Start 2009 with an Epic

Get over the hangover and go big this year. Then make it a tradition

When I left New York City for New Mexico 8 years ago, I learned to love waking up before sunrise on January 1st, schlepping up to the Santa Fe Ski Basin, and then snowshoeing up to the top with my snowboard strapped to my back.

If I timed it right, I’d reach the top at dawn and then ride back down the empty slopes. I did that every year I lived there, and I can tell you there’s no better feeling than starting off a New Year doing something cool. Something that’s good for your health and spirit.

Over the years I learned of other people’s New Years’ traditions. There was the woman who’d hike to the top of the mountain at night and ring in the New Year from 12,000 feet. Then there are these guys here in Colorado Springs who hike 7,000 vertical feet up to the top of 14,144-foot Pikes Peak and launch fireworks at midnight. Then they come down. And they've been doing it since 1922.

While I don’t climb mountains on Jan. 1 these days, I still make it a habit to go outside and do something to get my heart moving. Not to get all spiritual on you, but I find it does a good job grounding me to what’s real: namely, that it’s a big, beautiful world, and I need to get out into it more.

I suggest you try doing the same. At the very least you’ll sweat out your hangover.

On another note, this is my last post on Backpacker.com. I’ve enjoyed the challenge of finding something to write about each week. I’ve learned a lot in the process, and I hope you have as well. Good luck out there and keep dreamin’.

Grant

Image from AdAmAn.org

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Thursday, January 01, 2009 in: Fitness
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Fitness, Health & Life Lessons from 2008

How I ended the year a little wiser than when I started

In no particular order, here are my Top-10 nuggets of fitness, health, and life wisdom culled from 2008's Peak Fitness articles. Whether you agree or disagree with my findings, I've found that they've allowed me to Live the Life, a life I defined as one where I stay in decent enough shape so that when an invitation to adventure slaps me in the head, I'm ready.

1. Supplements (vitamins, etc.) are worthless.
2. Even though I’m nearly 40, I’m still going faster.
3. A salad a day does make me feel better.
4. I need to stop worrying about over-training and start pushing myself harder.
5. Running will add years to my life.
6. The ultimate grocery shopping list doesn’t contain gummy bears.
7. A 4-hour daily commute is no excuse to find time to stay fit.
8. Gage my health by how fast I ride, run, hike, not by the numbers on my scale.
9. A crappy day of exercise or painful activity always trumps doing nothing (unless you injure yourself).
10. Take care of my feet and teeth and my body will take care of me.

Happy New Years!

Grant

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Tuesday, December 30, 2008 in: Fitness, Health
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Got a Cold? Keep Exercising

Study shows that a head cold doesn't reduce performance or recovery

One of my favorite health writers, Gina Kolata of the New York Times, must have gotten her first cold of the winter last week because this week she wrote about exercising with a head cold. I say this because last week’s cold snap (sub-zero temps and a wind-chill to boot), served up my first head cold. And it was such a pain that I decided to quit exercising until it went away.

So I was interested to see what Kolata had dug up. She reported on a Ball State University study where researchers subjected 45 men and women to a cold virus, waited for the symptoms to peak, then conducted treadmill tests on them. In all cases, none of the test subjects saw a drop in lung function or cardiovascular and muscular strength, even though, as one of the exercise physiologist reported, they all felt like crap. Golata goes on to point out that none of the sickies suffered from a longer recovery due to exercising with a cold.

Earlier this year, I pointed out my rules for exercising when sick: If the symptoms are in your neck or higher, keep working out. If they’re below your neck, take as many days as necessary to rest and get better. But, I didn’t realize that one could keep pushing themselves hard with a cold. I’d always figured you needed to dial back the intensity and simply maintain your fitness until the virus worked its way out of your system.

Now, I can’t say you’re going to enjoy exercising with a hacking cough, running nose, and headache, but it’s nice to know that you can.

 

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Friday, December 26, 2008 in: Fitness, Health
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We have proof: warm-ups reduce injuries by almost half

20 minutes to get the blood and body parts moving will keep you in the game

An old, yet oft-ignored piece of advice, “Warm up before you do anything,” may become required protocol now that a new study has put some bite behind it. Earlier this month the British Medical Journal published the results of research on close to 1,900 female soccer players in Norway.  Of the group, a little over 800 were asked to follow a 20-minute routine of slow and speed running, along with key strength, balance and agility exercises. As a result, the women suffered from significantly fewer severe injuries, overuse injuries, and injuries over all.

