, physical fitness is an important practical part of planning your Lake Tahoe to Mount Whitney backpacking trip, or any other hiking trip.

Your physical preparation will allow you to understand your level of fitness. This understanding will allow you to realistically plan your daily mileage.

Your planned daily mileage will allow you to accurately estimate the amount of days it will take to hike between resupply points.

Your real real daily mileage capacity will determine how much food you will actually need to feed yourself between each re-supply point down the trail.

Your real daily mileage capacity vs your planned daily mileage capacity can vary significantly. If you have not validated and tested your actual capacities through physical training and preparation you cannot make reliable trip plans.

Top of Page

Mountain Conditioning: Joy of Engagement

Ekulytes sums it up very succinctly:

Backpacking is good for you!

Top of Page

Mountain Conditioning: Couch to the Mountaintop

In the following sections I describe the "couch to the mountains" program I use to bring myself back to the level of conditioning necessary to make the least painful transition from the sedentary world of modern conveniences to a life of carrying all of your necessities in a heavy pack over difficult terrains for long distances.

The goal is to carry your pack though rain and shine, through thick and thin air, up big climbs and down steep mountains through meadows and forests, and across rivers. Your ability to be self contained for great distances across all terrains and weather conditions will bring you into the terrain that our ancestors navigated long before the dawn of history.

My personal goal is to be able to survive and prosper through the physical challenges of backpacking the length of the spine of the High Sierra between Lake Tahoe and Mount Whitney while observing everything as I hike, to act as the best possible human mirror of the terrain as I walk through.

If I am struggling to survive the weight of the pack and the thinness of the air, I have much less energy for observation and reflection. If I am fit and strong I have much more energy to dedicate to observation and analysis. A backpacking trip can span a wide range of experience, from fear and pain through deep satisfaction and great pleasure.

Poor physical conditioning will enslave and demand your perception be tightly focused onto surviving the rigors and pains of each individual step you take. Excellent physical fitness will allow your body to hike the trail while your mind reflects the terrain you are passing through.

At the inevitable low-points of backpacking, your fitness level will determine how much you are going to suffer, which is also going to determine the character of your trip. A fundamental base-level of fitness is required to prevent your trip becoming an exercise in surviving excessive pain.

As my energy level fluctuates, so too does my pace. I always adjust my pace to suit my status. When my energy is taxed over many days of long miles over hard terrain, I establish the pace required to suit the circumstance. This pace is determined by my base level of fitness, whatever level that may be. If fit, my pace is fast, and if unfit my pace is restrained.

I call it "Compound Al." Have you ever seen an old jeep in the gear called "compound low?" When I am at the end of my rope, I set the trail pace that I can hold all day long for as many days as are necessary, without overstraining myself. I call this pace "Compound Al." It is the pace I take today so I can hike tomorrow, and the day after...

The goal of this fitness section is to bring each of us to the level of physical fitness and physical awareness so we can ascertain, establish, and maintain our own reliable constant pace from Sunrise to Sunset for many days with enough extra physical capacity to support full perception and observation, engagement, and enjoyment of the terrain.

Such simple goals.

Top of Page

Let's Get Started

Mountain Conditioning: Your Personal Approach

The Fundamental Skills of Physical Fitness

We all gotta start somewhere...

YOUR Personal Physical History

I am forced to take a flexible approach to fitness. You should too. Each of us must know our current physical status to know where to begin our fitness program. Each of us has a particular physical history that must be reckoned with as we recover from injury or build a new program.

You must tailor your approach to restoring your fitness if you have to accommodate Bad Feet, Bad Knees, elbow and wrist problems, a Trick shoulder or a Bad Back. None of the above, or all of the above! No matter. You can work through almost anything if you take a careful and sensitive approach.

Each element of your physical history is going to require you take a considered approach to fitness. This is going to require flexibility with your program and the sensitivity to carefully monitor the status of your body as it responds to stretching and your first exercises.

