Every morning, I get out of bed, put on the news and drop to the floor for a two-minute plank. Why do I do this? Well let me tell you.
When done properly, a plank – that’s holding your body up on your elbows and toes and keeping yourself absolutely straight, like a plank of wood – might be just about the best exercise for your body. It can strengthen the core, the spine, the rhomboids – those are the muscles on your upper back, the lats and trapezius – more back muscles, shoulders and triceps – and also to some degree the quads, glutes, and hamstrings. There really isn’t another exercise quite like it.
Now my tagline is walking the world, and you might be wondering what is with this morning ritual of planking, one I’m holding now for two solid minutes, no droopy butt and no triangle shape.
Planks are a body weight exercise. They help build a solid core – one that stabilizes, balances and powers the body. From that strength comes all other strength and it’s the basis for all athletic movements. Yes, I’m a full time pedestrian, but that does not mean I walk all the time. In fact, I walk better when I do other things to get my body strong and flexible.
So today, three weeks out from starting the Continental Divide Trail, I thought I’d bring you along on a little “thru-hike” of how a long distance backpacker gets and stays in shape for hiking.
Here’s how you do it: Lay on your belly, elbows below shoulders and legs straight out, press your toes and into your forearms to lift the body. Watch for that straight line from the heels all the way to the top of the head – you can start with 10 seconds, 20 seconds. Stop, and pop back in – and when you get good, how about a little leg lift – very gently.
Ah, and then it’s back into a kneeling position. Child’s pose. Up dog. Full forward fold. The results of a daily plank is pretty phenomenal – and I started doing them right after my surgeries.
You’ve probably heard that I am bionic right now. I had both hips replaced in the fall. There is a video of what full hip arthroplasty looks like. I watched a bit of it: lots of sawing and lots of popping the leg apart. The anterior approach left me with six inch scars, but it’s actually relatively easy on the body because no muscles are cut. That being said, there’s a lot of jamming things around and it left me with a bruised nerve likely in the sciatica. So my left calf, foot and big toe are numb and tingle. For the first few months, I couldn’t bend my left foot up which made walking a little painful. The muscle is tight and does cause me a bit of concern for hiking. So what do I do is stretch, a lot.
Like on a stretch board. Nothing fancy, just a large board with some sticky cloth on it that I lean against the stairs. I face up the stairs, and pull that calf back. Funny, afterwards I feel light as feather.
It’s been seven months since that first surgery and the tingly feeling is going away, very, very slowly – so that feeling, even for a moment, of being light as a feather is huge.
The way to feel that light more often is through yoga. I love yoga, especially hot yoga. It was four years ago when I was climbing a wall in the gym and I suddenly had this searing pain in my left leg. As belayer let me down in tears, we all thought I’d pulled a muscle. It turned out it was the first sign my hips were decaying. Arthritis runs in my genes and it’s been causing swelling and disfigurement in my fingers and toes over the past decade, but I had no idea I’d get a diagnosis of “severe arthritis in my hip.” Summit Orthopedics gave me a cortisone shot and sent me on my way. I wasn’t walking well, I definitely wasn’t going to climb any walls and skiing felt impossible so I was totally lost as to how to regain my strength. It just so happened that at that moment I was doing one of those exercises where you dig deep to remember things you used to love doing but you don’t do anymore. And that’s when I remembered a yoga class I took years ago in Boulder when the heat was cranked up. I loved it – but never went back.
I did a google search for hot yoga and lo and behold, there’s a center one mile from my house! How had I never known this! They even offered a free trial so I signed up. And the first time I placed my chin atop my entwined fingers, my elbows like a bellows sucking in and pressing out air out for Pranayama breathing, I felt like I’d come home.
Holding those intense poses a minute at a time in 105 degrees over 90 minutes, restructured my body and it bought me both the Te Araroa and the Pacific Crest Trail with a whole bunch of miles in between. I actually asked my doctor about this and he said a lot of times there is little pain until the whole system falls apart. I had no trouble at all until I had no cartilage left and a shot wasn’t going to fix things.
