California Hikes & Realizing Cardio Matters
AUGUST 21, 2018
Cardio
I’ve played sports all my life and always hated the cardio aspect of practices. At the end of practices there would be “conditioning” which consisted of sprints, long runs, up downs and whatever else the coach felt like throwing into the mix. The purpose was to build stamina so that we wouldn’t get tired out during games.
Now that I’m no longer an athlete I’ve pretty much stopped running and doing cardio because a) I hate it and b) I don’t need to prepare for games anymore.
Hike near Lake Tahoe
A few weeks back I did my first trip to California. Our original plan was to hike Half Dome in Yosemite, but the ongoing fires made the park close. The hikes we were expecting to do there would have been about 14 hours on average. Instead we hiked at a few smaller areas including Muir Woods and Point Reyes.
Each of those hikes were about 5-6 hours round trip, but we were struggling. Even though we were only walking, the incline made it feel as if we were running a marathon. I quickly realized that had Yosemite been open we would have been really having a hard time completing the hikes we wanted.
Muir Woods
After feeling as out of shape as I did climbing up the mountains, I’m definitely going to start working in some cardio to my workouts now. I hate doing it and I’d much rather do weight training, but doing the hikes was a bit of a wakeup call. Even though I feel in shape and workout consistently, I felt as if I had not worked out in months.
One cool thing I did learn was the 90-90 stretch. One of my friends on the trip showed us how to do it but I couldn’t even come close to how the stretch is supposed to be done. It really helped loosen my legs up though. Flexibility is another thing I’m going to need to work on.
TLDR -
If you want to be able to see the great views from hiking you need to have your cardio in check or it’s going to be rough.