In Great Shape and Alive

Saturday and it's time for hiking. I've been building my conditioning and speed and I took on the longest hike thus far this season. Once again I went on the South Crest Trail but I went much further - 11 miles total up and back and a climb of around a 2000 foot climb. This takes me to one of my favorite places where you come out of the trees and are looking at the face of the south peak of the mountain. You also look over the entire city to the west. On top of this there is a fantastic place for resting your weary bones, kind of like the perfect lounge chair, just made out of rock. It fits me perfectly giving me back support and a leg rest...not the easiest thing to find out of a natural rock formation.

View of the South Peak Face

View to the West overlooking Albuquerque

View to the South coming back down the trail

I also made the trek up in record time, 2 hours and 5 minutes. I am in surprisingly good physical condition considering all the traveling I've been doing. I think it is the treadmill workout ideas that Wild Bill gave me. I think they are definitely improving both my speed and endurance. The way up was relatively painless (operative word is relatively) and it was most definitely not particularly taxing on my cardiovascular system. I would have to say that this is the best condition that I've been in since I started having all my physical woes around 10 years ago.

Going down was interesting because I fell. I am always paranoid about falling because there are so many ways to slip or lose ones footing. Virtually every hike there are moments. Up until now I've never hit the ground. Today I was only about 20 minutes on my way down when I don't know what happened but I was falling forward and couldn't catch myself. It wasn't even a particularly difficult stretch! Down I go face first. As I hit the ground I'm seeing myself stranded on the mountain with who knows what broken. Just as I hit my left calf started hurting like hell. I flipped over and stretched it out and it turned out just to be a cramp. I had scratched up one knee pretty bad but other than that I was in one piece. Pretty lucky.

Just before I got back to the parking lot, I saw this incredibly bright yellow, black and red bird. I had seen the same bird last week in almost the same place but it didn't stick around long enough for me to really see it. Today it was more obliging. A little research finds that this was a Western Tanager.

I happy to say that as of this evening there were no ill effects from the fall and I recuperated wonderfully from the hike. Now if only Wild Bill wasn't injured so I could some really more challenging hikes.