But back to yoga and today with titanium hips - my last class was on the evening our Governor shut down the state due to covid, so I have mostly been incorporating poses at home. Not the whole workout, but many of the standing poses. I start with Standing Head to Knee Pose. No, I can’t do the whole pose, but I bring my knee up high and reach for the bottom of my foot, standing strong and locked on one leg.
Ah – talk about focus. It’s like the body is juicing itself – stretching, strengthening, breathing, balancing – I then try for Standing Bow. That’s when you stand solid on one leg, reach out your hand and pull the other back like you’re doing a quad stretch, your free hand up in the air. Then you slowly tilt forward and pull the bow – the leg and the free arm in equal proportion. This one just wakes up those muscles. My doctor told me it could take a full year before my muscles heal and they’re protesting. It’s not pretty, it’s not perfect, but I’m balancing here as my timer ticks off 60 seconds.
There’s Half Moon Hands to Feet – which doesn’t challenge my balance so much as dig deep into my torso and wake up any lazy muscles. I feel taller after this one. Awkward pose makes the big muscles in my legs and even my toes work hard. Tree pose – a kind of standing half-lotus – slowly encourages an opening up in my hip. I must have asked Dr. Stroemer a dozen times if I had any restrictions – no, you can sit in lotus, if you can get in lotus! Though he did advise I skip running from now on, mainly so I don’t wear out my new hardware, which might last me 30 years. Think about that – the rest of my walking life? Maybe.
So I’ve stretched, I’ve balanced, I’ve focused my energy on using my body weight to get stronger and more flexible – what about cardio? I take pride in the fact that I’m a bit of a mountain goat when it comes to going uphill. Alessio, my hiking buddy on the Te Araroa, pegged my age near 60 and yet said I hike like someone in their twenties. Sadly, that all disappeared with my surgery.
I don’t think it’s entirely because I sat in bed bingeing on “The Queen’s Gambit” and “The Crown.” It had more to do with the fact that my muscles were stressed and weak. For them to carry my body required a lot of fuel in the form of oxygen. Those first days out in the snow with my Lekis and traction on my shoes, I got tired easily. I still remember my very first hill heading up from the river to Fort Snelling. It was hard to go slow enough to stay “under my breath” and not stop.
Nothing makes you feel old and that you’re losing it like being out of air. Curiously, before my surgeries when I couldn’t walk at all, I was able to bike. It was a challenge to get on the bike since I couldn’t spread my legs apart. But placing the bike on the ground and sort stepping into it solved that. I went for miles – 30, 40 – and some decent hills which knocked me to the point I’d sleep like a log when I got home, but I credit all that biking right before surgery with my somewhat easier recovery.
Cycling has a totally different effect on the body – it’s non-weight-bearing, so the stress is on the muscles, not so much the joints. There’s a built-in interval training if you’re riding on a trail. Sometimes you coast, sometimes you have wind in your face and sometimes you have hills and sometimes you just want to get through that yellow light. There’s an argument that walking is so natural, you don’t really get the workout you need.
For me, it’s about mixing it up – and I live in a city – and state – with one of the best bike trail systems in the country. I normally hop on Hank, my ---- and ride out my driveway east to Stillwater, south to Hastings or, my favorite, the Grand Rounds of the city lakes in Minneapolis. It’s urban meets “Sunday in the Park with George” once I reach the Greenway portion, an old railroad mostly below street level carving its way under bridges from the Mississippi to Bde Maka Ska. The great leveler, everyone is out – lime scooters, babies on board, entire families like little ducklings in a row, and, of course, a few lycra-ed road warriors.
Not a bad day to be out as I turn left and circle Lake of the Isles singing my little ditty, “Everyone’s out in the city…” It’s still cool as spring descends in blooming trees. A woman does sun salutation in the grass, a man walks his cat on a leash and a large group cooks weenies on a BBQ they rolled down to the shore. The trails here are a miracle of public minded efforts. Designed in the late 1800’s by a man named William Watts Folwell as a ring of city parks, he connected the lakes and famous Minnehaha Falls with trails, making them available to all residents whether you could afford lake front property or not.