You are going to need to "counter," to respond to each element of your physical history. Back injury requires floor exercises, sit ups, and proper back stretching. A bad knee requires a cycle of rest, range of motion exercises, and careful road work to bring up strength and endurance while controlling pain. Bad feet respond well to massage and proper rest. It is critical that your feet are properly geared up to support your foot structure.

Injuries can be managed and strengthened up to full serviceability sufficient for long distance backpacking on the Sierra Crest between Lake Tahoe and Mount Whitney. I have completed this hike four times after compiling a substantial laundry list of serious injuries.

Restoring fitness through a storm of injuries requires that you specifically work and maintain your previously injured parts, use great sensitivity to accurately track the status of your previous injuries, and have the flexibility with your fitness program required to tailor your program to suit the current status of your injury.

It's like Willie Nelson says, "Ya gotta know when to hold 'em, and when to fold 'em."

Our Flexible Response

You must know the difference between a chronic pain that is manageable for exercise, and an acute pain the requires full cessation of exercise, treatment of swelling and inflammation with anti-inflammatory drugs, massage, hot or cold treatments as required, and rest.

You must know when the chronic pain is transforming itself into an acute episode, and have the wisdom to stop exercising.

You must also be able to understand when the acute episode is fading into chronic pain, and respond with increasing exercise and flexibility stretching.

My History

My flexible approach to fitness began when I fractured my kneecap into six pieces when I was 17. The naval surgeons wanted to remove my Left kneecap and replace it with a teflon model.

Though I was just 17, I was very skeptical of removing my kneecap, and I delayed the surgery. During that delay I observed a number of Marines from the fleet and various units undergo the same surgery. They went in with bad knees, they came out of surgery crippled. I refused the surgery, which resulted in a whole lot of hassle.

The Marines who took the surgery got a 30% disability discharge, and I got the run-around.

At around age 28 I could finally get the knee working again.

Since I could not walk, run, or hike-off my energies between ages 17 & 28, I took to road racing great big Jap motorcycles. F1 and Superbikes. First the other riders, then the cops, and finally the clubs. While road racing motorcycles with the American Federation of Motorcycles here on the West Coast, I took repeated high impact injuries over a period of years.

But I never was busted or run over by a car while racing on the track! There were always extra dangers on the streets that caused me to defer speed to safety. Good clean fun.

I once participated in a Superbike Race, and two other races that day, with three broken bones. I think I came in third in the Superbike and F1 Races, second in the Battle of the Twins. It was an unwise decision. The stresses of racing on the improperly set bones seriously hindered healing, and directly contributed to long-term wrist and shoulder problems. I was young and very aggressive.

Between age 17 and 52 I did 7 violent shoulder dislocations, one compound fracture, broke both my lower R arm bones lengthwise from the wrist, herniated a disc, broke bunches of ribs (I have two sternums, on natural and one caused by a broken rib healing funny...) and broke two other bones. Hummm...I also have taken around 90 stitches.

Treating my broken lower Right arm bones at Kaiser was a real challenge. I had broken both lower arm bones lengthwise through the ball joints towards the elbow. The resulting surface roughness on the ball joints deteriorated the wrist joint to the point the ortho surgeon at Kaiser insisted that fusing the wrist was the only solution. I chose cortisone and exercise.

Though I sometimes have to brace-up my R wrist to properly use ski poles, it works fairly well for the insults it has suffered.

Back to the Trail

At age 28 I came to the realization that I could no longer injure my shoulders, elbows and wrists if I wanted to continue to use them in the future. I also understood that the years of acute pain in my knee had finally moderated to a chronic pain level. I could now begin to strengthen the knee and get back on the trail, though with a whole raft of new injuries to deal with.

I traded in my bikes for a backpack. (The pack was in the closet...) I still had the old first-generation aluminum Camp Trails external framed pack from my last trips when I was 17.

