Mobility Up A Mountain

Over the last year, I’ve been using an approach to health and fitness composed by the creator of Circular Strength Training™, Scott Sonnon. It is an approach that has the greatest degree of balance, moving thru many degree’s, that I’ve come across to date. It employs Joint Mobility, Prasara Yoga and Clubbells; to keep it simple. And Sonnon’s outlook truly takes in all aspects, not just the physical. In truth, this system goes to such depths that, as far as I can tell thus far, there is something in it for anyone, no matter where they’re at.To shed a little more light on the extent and effectiveness of this program, I’d like to share a story with my own experience using it.

As anyone that’s been following us here at Gym Jane can tell you, Chris and I hike out in the local mountains quite a bit. A little less in the last year, but 6 months prior to starting the blog and 6 months in to it, we were getting out just about every weekend. The hikes varied from 1hr (straight up) to 9 hrs. Up steep faces, thru the snow, in the rain, in the fog, in the hot sun, over rivers and sometimes a combination of all of these in a single hike. And during the first 6 months of Gym Jane, we were training pretty intensely, 4 days a week, working up to completing the “300″ test created by Gym Jones. And we trained very much in a style that encapsulated Gym Jones/CrossFit/Kettlebell Lifting. So to say the least, we were in pretty damn good shape.

Now something we’ve been doing every summer for the last 3 years is going for a hike up to Crown Mountain with our father-in-law Richard. Hike takes about 6 hours all together (usually because we hike most of it over snow). This summer was no exception. And this time we also brought Chris’s younger brother Kevin (14yrs) along with us.

This summer however, Chris and I didn’t have the benefit of the training we’d had the previous summer. Due to our schedules, we haven’t been able to train together. And for myself, I’ve been dealing and working thru a major back injury. It is actually what brought me to finding RMAX and delving into CST. As part of my rehabilitation, I’d been doing Intu-Flow, CST’s Joint Mobility system. Actually, because of the severity of my back injury, that was basically all I could do. Every day. Twice a day for the first 3 months (both sessions combined for no longer than 25 min). So by the time we got up on the mountain, I’d been doing it for about 5 months, with a bit of a few other things, but nothing that would come close to constituting “getting fit”. And Chris and I hadn’t been out for a hike in a while.

But while hiking, I found myself full of energy. I wasn’t out of breath, my legs weren’t burning, nor did I feel tired. If anything, I actually felt like I was “bounding up the mountain”. I kept feeling like taking off in a dead run…..up. But I held myself back, as I didn’t want to rub in, to my compatriots, that they were sort of struggling along and I felt like breaking out into a song and dance;). And I was feeling just as good, if not better, than the summer before, when I was in some wicked shape. As I kept going, I realized what was giving me all this energy, what had contributed to it. It wasn’t too hard, as Intu-Flow was really the only thing I’d been doing. And it wasn’t just the hike. My recovery was FAST! The next day, I felt it a little in the thighs. But then I also road my bike for an hour and a half. By the day after that, it was as if I’d never gone up.

We’re not talking about some “new, crazy, top performance” training program here. We’re talking about a 10-15 min a day joint mobility program that releases tension and helps you reclaim your full range of motion. The foundation of CST. And that’s just scratching the surface. So if all you’ve got is 10-15 mins a day to spare, no energy or chutzpah to get yourself going on a fitness program…..check it out.

You may find yourself up a mountain before too long.

s.

P.S. My 3 com padres all now practice a little joint mobility program themselves;)

A half marathon…..up a mountain….

Well we finally got out on another hike. Life’s been a little crazy for both Chris and I and we haven’t had as much opportunity to get out for our weekly hikes. We’d been talking about hiking up to a place called Lynn Lake for the last couple of months. With Canadian Thanksgiving (Oct. 8th) and having that Monday off, we took full advantage of what nice weather we had left to head up to Lynn Lake. And when I mean nice weather, I’m talking sun is out and it’s not overcast. Over the last year of consistent hiking, Chris and I (as a pact with ourselves to never let crumby weather deter us from getting out, otherwise we’d never get out over the winter) have always found ourselves on these big adventures to new places when it’s overcast and raining. Now we can handle the wet and we can handle the cold (cold and wet…..these are the descriptors for a Pacific Northwest winter), but in those conditions, up in the mountains, we can never see anything! I’d been up to Lynn Lake once before and it’s gorgeous up there. So we wanted to have one day, just one day, where going on one of our big hikes, we’d actually get to see what it looked like. And see we did.

