A Proper Ass Kicking

 

Morning, the day after my demented sprint around the Frio Canyon trail at Garner State Park.

The sun is trying to work its way through the trees over there on the horizon so it must be time to get a move on. Hopefully a slower move on than yesterday. Perhaps I could manage to take a real hike this time and not run a friggin race against - well, nobody (in which I'm always the loser).

I don't know if that thought jinxed me or what! - But you'll see what I'm babbling about in a moment -

This morning, a Wednesday, right smack dab in the middle of the school and work week, seems like a good day to tackle the popular (for me popular is a bad word because it means people!) Old Baldy summit trail.

Except - because of roadwork one-lane-ing the only road into that area of the park and closing it completely to bikes and pedestrians, as well as closing off the riverside trails below the road that I might have used to bypass the roadwork on foot, I had to drive from campsite at the northern end of the park to trailhead at the southern end.

This meant dealing with automatic signals on either end of the work zone that are on an 8 minute cycle. (If you get to one of these just as it changes to red, it will be 8 minutes before it turns green again) Park people were told this work, along a tight, winding section of road perched precariously between river on one side and mountain on the other, would be finished up in March. This is October, and apparently now the contractor, who I personally witnessed packing up, rather wimpily, early for the day because of a very light sprinkle that lasted maybe 15 minutes, is claiming they didn't specify what year they meant.

Anyway, the next shocker, concidering it was mid-week and school is in session, was finding that the cabin-shelters lined up here one after the other on the right were jam packed with kid-heavy families that were busting out all over the road as I was trying to get to that trailhead parking lot ahead of me on the left.

(I had to use a photo from my trip here a few years ago because it wasn't safe for a scruffy old man to be standing there taking photos of all the little kiddies!)

Ignoring, or at least pretending to ignore, the hysterical cacophony of zooming tricycles, flying balls, ricocheting rug-rats, screaming kids, and even screamier adults, I parked, donned my pack, grabbed my sticks, and set off on the Old Baldy trail, quickly leaving the chaos behind since most still seemed to be embroiled in getting breakfast on the table rather than hiking.

And then promptly got my ass stripped off, shredded, and handed back to me on a platter in tiny little pieces.

Admittedly, from Pecan Grove Camping Area (Why anyone would willingly camp in this noisy, overcrouded enclave is beyond me!) to the summit of Old Baldy, that green dot in the lower right of the trail map, is a steep climb, but, despite the distance between those two points being just barely over a measly half mile, it took me more than an hour to get there! One quarter the speed I was moving yesterday. And I'm not talking a half mile of sight-seeing and lolly-gaging, I'm talking head down, one foot in front of the other, sucking air, trying not to die, plodding.

Unlike the Brother, who is one of the 4% that can't feel thier heart (which explains why he wouldn't know he was having an afib event untill he passed out, or rather, recovered from passing out), I knew my heart was pounding!

But that wasn't the issue. This is a phenomenon I first noticed in the '80's when hiking near Anchorage Alaska where many of the trails within afternoon-hiking-distance have an initial steep climb to get from road up into the Chugach Mountains. By the time I topped these initial climbs my heart would be pounding hard enough to make me question, despite what my ego believed, if my conditioning actually sucked, but it would quickly settle down and I wouldn't notice it for the rest of the hike.

Since I was being abused by what was essencially a stairmaster on steroids as I humped my way up Old Baldy one limestone ledge after another, the thumping heart, somewhere around 90 - 110 BPM which is normal full-on-exertion for me, was to be expected. But the light-headedness, wonky vision, and brief waves of almost-nausea - well this was new!

A wise person would concider turning back at this point, I mean, hell! This might be something that needs looking into! - But apparently I'm not wise.

Later I went back to my old, long obsolete even before I quit using it, mapping system which still lurks on my seldom used laptop, and pulled up the track of the last time I climbed this mountain in December of 2022 to see what sort of pace I maintained back then.

Neither maping system, the new one (Gaia), or the old one (Delorme Topo), lets you break down segments of the hiked track into time, just distance, so I manually sampled the climb portion of the 2022 hike in several spots and, though there was some sub 1 MPH samples, about 60% of the samples were in the 1 to 2 MPH range so covering the half mile of the climb would have taken significantly less than the hour it took me this time.

Oh, and by the way, in 2022 the 6.24 mile hike that included summiting Old Baldy took me about 5 hours at just over a 1 MPH speed.

Normal for me back then.

Todays hike, though only a relatively short 2 miler, took me 4 hours! An average speed half of what my normal used to be.

So now I don't know what to think!

Yesterday I raced around a 4 mile hike at twice my historical average speed, yet today I struggled to maintain half my normal speed on a hike only half as long!

Spoiler alert. I would do tomorrow's 5.21 mile hike in just over 4.5 hours. Pretty damn close to my historical average. If I was part of a statistical analysis I'd a been thrown out with the garbage as useless data!

To be fair, some significant events have occured between 2022 and now.

• I'm three years closer to dead
• Cancer (though I most likely already had that in December 2022. It just wasn't diagnosed until April 2023)
• Several surgeries
• Two rounds of chemo with a few serious side effects thrown in for good measure.
• The trauma of finding out that my brain is even more broken than I thought
• Eliquis.

I throw the eliquis, a blood thinner, in there because the Brother, who's also on eliquis, swears one of the side effects is to suck all the energy out of him, leaving him crashed on the couch in-between short stints of activity, and this crossed my mind when Old Baldy was kicking my ass.

But I've  been on the crap for two years, over two years, and haven't noticed a significant decrease in energy during that time. Maybe an increased willingness to take it easy once in a while, though I think that's more to do with being forced by the cancer to pause and evaluate my life, my future - but no big loss of energy. Besides, lack of energy or lethargy are not in the listed side effects for eliquis. Anemia is, but with all the blood tests I've had while on eliquis, thirty frigin two of them - so far, I think I'd know if I was anemic!

I went back and checked, and since February of this year I've taken 21 significant hikes and bike-rides, not counting the laps I regularly subject myself to around the property. I don't remember any of those kicking my ass the way this one did. Physicly pushed and feeling it, yeah. Wore out and glad to be back at the trailhead, yes. But none of that other stuff, the light-headedness, wonky vision, and touches of nausea.

Maybe I had a few-hour bug? Or it was eating my morning plain-yogurt without added honey (I forgot and left the honey at home and plain Greek yogurt tastes terrible without it, but the chemo ravaged my gut pretty bad and the yogurt helps.)? Or perhaps I simply did something last time I was here that pissed the mountain off and it's punishing me for that this time?

I don't know.

Whatever the cause of the struggle, with determination, or perhaps just plain stupidity, I eventually made it up the mountain.

But I didn't stay and enjoy my accomplishment as long as I would have liked because people started showing up, and we all know people suck!

So I quickly gathered up my stuff, headed back down, giving up a portion of that hard-won elevation, crossed a narrow saddle, clawed some of the elevation back, wandered the spine of an adjacent ridge on the Foshee Trail, made a hard right, and a steep decent on the Bird and Wind Cave Trails back to the trailhead.

By this time many of the shelter-dwellers had packed up and left so it was a lot calmer at the base of the mountain than it had been when I arrived this morning. But I didn't care. All I wanted to do was get back to camp and chill in my chair with a model railroad magazine, my water-bottle, and a few crackers - maybe an M&M or two.