Sounds great, and if I was playing in a soccer or hockey league, or trying to wake up my body before lining up for the first chair of the morning at the ski hill, I might follow the advice from this study. But that’s a lot of time to take from me. Honestly, I’d rather warm up by doing whatever sport I want, but use the first 20 minutes of a run, ride, hike, climb or whatever to loosen up my joints and muscles. I suspect that I’m not alone. These days, I’m lucky if my entire workout lasts longer than 30 minutes.
While I know that I can gain some benefit from 10-minutes of high-intensity work, I don’t know if it’d be all that satisfying, ya know?

I will admit that I’ve noticed it takes me about 20 minutes for my body to come into form on a run or ride. So maybe the researchers are onto something with their call for such a long ramp-up to full speed, but I have a sneaking suspicion that this long acceleration to full speed has more to do with my age than anything else. 

Whatever the case, this study finally puts some numbers behind a protocol we all sorta knew made sense. If all this study does is cause the warm-up to go from discarded to religion, it'll be a good thing.

Source: Science Daily

 

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Sunday, December 21, 2008 in: Fitness
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The Easiest Diet on Earth

Slim your way through the holidays with this simple diet

Over 18 years and another lifetime ago, I was listening to the radio while delivering pizza on a below freezing Minnesota night, and I heard about this thing called “food combing.” The basic gist goes like this: When you eat meat or protein, don’t eat starch. When you eat starch, don’t eat protein. The diet's premise has something to do with the way our body digest either foods.

I gave it a try for a couple of days, and it seemed to work. I lost some weight, and I seemed to have a little more juice in my step. Although it’s hard to say if that was just due to the diet or because I was conscious of what—and how much—I was eating.

At any rate, I stumbled across this article from a writer in Boston which reminded me of this experiment. Regardless whether you think it works or not based on the physiology, I’ll tell you that it will have you eating better.

Think about it: No more pizza, no more hamburgers, no more nachos, no more cheese and crackers. Cutting out those combinations will shave 100s of cheap calories out of your daily diet and off your holiday party plates.

So let’s recap: If you’re eating meat and dairy, don’t eat starches (wheat, corn, rice, potatoes). If you’re eating starches, don’t eat meat. Oh, and eat mostly fruits and vegetables. Simple.

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Thursday, December 18, 2008 in: Health
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Low-carb diets make you stupid

Study shows that depriving the brain of carbs leads to memory loss

A Tufts University study conducted by professors at the school’s psych department and to be published in the February issue of Appetite found that dieters who eliminated carbs from their meals flamed out on subsequent memory-tests compared to dieters who ate a low-calorie diet which included carbs. Here’s the interesting part: when those carb-deprived stumble-bums started eating carbs again, their cognitive skills came back.

The reason behind this diet-induced idiocy is simple. The brain runs on glucose which is what the body makes from carbohydrates. The faster a person can get glucose to their brain, the sharper their brain function. In contrast, high fat/high protien diets seriously slow down this process. In effect, those on the Atkins diet suffer from a sort of energy brown-out of the brain. They’ve got energy, just not enough to operate at peak power.

OK, now that we know this, I have to inject a note of sanity here. This news doesn’t mean y’all can go out and munch through a plate of blueberry scones to power up your memory before renewing your license at the DMV. Too many of those carbs will just make you fat. Remember people, fruits and vegetables are carbs. Better to put down the bread and heed the Michael Pollan/In Defense of Food, manifesto: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” Eat a salad instead.

In the meantime, feel free to unload all your dark secrets to someone who tells you they’ve been on a no-carb diet for a few weeks. Chances are they won’t remember anything you said. (OK, that’s not true, but I’m obviously not a fan of the no-carb scene. Plus, I feel a bit snarky today.)

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Saturday, December 13, 2008 in: Health
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America's Healthiest Supermarkets

Where to go when you want to shop right

A while back I posted a column on the ultimate shopping list for us active people, and now Health Magazine's taken that a step further and asked nutrition experts to rate the best supermarkets in the land. MSN put together the whole story here.

Any surprises? Not really. Whole Foods walked away with top honors. Trader Joe’s made the list. The one thing I was surprised to see was that Safeway was ranked second. The Ph.D. interviewed in the story commended the store for their expanding produce section and growing organic foods selection, while a nutritionist raved about the store’s online Food Flex program that analyzes a shopper’s purchases based on various “metrics” like low-sodium diet, cholesterol, etc.

I was a bit disturbed to see that the store I grew up on, Vons in California, didn’t even make the list.

Here's the Top 10:

1. Whole Foods
2. Safeway
3. Harris Teeter
4. Trader Joe's
5. Hannaford
6. Albertsons
7. Food Lion
8. Publix Super Markets
9. Pathmark
10. SuperTarget

Well, now we know.

