Enjoying the Process

Matt and I spent some time this weekend talking with a couple who is planning on hiking the John Muir Trail (JMT) later this summer. This is a 210 mile-long trail in the California Sierra Nevada region. It starts in Yosemite National Park and ends at Mt Whitney—the tallest peak in the continental US. As Matt and I and a friend are planning on doing our own trip on this trail next summer, we were talking to them about the permitting process and planning for daily distance, pack weight, food, and other gear considerations. All that discussion got me musing about the experience.

I wondered what would it be like for me to start at in Yosemite and end at the Mt Whitney Portal approximately three weeks later? What would I think about as I walked? Would I enjoy my food each day? Would I be able to overcome fatigue and pain from my exertions? Would I feel mostly positive as I walked, or would I occasionally succumb to feelings of melancholy? Would I always want to walk together with Matt and our friend or would we want to walk alone sometimes?

I have often said that one of the keys to success in long-distance day hiking is enjoying the process. This is the ability to find joy and meaning in something as simple as walking and being in nature. The goal of reaching the destination becomes secondary to enjoying the trip and each moment you spend doing it. I often compare it to working on a puzzle. People such as myself who work puzzles of many thousands of pieces don’t do it just see what the picture looks like when it’s done—we can look at the box to see that. We do it because we enjoy the process of examining each piece of the puzzle to see where it might fit in the whole. We like to experience the work in progress as we build slowly to the completed image.

I think the same experiential desire works for long-distance hiking whether it is for twenty or for several thousand miles that is involved in doing a hike like the Pacific Crest Trail.

If you are unable to cultivate an enjoyment of the hiking process, and instead focus mainly on reaching your destination, you may find longer hikes frustrating and boring. If the weather is less than stellar, if thunderclouds threaten, or if one of your companions develops a serious injury—turning the entire group around before reaching the destination—you may become angry or feel cheated from reaching your goal.

But if you enjoy the process, you will enjoy the beauty of the trail and scenery, the conversation of hiking partners, the taste of your food and cold water, and even the feeling of your body as you move on the trail. Reaching the destination will be an added pleasure—not the only one.

CHS 2013 Orientation is a Big Success!

Yesterday I had the pleasure of attending the orientation for the participants of the 2013 CHS group. It was a lively group, with lots of conversation happening in the breakfast/lunch break portions of the day. Participants also asked lots of great questions of our presenters. The carpooling arrangements went a lot smoother this year. Which was good, because a lot of the parking areas were covered in quite a bit of snow, making parking a bit difficult for low clearance vehicles. It was nice to have cut down on about 20 extra vehicles if carpooling folks had come separately. Volunteers Francis Rondestvedt and Craig Illman directed cars to the right place to park. 

Recent snowfall was evident at the Cedar River Education Center, which got around 8 inches of snow on Friday. It fell off the Center's roofs in great loud clumps as the sun warmed up the snowpack.  

We also had a new presentation on Stretching from 2012 graduate (and current year participant!) Lindsey Mcleod. Participants learned about the benefits of stretching along with the usual presentations on Leave No Trace (Sarah Krueger) , WTA (Alan Mortimer), and Conditioning for Hiking (Ed Kula). I talked about the CHS Way complete with scenarios of a naughty hiker who looked a lot like Steve Payne. Matt Cleman ended the day with his stirring recitation of Robert Service's poem, The Call of the Wild. 

Here's a picture from the day. If you haven't been to the Education Center before, it's really a great place to hold our event. It has a large kitchen, which was staffed by CHS volunteers, Debbie Doutlick, Laura Winger, Jackie Kiser, and Debbie Graham. They put out a lovely spread of endless coffee and food and snacks brought by participants. 

The day ended with the round table discussions: Map and Compass Basics led by Bill Schecket and Hyla Dickinson; Nutrition and Hydration led by Arin Cole, and What to Bring in Your Pack, Clothing, and Footwear led by Matt Cleman. 

Our pacing hikes for the afternoon were led by Anne Ward-Ryan, Jennifer Lekisch and Steven Fogg, Lynne Dial and Stacey Lissit, and myself. Our pacing hikes had to be a bit curtailed as it was difficult to get to some trails due to snow. The group that I led up to Cedar Butte learned all about the benefits of Yaktraks and other traction devices on steep trail covered in snow. We did have awesome views though and the sun and warmer temperatures were melting the snow as we walked under the trees, dropping it on our heads and down our shirts! 

Other volunteers helped out as needed including Courtney Caryl, Jan Stephens, Leigh During, Lynne Dial and Jennifer Lekisch. I'm sure I've forgotten somebody. It was so great that there were so many folks there to help out! 

And of course CHS Administrator Steve Payne coordinated everything and kept all us doing what we were supposed to be doing. He did so much that I can't mention it all here. Many thanks to Steve for making the day a great success.  

CHS 2013 has officially started and I am certainly looking forward to another fun-filled year. I hope you are too! Let's get hiking! 

All You Need is a Little Motivation!

