Wilderness trailcraft on staying in shape for hiking when local conditions make hiking impractical:

What I’ve discovered over the past few years of spring training is that it is extremely difficult to exercise all my hiking muscles in the gym. When I go to the gym I focus on leg muscles and core body muscles but when I finally get a pack on my back and start hiking I always find muscles in these areas that my work outs didn’t prepare. Because of that, I have started to adjust my spring training to include actual hiking with a backpack.

However, I still think the most important element of training is the aerobic element. In Idaho, where I live, most of the mountain hiking is somewhere between 8,000 ft and 11,000 ft. If I don’t prepare my lungs I inevitably run into breathing limits before I run into strength limits. Because of this, the constant in my work outs is aerobic exercise. I like the elliptical and stairmaster machines the most so I spend at least 25-30 min on one of these machines several times a week.

I’m posting this mainly because my new work schedule should allow blogging and hiking most mornings. My goal is to work off the 10 pounds that seem to have settled around my gut since, well, I started this blog.

The hard part is not the hiking, it’s the giving up on sweets, beer and extra helpings. But I lost 30 pounds a couple years back so I know it can be done.

In the past when I was hiking five miles with 1500 feet of climb every morning, I’d just eat anything I felt like eating. And I’d start putting pounds back on within milliseconds of getting out of this routine (at first this was reassuring because I knew my weight loss was from exercise and diet working and not, say, cancer. Lately, though, it’s just getting old.)

So if I have any resolution this year, it’s to keep diet and exercise in balance all the time and stop veering from one extreme to the other.