The ever changing conditions of my wide range of previous injuries demand that I take a balanced and flexible approach to fitness, to be able to carry the heavy backpack for great distances in all seasons.

My friends had all switched to gore tex in the early '70s, but I had maintained wool and vented windbreakers. Today's "heavyweight" backpacker is yesterday's lightweight backpacker! I don't sweat carrying a heavy Summer backpack because my goal is to be able to easily carry the heavy backpack required for safe Winter snow travel. A heavy Summer backpack makes for easy transitions to Winter backpacking.

I have to work the legs and lungs into aerobic fitness, but without irritating my knees. I have to strengthen my shoulders to carry heavy loads without dislocating or triggering chronic shoulder pain. I have to keep my back and hips flexible enough to carry massive weights for long distances over high altitudes without sciatica and hernia, and without breaking my back.

If I can get my bag of bones on the trail, so can you. But, my injuries are not "bone-to-bone." If you have lost the cartiledge, you are in trouble.

Recent History

2006: complete L knee failure, serious L hip issues. VA issues Cyclobenzaprine (Flexeril), which induced atrial fibrillation. Ibroprofen burned a hole in my stomach. You may see how this injury spiraled out of control. One drug the VA gave me triggered AF, which is a nightmare. Another burned a hole in my stomach. After arriving at the VA with knee and hip problems, I soon added heart and stomach problems to the list.

I started with orthopedic issues, and soon had a full plate of secondary issues triggered by the treatments themselves. Then the VA said I was "crazy" when I reported my serious heart problems, and tried to get me to take anti-anxiety drugs! I refused. Many months later a VA appointment lined up with an AF episode, proving what the VA had called "anxiety" was actually AF.

Thus I recommend that you use extreme caution with all the drugs prescribed and ms-prescribed by the doctors. Check them carefully for side effects before using them, take the drugs according to instructions. Immediately quit taking any drug if weird things begin happening to you.

2007: Popped Ligament in R Knee while trying to exercise-recover from 2006 L knee and hip problems: My lower Right leg swung outward!! The whole year of 2007 was taken up by recovering, treating, and finally beginning to be able to train up both knees and my L hip.

2008: Back on the trail, back to training.

2009: Tahoe to Whitney #4 during the Summer, and the Tahoe to Yosemite during Fall.

2011: Frostbite. Currently in rehab as of September 9, 2011.

Conclusion

Work Works.

Top of Page

2011: Annus Horribilis

(See: Injury Recovery & Recovery from Frostbite)

Back in the ER. Damn. On Jan 5 2011 the combined medical staff at the VA urgent care clinic in Oakland California concluded that I was going to lose at least the two biggest toes, if not the whole front of my Right foot. I told them that they were wrong.

I had done fine during a four night Winter Backpacking trip in the Northern High Sierra. Problems occurred hitch-hiking out of the Lake Tahoe Basin down the Western flank of the Sierra. I had the proper gear for hiking through deep cold snow. I had the proper gear for standing around in camp during the long nights. But I did not have the gear to stand idle alongside the snow and slush covered Highway 50 roadside hitching out. Damn.

Arriving at the critical care unit of the Oakland VA a few days later the doctors and medical personnel drew a line across the front of my foot, and I washed it off. I told the combined medical staff that they were absolutely wrong, and that I would lose no toes, and that I would fully recover.

They were not convinced, though they hoped I was correct.

Rather than checking into the hospital for an amputation, I went home to begin a long, painful, and tedious set of treatments and therapies I devised to restore circulation, save skin, and restore degraded soft tissues as well as recover bummed-out bones. The medical staff at the VA figured I'd be convinced to amputate when the front of my foot turned black and started to fall off, while I figured they would be convinced when I restored nice fresh pink skin.

June 22, 2011

After 27 weeks of recover, therapy, and exercise the surgeons who insisted that I would lose two toes, and who also said two weeks ago that I should still cut off my big toe, have just now stated that I would recover fully.

