I get my exercise challenges by walking or hiking a little longer and faster. Or by working out at a greater speed or for more minutes on the treadmill.
But I need a lot of variety in my life. We all need this variety, although my guess is that I need more than most folks. This makes it a darn good thing that I am a journalist, where I can and must write about something different every day. Likewise, I crave new and different places to exercise and indeed new and different exercises all the time.
Variety is probably why I love to hike so much. In fact, I make a point of going out to hike on a new or longer segment of the trail whenever I can. But even well known trails can bring surprises, especially with the changes of the seasons and chance encounters with wildlife.
I capitalize on that variety by always carrying a small digital camera with me on my hikes. This encourages me to be on the lookout for something new. I always try to send a beautiful photograph from my hikes along with a trip report to my family and friends.
But unless you are blessed by as many wonderful trails as I am around my home in Boulder, Colorado, you might not find enough variety. Even here I am close to running out of new and beautiful trails for my usual day hikes.
This problem reminded me of the boredom solution of my younger days -- backpacking on much longer trails for up to five or six days at a time. Since I no longer had my backpack, sleeping bag, and tent, I recently bought all of that equipment as well as necessary supplies like a portable water filtration device for the sake of my health.
As soon as the weather in the Rockies allows, I will be using this gear. Meanwhile, I added another exercise to my bag of health tricks -- snowshoeing. And just this week I made my first decent (four hour) snowshoe trek in the Rockies.
But next for my exercise variety is cycling. I just bought a hybrid bike for riding both in town and on the less extreme foothill and mountain trails.
I have finally started to do some resistance training. I know how important it is after reading and writing a lot about it.
But resistance training -- working out with weights -- had always seemed boring to me. So I use whatever strategies I can think of to overcome that boredom, primarily by listening to music and books on my iPod.
Who knows what types of exercises this 72-year-old man will take up after that!
For all of us carving out enough time and emotional energy to start an exercise program is the basic problem. When I go on long hikes, the way I think about my time on the trail away from my work is that this is finally the time that I am taking for ME.
Like most people, I am at the beck and call of others. For me, it's mostly my editors and email correspondents. I do take great pleasured in helping others, but I can temporarily escape from all of them when I'm on a long hike.
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