It was an amazing day to get out. The first portion of the hike is the same route we use heading up to Coliseum Mtn. and the Hanes Valley to Grouse Mtn. After the first hour and a half, it turns into pretty rugged trail. Then for about a third of the hike (the middle third) we have to hike right up the middle of Lynn River itself. This was the really fun part, as we’re jumping and negotiating from boulder to pebble to boulder (we even managed to stay dry the whole way). Then, just as you get “close” (the final third or so of the hike, the angle all of a sudden turns sharply up, just to remind us we had to earn our way there;).

And there it was Lynn Lake, as peaceful and serene as I’d remembered it. It was funny how I could feel myself calming down once we were there and realizing that I’d been feeling my energy quite accelerated. This was more than likely due to hiking up the center of a fast flowing, loud river. It’s amazing when you open your awareness to your surroundings (which naturally seems to start happening when you get out in nature), you can begin to see just how much of a profound effect the energies of your environment can have on you. Keep that in mind the next time you’re feeling way out of wack. Look at your surrounding environment and see whether there is something that can be adjusted to assist you in getting yourself back on line.

We hung out for lunch for about a half hour and then started the trek back down. Down is always a little more of an effort, had to be a little more focused. When we’d gotten back to the parking lot, the distance to Lynn Lake and back had jumped into my head (I usually don’t think about the distance). It was 21.8 km. And it occurred to me, “hey, we just did a half marathon up and down a mountain…….in fact every time we do one of these long ones, we are doing a half marathon”. I mentioned that to Chris and he said “yeah, that’s what Richard (our father in law who runs marathons) said when we went to Crown Mtn., only he said this was harder”.

I tend not to think of it that way, but when put into that context, it left me with an energy that fueled me the rest of the day (not saying I didn’t still feel it the day after;). To get a glimpse of increasing capacity in oneself, it sparks reflection on increasing capacity in other aspects of ones life and gives you a sense of moving forward.

It was cool, to think that when we go out for a “hike”, we’re in fact doing half marathons….up and down mountains.

Chasing Pain

Most of our lives we are constantly trying to get away from pain, but pain is just a part of life. Without it there would be no way of knowing how good things could be. Let me stop here before it gets too cheesey! I heard a friend tell me recently that in Russia, they looked at him weird when he complained because it was silly to fuss about things you could not change…. I have to admit that it made me stop and think.

So what does this all have to do with discipline? Well, over the last few weeks, the requirements for our hikes have been increasing. Our last hike was 8:35 min! We were lucky this time to be joined by my father-in-law, who is in his 50’s and runs marathons! So the idea of this hike is to gain about 1000 meters of elevation, then walk in the snow for an hour, loose about 600 meters of elevation and then gain about 800 meters of elevation (not to mention walking back they way you came from.)

If you are still wondering where pain and complaining come into the equation, I am sorry, I might have not fully conveyed the extent of the situation. So first you go up PAIN and then you walk through PAIN and then you walk down a slope(and all you can think about is the PAIN of going up the slope on the way back) and then you go up PAIN and then you walk back they way you came from.

What I discovered on this hike was the need for self-restraint. I needed to take control of my emotions and while still being exhausted, not allowing myself to complain or loose focus of the goal. At this point enters patience since it is what you need when things don’t go your. I also figured out that I need to have more fun and stop hurrying to get home to the family.

It seems that time and patience don’t seem to be able to coexists peacefully. If one is overly concerned about time or in a hurry, it becomes next to impossible to be patient. So when I stopped being in a hurry to get home and started to be ‘mindful of my thoughts’, the hike became fun and I had less pain.

I guess the moral is that our reality is created by our thoughts and thus complaining can only bring us down.

ae

A Different Type of Workout

Normally Shane and I go on a hike every weekend… but not this time. This weekend we were asked to fix up an office, which basically meant to put some paneling on the walls and clean the looks of the office. At first we thought that it would take about eight hours work. hahahaha… not quite so. On Sunday, we thought it would take four hours! hahahahah…. Think again. In the end it took us about 25 hours!