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Wednesday, December 10, 2008 in: Health, Food
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My 'Duh' Moment

This past weekend, my wife was super cool. She hired a babysitter for Saturday morning so that the missus and I could take 3 hours and go for a hike in the mountains. We had an amazing time. In the sun, it was T-shirt-warm despite the snow on the ground. We tried out a new trail that was all but empty for our entire ramble through the woods. It was the perfect example of living the life, a state of being which I’ve been talking about since I began this blog in March. For those of you catching up: Peak Fitness isn’t about training for multi-pitch climbs or 3-week thru hikes. Nope, this blog is about my quest to simply stay healthy and fit enough to enjoy myself in the mountains, on my bikes, and with my family.

So what’s the “duh” moment in this story? Well, it has to do with the fact that this very pleasant hike with my wife was a piece of cake. In fact it was so easy that I started scheming about  when and how I could fit in a 10k run later in the afternoon . You see, I didn’t think I’d gotten any exercise from walking for over two hours up and down 1,200 vertical feet of National Forest trail. At altitude.

Then it hit me while I was weighing the possible negative effects of eating a cinammon bagel slathered with strawberry cream cheese vs. a piece of whole wheat toast and peanut butter (the toast being a better choice if I was going to go running later). “You idiot,” I thought to myself. “The whole reason that you go for runs during lunch and wake up at 5 A.M. to do your 20-minutes of strength training is so that those times that you DO head into the mountains feel like cake. Give yourself a break and start enjoying what you’re fit enough to do.”

And with that, I shut down the nagging voice inside my head saying, “Run, run, RUN!” and had the bagel. And the rest of my son’s which he didn’t eat.

Living the life is good. Especially when you slow down and live it.

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Sunday, December 07, 2008 in: Fitness
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DNA test for your sports gene

A test can now tell you if you have what it takes. It'll also tell you if your kid has it too.

I’ve been waiting a couple of days to write about a front-page story I saw on last Sunday’s New York Times. In short, it spoke about the rise in testing kids as young as two to see if they have the genetic markers to be great power athletes or endurance athletes, or a combitnation of both.  The lead anecdote in the story quotes a well-meaning mother in Boulder, Colorado who says, upon hearing about the test, “I think it would prevent a lot of parental frustration.”

The article goes on to talk about the new industry of gene testing services coming online that can take a swab of your saliva and then figure out if you’ve got the gene for smashmouth football or ultramarathons. At first, I was seething about the article: mostly because I suck at every sport I love, and I’d be pissed if my parents had figured that out before I knew any better and kept signing me up for football every year. If that had happened, I probably never would’ve stumbled on the luxurious mental escape that biking provided me in high school and both biking and running offer to me now.

I don’t know if my life would’ve been better for having my spit decoded back in 1972. For all I know I may have actually thrived and developed differently if I was confident in a sport. Maybe I wouldn’t have needed the escape of those long, solitary bike rides after school each day—yeah right. Like that would’ve altered the trajectory of my life. Something tells me that I would've gradually made my way over to the endurance sports world even if my genes said otherwise.

But I digress. After stewing about this article for a few days, I have to be honest, now I’m curious to know what a test like that could tell me. And I’d be interested to learn how I could take that information and tweak a fitness plan to take advantage of it. I wouldn’t change my interests, mind you. I’m not going to eBay all my bikes simply because a test said I should become a powerlifter. But maybe, just maybe, I’d train differently to take advantage of what I'm supposedly good at.

And after cooling off for a few days, I admit that I can see how a parent might be tempted to submit their kindergartner to a DNA test. As a parent myself, I’d be mildly distraught if, as a different mother from the article puts it, “(m)y son could be a pro football player and I don’t know it?” We always want to give our kids the best opportunities to succeed. It's why we shell out money for private school or a pricey mortgage for a house in a good school district. That's just what parents do. At least the ones I know.

 

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Wednesday, December 03, 2008 in: Fitness
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Tips for Living Past 100 from Edna Parker

Last week the world’s oldest woman, Edna Parker, passed away at age 115. While I’m sure her attitude about life played a dominate role in her longevity, I was curious to see that it was also her active life that helped her roll along for over 100 years.  According to her grandson, Don Parker, “she would be pushing other patients in their wheelchairs” whenever he went to visit. No doubt many of those patients were decades younger than her.

Another guideline: Parker skipped alcohol and never touched tobacco.

If all that seems ridiculously simple, well, that’s because it is. It doesn’t involve a magic pill that lets you eat and drink whatever you want, whenever you want. It doesn’t involve some freaky new exercise class that Hollywood stars and pro athletes swear by. All it involves is not eating what you know is bad for you and keeping active by taking care of the mundane daily tasks that make up our lives. I’m talking about walking the dog, gardening, cleaning your house, etc.

Doing anything above and beyond that, stuff like climbing mountains, scores you bonus points.

 

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Saturday, November 29, 2008 in: Health
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