I was told that I had been correct in my early analysis, that my treatment program had worked exceptionally well, and that they had all learned much about frostbite from my program.

As of right now the only sign of frostbite is that I have is a small patch of dead skin at the tip of my right big toe. And my toes are in screaming pain. The patch of black dead skin still covers a bit of bone sticking out of the skin, but it is fully surrounded by growing skin. Hey...not a problem.

(Broken off on September 5 2011. Full Frostbite Recovery Page.)

I did not say this worked out perfectly! Other than that one enduring detail, and continual extreme pain, it is getting hard to see the difference between my feet at this point in time, without close inspection. This is a bit deceptive as much of the injury was internal, and not visible to the eye.

I also suffered "structural" damage, meaning the internal damage to the soft tissues in the front of my foot and my toes. I damaged the internal circulation, nerves, as well as starved the ligaments, tendons, muscles, and bones in the front of my foot of 02.

This structural damage has healed about 50% from the original injury. and are all parts of my foot are responding well to repeated exercise, and I anticipate the foot will eventually return to full strength.

Mid June 2011

As I am writing this during mid-June of 2011 I am trying to restore as much of my aerobic fitness as possible while working on healing the internal structural damage in the front of my foot. Hot water treatments are supplemented by massage and range of motion exercises.

In the meantime as I am working on the structure of my foot I am also waiting for the hole in the end of my big toe to finally heal and seal up.

I have been walking up to 5.5 miles in the hills, pain and after-exercise consequences permitting.

The final healing of the hole in the tip of my toe is dependent upon the very slow rate of speed that skin grows. It is like watching molasses flow on a cold day. Patience is the key.

But the skin is growing over the "exposed" bone of my big toe, and under the cap of dead skin sitting above the bone.

Grim Shit.

You better believe that this has caused me to come up with a few new twists to my fitness program.

August 2011

Up to 7 miles of walking-jogging. Exercise-Rehab program under way at fullest speed possible.

My point here is that you start your program from where you are. I have. Again.

Top of Page

The program

It's real basic: flexibility, endurance, and strength.

The Goal

As our goal is to restore our ability to backpack long distances in the High Sierra, our program starts with stretching and walking. As our goal is to walk long distances with a heavy pack, we will also eventually require sufficient upper and lower body strength to support the pack. As our backpacking path will take us over a variety of obstacles and terrains while carrying this heavy load, we must have both the flexibility and core strength to bear this load at odd angles.

The basic elements of the program are simple:

1> Stretching and Walking: Injury recovery, and beginning from sedentairy state.

2> Walking into jogging: Slow progress to top levels of fitness.

3> Sit ups and floor exercises: Core strength and flexibility.

4> Weight Lifting: Upper body strength.

Getting your body to respond with increasing flexibility, strength, and endurance is a little more complex.

Over a number of decades I've developed my own personal program with specific standards and goals for endurance, strength, and flexibility. I have come to understand how my body will react to high altitude backpacking when I am at optimal and in less than optimal conditioning.

Over a lifetime of repeated injuries I have come to understand how to assess and restore fitness to my injured parts and counter the damage that inactivity after injury brings. When I am hitting the trail in less than ideal conditions, or I am taking my first walks after re injuring my knee, I understand that I have to start from where my degree of injury and fitness allows. You too must find the proper exercise and stretching to honestly suit your current status.

Let's find It

This program is designed to show you how to assess your injuries, develop a practical program to recover, and finally filling out the program with strength and aerobics exercises to bring yourself back to the highest degree of fitness you are capable of attaining. This approach also suits those of you who are out of conditioning due to simple apathy and living a sedentary lifestyle.

You can start at the beginning of recovering from an injury, or you can pick up the program at higher levels, depending on your current level of fitness.

Those of us recovering from injury and long-term inactivity have a real need to know what level of performance we are capable of, and then how to work up our flexibility, strength and endurance from that point to develop the conditioning necessary for successful long distance High Sierra backpacking.