For my purposes, it’s a beautiful ride past the scenic loveliness of lakes, but also the eye candy of the populace. Fisherman and their dueling music, tiny people with big dogs and big people with tiny dogs, a painter en plein air next to high schoolers in prom dress. Someone wisely separated the people on wheels from the people on foot, and our trail goes one way. I pass skaters, one pushing a baby carriage.
Sure, I could ride out in the country on a road bike and push myself harder, but here I do get to go fast sometimes. I have long stretches of paved trail, safe from distracted drivers and I can go straight from door for 50 miles or more.
My thighs and butt get worked and my breathing is coming back. It’s slow at first, but I begin to slowly feel more and more like myself.
Of course, walking is what I do – and all these activities are linked to making me a stringer, more balanced, and more athletic walker. So part of my – I hate to say “training” – is walking, and a lot of miles. I’m actually surprised how many miles I’m fitting in around my work as a voice artist, flutist and podcaster. Aside from my actual mini backpack trip on the Superior Hiking Trail in northern Minnesota, I visit a series of superb state and regional parks – Afton, William O’Brien, Fort Snelling, Lake Maria, Frontenac, Nerstrand – all with slices of ecology that fascinate like bluffs and cliffs, woods filled with birds and carpets of spring flowers.
By far my go-to is a wee park east of Saint Paul called Lake Elmo. Why does this place always feel like coming home? For one thing, there’s a series of loops that can add up to well over twelve miles, so it’s a decent amount of movement for a would-be thru-hiker. I’ve taken my pack and filled it with tomato sauce cans and jiggled my way around to remind myself how a bear canister will weigh me down. There are hills and variety, including woods, prairie, and ponds. Maybe it’s the fact that this park sits on the edge of the city and is still full of life – red wing black birds slap trilling, a pileated laughing hysterically, frogs peeping and crickets sawing.
Walking is so much slower than biking. I think more. I talk to the goddess more – ok, myself more – I watch the light change as the afternoon moves to dusk. A wild turkey cackles and a few remaining cranes answer, loud but mysterious. One white throated sparrow sings his downward melody, telling me he’s only staying the night and heading north tomorrow. I point my Lekis straight out to break up a cloud of gnats, rounding familiar bends in the trail that bring me to a tiny beach where two geese protect their brood of yellow-black goslings, tongues stuck out and necks arching in warning.
This park never feels full, I pass a few hikers all commenting on the beautiful evening but mostly lost in their own reverie. My left calf is not so much sore, but kind of solid, my foot tingles each time I step. Moving along, the little sores spots work their way out and I find a rhythm, pushing up the hills and remembering who I am again.
That’s my list of things I do to get in shape – oh yeah, I lift weights now and again too ensuring my arms and shoulders stay strong, but mainly it’s a relaxed and integrated part of my life. As my walk comes to an end, I feel good, that all the little bits of workout have gotten me here, to a place I enjoy over and over, the memory of which I’ll take when I walk the Continental Divide.
American Beach volleyball star Kerri Walsh Jennings has this advice, “It’s going to be a journey. It’s not a sprint to get in shape.”
What I learn is that the long distance trails are just an extension of what I already do – my planks, the yoga, a few weights, biking and walking. Thru-hikes are one section hike after another, additive beauty and interest and problems to solve. Obviously I won’t have a home to return to every day when I go, but as I “train” – ugh, that word again – how about we use “prepare” I get to know my body better and what it can do – especially with two new titanium hips and the healing that stills going on. That helps me project what I’ll be capable of as I move through each day of a long hike.
And let’s be honest, I like how it feels to do “train/prepare.” Even if I give up the CDT on week one, I’ve already been on a journey.
Tell me what you’re doing right now to stay in shape, prepare for something you can always reach me at BlsisfulHiker.com – that’s also the place to read about and see pictures from my hikes around the world.
