I visited Muir Woods National Monument this past week and got to take advantage of the benefits of being a regular at fitness connection. I’ve never had a problem joining a gym but going regularly always seemed beyond me. I learned recently to look at it differently-if you don’t make good life decisions all the freedom you look forward to in your later life will be compromised by a lack of energy and arthritic pain. This realization made going to a gym a necessity instead of a pipe dream. I am looking forward to years of travel and adventure and I don’t want to miss a mountain or scenic view because my knees are bad or I just don’t have the energy.

I will admit being a bit winded but I believe it had more to do with altitude than lack of strength or stamina. I felt fortunate that I had started getting in better shape when I did because if I hadn’t been working out I think it might have made the hike much shorter. We often take the ability to walk where ever we want for granted, I once slipped a disk and was almost bed ridden for a month and when I did walk I walked like the hunchback. After this incident I never took the mere act of walking for granted again and being able to hike up the side of a mountain drove that message home.

Muir woods is amazing, I’ve heard about it from others and it is as big and grand as they’ve described it. My son and I had been to Big Basin State Park, Californias’ oldest state park, where we walked three miles but the walk was on relatively flat ground and not much uphill terrain. We took the ocean view trail in Muir and never actually saw the ocean, the trail meanders around a mountain with some areas pretty steep for the novice hiker dealing with altitude-there were many older and younger than I standing panting along the trail “enjoying the view.”