So basically we spent the whole weekend in a workout. The paneling was not incredibly heaving but after moving as many times as well did for cutting and measuring they sure felt heavy.

The truth is that it was more of a mental workout than a physical workout because we had to continuously refocus our attention at the task at hand. Even when exhaustion has set it. The picture of the office does not really show all the work but I wanted to show something!

ae

The Hanes Valley Hike…..at a glance.

So this was our hike thru Lynn valley, across Hanes valley, up Crown Pass and along the Grouse Mtn. alpine range, totaling in 16 km traveled, aprox 1300m in elevation gained, 6 hrs 46 min, 77% pain, 110% fun:)

Always feel like a kid again when we get out on adventures such as these……..and that’s a good thing;)

s.

The Haynes Pass

Every time I hear the words “Haynes Pass”, it makes me think of Lord of the Rings. Yesterday, however, I felt like we were in the movie! Over the last 10 months we have been going on hikes that many times exceed my capacity in some way or another. They are not completely out of my reach but they are challenging enough that they require more than good physical shape.

Yesterday, as we clawed our way up an hour and twenty minutes of a compacted snow slope with an inclination of 45º to 75º, I felt like Frodo, wondering if he would ever get off the mountain. It is those times of complete commitment that one has little choice but to move forward. Regardless of the pain and with no easy out or alternate route. At that point, you are alone with yourself .

As my leg muscles started spasming uncontrollably and I felt light headed from exhaustion, I started to verbalize my frustration under my breath. Even at that moment, I was not talking to Shane in hopes to find comfort. It was just raw anger. I knew that I was alone in my mind and that it was simply an opportunity to learn the pain of following through to the end of a task.

There is always a level of challenge in the things we do but is the resolve commensurate? This is the question that I, like Frodo, had to answer.

ae

“The Humbler” & “Family Ties”

Wanted to take the opportunity to write about our last two hikes. Mostly to highlight that, although they were small, they held just as much importance for us as the big long ones we go on.

First was the BCMC (at the end of “Week 7″). It takes anywhere between 1 and 1 1/2 hrs to get to the top of Grouse Mtn. along this trail. An hour, that’s it. And yet it finds a way of humbling us every time we get on it. We’ve gone on 8 1/2 hr hikes up Mtn. ’s and felt, over all, pretty good by the time we were done.  We’ve been working out pretty intensely for 7 weeks. We’re feeling great and in much better shape than last summer, when we did the BCMC 4 or 5 times. Those hikes would take us about the 1 1/2 hrs to get up. Yet 10 min’s up the BCMC, we’re starting to breath hard. Long before we even feel like we should be having to push thru the climb and our own hesitations, we’re doing just that. And this is good:) A seemingly small hike that should be considered an easier day (comparatively to all the other stuff we’re doing). Yeah it’s a pretty steep climb all the way up, but that isn’t relevant. What’s relevant are our feelings towards it before we go up.  Then how those feelings change after we start. It keeps us honest. Keeps us humble.

Second was the hike with our families in Lynn Valley (at the end of week 8). This was an hour and we went a total of 1km. In this hike lies one of the biggest reasons why we do all this fitness stuff and hiking.  Our families. The stuff we do helps keep us balanced, energized and growing, which allows us to put that much more into our families (among other things). And to have the opportunity to share with them something that we get so much from, resounds within the chambers of the soul. In nature, away from the distractions and noise of the city and material world, the connection that binds families together can grow and be nurtured with such ease. And it’s ALOT of fun. Running thru the trees, looking for skunks (of all things:) in the bushes, splashing in puddles, taking a moment with every flower, berry and bug that crosses our path, listening to the river and the kerplunks of the rocks we throw in. This is all so relaxing and fun. It helps to remind us of the great treasures found in the smallest things, especially if we start getting too focused, during our hikes, on how far we went or how fast we got there. It reminds us of the fun we can sometimes forget to have.

Such great teachers, those kids of ours:)

s.