Today I want to talk about figuring out how to motivate yourself to meet a goal. When I've talked to CHS participants over the years, many of them have mentioned that part of the reason they liked the course was that spending the money forced them to get out and hike more. Now of course we don't literally force you at gunpoint to come out and hike with us when you join, but to some extent, spending a not-insignificant amount of money to join CHS can provide some people with the right motivation to finally set and meet some physical goals for themselves. The expectation that participants hike at least two hikes per month is also motivating to many CHS participants. 

Personally I am motivated to meet my goals by announcing them publicly, thus risking humiliation and defeat in a public arena if I fail to meet those goals. I am most successful in meeting goals if it means that my lack of meeting them will be noticed by people whose opinion I care about. And aside from a half-baked attempt at doing the Seattle to Portland bike ride about 20 years ago with my then-boyfriend Matt, I have succeeded in meeting my goals when I announce them to my friends and family.  

My most current success was taking up the sport of running in order to stay in shape during the non-hiking season. I don't know if a lot of hikers do this, but when it's rainy, cold, and yukky outside, I like to sit on the couch and watch tv. My weakness is for football. And not just watching a game or two, but all of the college and professional games that are on during a weekend. I can sit on my behind for a whole weekend and not do much but surf the Internet and watch one game after another. Plus I tend to enjoy food such as pizza and other calorifically carbohydrate-based foods like that. 

Lack of exercise + eating too many calories = weight gain. 

In the spring, I would struggle from the extra pounds I had gained and my lack of conditioning  over the off-season and have to get back in hiking shape if I was to keep up with all the new gung-ho participants. It was a pain. I needed to find a way to keep in shape in the off-season that would allow me to still watch football in the winter, yet would burn enough calories so I didn't gain weight and get out shape. I'm not much of a gym person, and the thought of walking on a treadmill or some other exercise contraption wasn't motivating.    

In March of 2012 after yet another season of couch-potatodom, I was talking to a hiking friend who was planning to run a half marathon in Moab, Utah in October of the same year. It sounded like a cool thing to do in a cool place, so I decided that I wanted to run that half marathon with her. I was not a runner in any shape or form at that time. I'd done a few 5K runs, but that was it. So I hired a personal trainer who would help me build up the mileage gradually and announced to all of my friends and family that I was going to run a half marathon in October. Every time I saw these people they asked me how my training was going. I couldn't let them down by saying that I'd ditched it--even though some days I felt more like a wreck than someone who could successfully run 13.2 miles by October. Some days the thought of admitting defeat to these people was the only thing that kept me going out and running. 

Then my motivations starting building on top of the initial one of avoiding humiliation. And you know what, I actually started enjoying running. Not necessarily every time I went out, but more often than not I felt pretty good after my run and that was motivating. I even bought myself a cute outfit (which is saying something for me) to wear for the Moab race and the thought of wearing it was motivating too! I also saw some of my extra weight drop off and got a little firmer in the behind area and that was motivating also! With so much motivation going on, it was easy to go out and meet my goal of running that half marathon--and it was actually fun too. 

The point of all this expository writing is not that you should announce to friends and family that you're doing the CHS course and will be doing long distance hikes with a hefty amount of gain by the end of the season. You're certainly welcome too, but that may not be motivating to you. Figure out what does motivate  you to complete the course and make sure you build that motivation into your life so that it keeps reminding you over and over again why you're getting up at 5:00 am on a Saturday to go walk 15 miles in August when you'd rather just sleep in. Just paying good money to join the course may not be enough to provide enough motivation for you to meet the goal of completing the course. Like me, you may need something more. Figure out what that more is and build it into your summer plan!

Welcome to CHS 2013!

Spring is just around the corner and so is the start of another CHS season! Soon we'll be putting on our boots and spending a summer together hiking to some pretty cool places. Needless to say, I always look forward to this time of year--especially after enduring another cold, soggy winter. I realize that spring in the Northwest can be cold and soggy as well, but once I'm out on the trail, I don't seem to mind it so much anymore. That's what an umbrella is for. 

Hi, my name is Kelly Cleman and I'll be writing the blog entries for CHS this year. If you don't know who I am then let me introduce myself. I am the original creator of the CHS program. I floated it as a trial course in 2005 and got around 30 participants. Myself and another leader, Karen Sykes, led most of the hikes and about 15 people  graduated from the course that year. The course has only grown bigger each year! Last year I handed course administration over to Steve Payne's very capable hands. I continue to help out by leading hikes, keeping up the web site, and this year, by writing the blog entries. In the picture to the right, that's me on the left sitting with my husband, Matt on Shi Shi Beach at the CHS beach cleanup event in 2012. 

I always have lots of pontificate about, so I'll try to put up an entry each week except when I run off on adventure. Sometimes I will duplicate information I have put out in a blog from another year, but some of the topics are timeless and should be put out there each year for people to think about.   

Reading this blog is optional, but I hope you do decide to check it out throughout the summer. If you have a request for me to write on a particular topic, let me know either by email or by replying to the blog! Ideally this blog covers information and ideas that you're interested in as a hiker in the Northwest. Also feel free to post comments to the blogs. On the blogs that I follow I usually find the readers' comments almost as interesting as the blogger's writing. 

Looking forward to a fun and challenging year with you in CHS! 

kc