Along the way towards developing long distance backpacking fitness we will do "starter" trips to check out our physical capabilities capabilities as well as to help us develop the trail and camp skills necessary to successfully deploy our gear.

This fitness section and the related skills sections will allow you to find all the information you will need about yourself and your physical capabilities before you strap on the pack and hit the High Sierra Trails. These exercise sessions will generate the information that will allow you to make realistic plans for realistic trips for your level of fitness. Trust me when I say that gaining this knowledge during training in civilization will save you a lot of pain on the trail.

This means that the goal of this Physical Fitness section is as much to ascertain the status of injury and general fitness as it is to make yourself ready for long distance backpacking along the Sierra Nevada Crest.

My ideal conditioning regime for backpacking is a combination of jogging, weight lifting, some floor exercises, and stretching. Let's look at how this program looks when it's running well, and I'm in top shape.

The Standards

Top to bottom Fitness

The Top

Weights

The top, being the goal of my program can be simply quantified. I can perform my four free weight exercises at high weights every other day.

They consist of four sets of ten reps each at the bench press at 185 lbs, the curl at around a 117 lbs, the forearm curl at about 40 lbs, and the fly at 12 lbs.

The forearm curl exercise incorporates the military press and the reverse-forearm curl behind the head. The fly also incorporates a "reverse" fly, crossing the over the body, and then back to the fly position.

I find this combination of upper body exercises ideal for prepping the shoulders, neck, and upper spine for carrying a heavy pack over long distances comfortably.

Endurance

I consider myself optimally mountain ready when I can run seven miles in hills over 750 feet of elevation gain in not too much longer than an hour, every other day, on the days I am not lifting weights. I will feel little fatigue, and need very little recovery time after the exercise if I am well conditioned. At my top levels of fitness I feel as if I can run the distance again when I'm done.

Though I am training for walking, I find that the stress-loading of jogging in hilly terrain replicates about the same level of heart and lung stress as walking with a heavy pack.

Flexibility-Core Strength

I do 150 sit ups every day, and execute my stretching program at maximum length for a long time in each position. This is more important than it may seem at first glance. Especially the first time you lean back a bit too far while climbing up over a downed tree blocking the trail.

The stress leveraged by the weight of the pack pulling you backwards while you are hanging off the tree will center in your abdomen, and if your core strength is not up to snuff, you will have a hernia.

The Bottom

On the other side of the coin is getting started again from scratch, either after an extended period of injury or inactivity or both. Sometimes one leads to the other, such as the inactivity following an injury, or inactivity leading to an injury. It goes both ways...

The key is knowing when your injury can be exercised at all without risking re-injury. I identify this as the point when acute pain shifts down to a chronic pain from acute pain levels, and the injured parts can be stretched and exercised without re sparking acute pain.

The approach is the same for injuries to different parts of the body: rest, recover, then gently and gradually rehab the injury, though the specific techniques will be different for each injury. These are the bottom levels of restarting my fitness program after injury.

Weights

After re injuring my shoulders (I have experienced a total of 7 "severe" shoulder dislocations and one compound fracture of the R collarbone.) By a "severe" dislocation I mean a violent dislocation in a high speed or heavy impact accident. I can't count the number of times my shoulders have fallen out of their sockets. I don't even count those as dislocations. They are merely part of recovering from sever dislocations. Eventually you can restore the shoulder muscles, ligaments, and tendons abilities' to hold the shoulder in socket.

At this sad level of conditioning I have to start my bench presses by just going through the motions with an empty bar. After recovering the range of motion without risk of further "slip out" dislocations (as opposed to a "severe" dislocation during an accident, a "slip-out" dislocation will happen when you mover your shoulder across the damaged area of the ball & socket. The ball joint will just fall out of socket.) I begin my sets at 117 pounds.

All of my stretching exercises, even the lower body stretches, incorporate shoulder and arm movements that are good for stretching out the shoulders.