ARC’TERYX

Over the last year, I have been looking for gear for the hikes and encountered frustration! Last year I was able to find excellent boots for on sale and I was really happy but looking for jackets has been a different story all together. In Vancouver, we are lucky to have a good selection of stores from which to buy gear for hikes. There is even an area of in which there are at least 15 stores within a four block radius!The frustration comes from not being able to find affordable gear. There are an incredible number of companies which produce great gear and with a variety of standards and pricing but that does not make it easier to find decent gear. The issue is the price/quality factor. I can Choose to have bad gear that will last a couple years for a reasonable price or get the stuff that will actually work and pull a second mortgage on the house!The other day, on the ride back from work, I saw a sign discounting up to 30% of Arc’Teryx jackets, so today I stopped buy to take a peek! OUCH! After the 30% it was still $450 plus! (and for those that have not been to Canada, we have to pay 14.5% sales tax on top of that) At this point I should admit that I might be cheap but I still like hiking!The question at the end of the day is what do people without the money do to follow their passions and hobbies? My solution is to do it anyway and get hypothermia!Any thoughts?ae

8:42:39 (Part 3) The End!

After about an hour and 20 min we reached a point where we would have lunch. There was a patch of trees that we stopped in to eat. While we were eating the fog cleared up a little. Just enough to let us see a big rock about 20 meter higher from where we were. We just about immediately packed our lunch and started digging our way up again (This was even more painful after stopping for a break).At this point we were reaching the turn around point. We needed to be at the parking lot by 9 (to make sure that we did not accidentally start a search party) and had to make back the way we came from! Sadly, we decided to turn around and start heading back. The truth is that we both felt that we had done our job at this point. We have fought the whole way up and were happy with what we had done.The first step of getting back was to slide down the mountain side. The funny thing about sliding down the mountain was that it took us about 15 minutes to get down what had taken us the better part of an hour and a half – and the irony is that it hurt just as much as going up. Going down a very steep slop in the snow is awesome. Especially when you get to go fairly fast – this was no exceptions. I missed a couple of trees and once my feet got stuck, propelling me a few feet in the air and landing on my chest while flying down the hill! but all in all it was a great way to start the journey down (it definitely put smile on our faces!) Then we would have to walk through the trails again. When we got down to the river again we were able to see the top of the mountains in the area since the clouds had moved a little. When it happened we got an idea of what we had done. It was fairly high up and we had climbed most of it.The rest of the journey was exhausting as well but pace was the same. We were able to move thought the trails quite fast and we still had spring in our step. This was an awesome realization since this is directly as a result of the workouts.Over all this trip was awesome and both Shane and I are looking forward to getting to the top of Coliseum and figuring out where we got to before. I am sure it will be a funny story when we find out. Both of us think that we walked passed the mountain and scaled one behind it. I guess the moral of the story is that we are still not expert hikers since we did not make it to the top… and because I wear ponchos!ae

8:42:39 (Part 2)

One of the main reasons I was able to do this was the workouts. Over the last 5 weeks we have done a lot of good things that have prepared me physically for this hike. This is every exciting for me since I am 31 now and I am doing some of the most physically/mentally demanding activities of my life and I thought that I would slowly become a couch potato .Back to the story. The first hour and 20 min was a slow incline through Lynn Valley. From there you hit the mountain straight on. It is like climbing a wall for 30 min. After that you have about 30 min of steady incline and then you meat the snow. This is where things changed… there was fog everywhere and our visibility was about 25 meters. This is normally not bad but if you don’t know where the peak is and the markers are under a meter of snow you depend on the visibility to find you way.We reached a point were we found foot prints in the snow, which had most likely been there for less than a week, so we followed them for about 30 min until we reached a river. At this point the markers were on the other side of the river so we climbed down about 2 meters of snow to the bedrock of the river. Crossed the river by hopping rocks and then climbed another wall of snow on the other side! (I loved this part!)I was exhausted by now but we had decided to make it up to the top of the mountain and we were not going to give up because we were tired! We followed a few more markers and then there was nothing. No foot prints. No markers. I guess this is the part of the story where I tell you that I have a compass in my watch and that if got lost we could follow our own foot prints through the snow (just in case you were worried).The next logical step was to gain altitude. Although we did not know the path, we did know that our goal was to get to the highest place around, so we started climbing the side of the mountain again. This time through the snow. Actually, we used the snow to climb. We would punch wholes in the snow with our feet and gained on the mountain side one step at the time. THIS WAS VERY PAINFUL. Both me and Shane were stopping every few steps to let the muscles have a rest and then we would continue on.aeTo be continued…