I’ve moved to a 4/10 schedule at work, so I now have Fridays off to do fun things like hike. This Friday, I headed to up to Lake Serene with a couple of friends.
If you haven’t walked on the Lake Serene trail before, it’s actually a good training hike because of the large number of flights of wooden stairs built into the trail. The stairs are steep and built for hikers with longer legs than myself. I need to pace myself to move continuously up the steep stairs and I also use the rest step quite a bit to keep to from building up too much lactic acid in my leg muscles.
If you find yourself breathing too heavily and working your muscles too hard, you need to ease up on the speed a bit, bring your heart/breathing rate down, and start using the rest step to give your muscles a brief rest. It’s amazing how well this technique works even if used on intermittently. I used it quite a bit as I was climbing out of the Grand Canyon a couple of weeks ago. The trail was steep, my pack was about 37 lbs., and we were hiking at an elevation of about 7000 ft. Just walking slow wasn’t doing it and I was over-taxing my body, so I performed the rest step on every third step I took and I started to immediately feel better.
If you haven’t learned how to pace yourself yet, you’re going to find that the longer hikes of July, August, and September are very tiring. I would urge you to spend the rest of your hiking time in June to work on continuously hiking at a speed you can maintain and feel good while doing so. Hiking too fast uses up more of your body’s resources and makes it harder to keep up with your caloric and water needs as the day progresses. You’ll feel better at the end of the day if you can keep pacing in mind.
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