Sunday, November 15, 2009

It's Heeear


When I was driving home from delivering things from Friday night's Scout Auction yesterday it started snowing.  Hard.  When I got to the house it felt like one of those days where you ought to put on a pair of thick wool socks, make a big pot of from-scratch soup and stay home.  But the bigger pull was to find my long gaiters and go for a hike and that's what I did.
My "constitutional" is a perfect example of the principle of just doing a thing without a lot of internal debate.  I go for a hike when I'm too busy or not in the mood for it because it's good exercise and I need exercise.  But I've never been on a hike, no matter how nasty the weather was, that I didn't come back to the car feeling like the world was a great place and I loved being in it.
So I've thrown long and short gaiters, six-point crampons and a jacket in the trunk of my car to ride around with my boots, super-sized handkerchiefs and hydration pack.  In a few weeks it looks like the snowshoes will have to go in too.
I have a 12-month membership to the outdoor gym.
Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)

It's not about skiing: It's about what I learned when I learned to ski.

You can't have fun skiing if you always lean uphill towards the seeming security of the uphill slope: Leaning up is natural for most of us though: after all, if you fall uphill, you don't have as far to go before you hit.
Trouble is when you ski like that, you spend a lot of time in the snow. Your center of balance is all out of whack, your skis slide out from under you and down you go. It's no fun.
If you want to zoom down the slopes free and easy you have to commit to the fall line, get your "nose over your toes" and risk tumbling head over heels once in a while in a glorious confusion of arms and legs and skis. But once you make the commitment: Surprise! You hardly ever fall and you can ski!
I don't ski much any more but life is like that too. You have to commit and risk a crash if you really want to live a full life.
This web log is a chronicle of the ways I find myself leaning up into the hill, and what happens when I catch myself doing it, and then lean forward instead.

Followers