I must constantly monitor my shoulders to prevent the acute pains that indicate I've overworked the critical muscles, tendons, and ligaments holding my shoulders in place. When this happens I must stop lifting until the acute shoulder pains cease.

Endurance

On the endurance front, as it was for strength too, the first thing we must do after injury or inactivity is to stretch the injured parts to restore flexibility, reduce stress, and improve circulation.

As my thing is walking and running, a good part of my stretching program is dedicated to getting the lower body and hips ready to run for miles.

Check out the stretching videos on the Building your Recovery Program page.

Our fist goal is to determine the proper warm-up so we can begin walking with minimum pain. The next goal is to find the maximum distance we can walk without re injuring or triggering acute pain and inflammation, either during the exercise period, or afterward.

Then we have to start bumping up the walking miles and angles of climb and descent as the injury responds to exercise. As we inure our joints to the stresses of impact, and after we have strengthened our injured parts, we can start throwing in little sections of jogging along our walking route.

Soon we will be jogging our whole route, and slowly lengthening it out...

first steps: set you goal

To get ourselves in the minimal shape required for basic backpacking we must get ourselves into the condition necessary to be able to easily walk the daily distance we plan on hiking each day with our pack. Say it is five miles. That comes out to 26,400 feet. The average person covers three feet per stride.

This means that our feet, ankles, knees and hips must be able to take 8800 steps without risking re-injury, tightening up from overwork on the trail, or getting so sore afterward that you cannot walk the next day. Once you can easily walk five miles then you can bump it up.

Walking five miles is good, but not good enough. The extra weight of carrying your pack on the trail will make five miles on the backpacking trail equal to at least 7.5 miles on the trail without a pack.

Each time you reach a distance goal in your walking program, you can either consolidate your gains, or start working towards the next goal. To consolidate your gains I mean that once you reach the goal of repeatedly walking a mile without too much soreness or strain, you can begin to jog sections of the mile walk, until you have jogged the whole mile. Or you can lengthen the distance of your walk as you begin to jog sections of the increased distance.

Heading for the top

From this first mile you can start building up to longer distances bit by bit. Once you hit two or three miles, you should start looking for some hills, elevation changes, and challenging terrain that will put stress on your carriage from a variety of angles, just as you will experience the stresses from a variety of angles on the trail.

My personal goal is to jog 7 miles in hilly terrain without too much strain, lift heavy weights without too much pain, have good core strength when I bend over, and have all my injuries well adjusted to a high degree of stress at high-angle elevations with no more than moderate chronic strains and pains.

This is how I make sense of it all:

1. Walking for Walking's sake

2. Stretching for shape and out of shape

3. Endurance to replicate mountain conditions: jogging and backpacking

4. Weight training for upper body "strap strength"

5. Backpacking fits right in like the key to the lock

Next page: The Fitness Recovery Section

Mountain Conditioning: mind, body, culture...

Notes

Captivated by critters: Caltech and UCLA researchers find humans are wired to respond to animals, Cal Instit Tech, Sept 8, 2011

Urbanization: linking Population, Poverty and Development, UNFPA

Urbanization Trends, Population Reference Bureau

Over one-third of California teens not getting gym classes at school, Sac Bee, June 1, 2011

Backpacker Health News: Running a marathon halts cellular suicide, BMC Physiology, May 10, 2010

Exercise no danger for joints, Journal of Anatomy, Jan 27, 2009

Health and Fitness Reports

The Gilded Age, Project Gutenberg eBook, Mark Twain and Charles Warner, American Publishing Company, Hartford, 1874,

Twain on Tahoe from Roughing It, TahoetoWhitney.com.

More Mark Twain.

Top of Page

Backpacker Forums

Have some good Backpacking Information to relate? Check the Forums or...

Post it on TahoetoWhitney.Org

Post your experiences, comments, or questions about Injury and Fitness Recovery on the Injury Recovery Forum:

Forum: Physical Fitness

Topic: Introduction