Take a Hike in Southern California

I’m going to regress slightly at this point to talk about hik­ing readi­ness in South­ern California—or lack of it. I thought going into my first hike, Pole Creek, that I was in pretty good shape. Boy, was I wrong! I had been putting in 45 minute walks every day through­out the neigh­bor­hood that included a 25 degree hill climb that was approx. 100 feet in length. Com­ing out of this hike I dis­cov­ered I was nowhere in the kind of shape I needed to be in.

I was a long dis­tance run­ner in high school and my heart and lungs had been expanded pretty good dur­ing those years of an intense run­ning reg­i­men that con­sisted of run­ning 30 miles a day (15 in am and 15 in pm) on back coun­try roads in Ohio. But, after high school, I let all of that go and started smok­ing. It wasn’t long until 25 years had gone by and I was up to 2 packs a day. Norma and I quit smok­ing 15 years ago. That doesn’t mean I imme­di­ately got back into shape—it only meant that I imme­di­ately (it seems) put on a bunch of weight. Liv­ing on an acre with some 100 year old trees, a pretty good size orchard and a lot of bushes, plants, flow­ers and a gar­den to take care of can put me through a good work­out at times, but still not enough for stren­u­ous long hikes.

Since this Tar/Sespe Creek hike, it didn’t take much to con­vince me that I badly needed to upgrade what I was doing to phys­i­cally pre­pare for these hikes. If I wanted to keep doing them. Which I did! I was deter­mined to be in bet­ter shape for the next hike so I set up a new, more dif­fi­cult reg­i­men. Norma had also read an arti­cle by a very reli­able source that if you want your exer­cise rou­tine to really ben­e­fit you, that the same rou­tine should not be pre­formed two days in a row, but to alter­nate rou­tines to give your body time to heal itself. What I decided to do is walk four miles every Mon­day, Wednes­day and Fri­day. Then on the week after a Sun­day hike, skip Mon­day and then con­tinue on Wednesday.

I would also add to my dis­com­fort by adding 5 lb. ankle weights. In read­ing a cou­ple of books about hik­ing the Pacific Crest Trail, the writ­ers both men­tioned light­weight back­pack­ing expert Ray Jar­dine as say­ing that one pound on your foot is equal to five pounds on your back. He was refer­ring to the impor­tance of good, but light­weight boots. I used that lit­tle bit of infor­ma­tion to enhance my walk­ing routine—hoping it would help get me into bet­ter shape. The ten pounds of ankle weights should add an equiv­a­lent of 50 pounds on my back.

After a week of this rou­tine, I remem­bered a set of stairs (92 steps one way) that went down into the west of town. I also remem­bered that my legs seemed to give me the most prob­lem on that last hike and I fig­ured adding the stairs (dras­tic up-hill stuff) might be an even bet­ter way to get in hik­ing shape. I seemed to do a lot of think­ing on my morn­ing walks. So I incor­po­rated two sets of stairs going out and two sets on my way back home. That pretty much tired me out.

Norma tried to explain to me that I was not out of shape. Any­one who can move and spread four full truck loads of mulch around our prop­erty, like I peri­od­i­cally do, was not in bad shape. She said the sore­ness in my legs was due to lac­tic acid build up because my strain­ing leg mus­cles were not get­ting enough oxy­gen to elim­i­nate the excess lac­tic acid. That may be true, but I still felt that if my legs were stronger and could han­dle more endurance, that I would expe­ri­ence a bet­ter hike.

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