The REI “GET OUTSIDE” Seminar
This is a summary of the REI Seminar for my Book, “Secrets of Aging Well: GET OUTSIDE”.
“If I knew I was going to live this long, I’d have taken better care of myself.” — Mickey Mantle
My wish is that this book and this seminar will inspire you to be proactive about taking better care of yourself. That you will take charge of the way you age, and make yourself more resistant to physical and cognitive decline. That you’ll be better able to fight off sickness, and recover faster if you should become sick. And that it will motivate you to share these ideas and advice broadly, with your family and friends, and especially your parents.
I hope it will move you to sit less. To go for a long walk in nature, start exercising, hike up a hill, or even climb a mountain. But most importantly, to use it to find a path to a happier, healthier, longer life.
“Secrets of Aging Well: GET OUTSIDE”…the seminar, as presented at REI retail locations, to various hiking groups across the northeast, and at hundreds of webinars nationally.
Author and presenter background: a long tenure as a senior executive and consultant in the fitness business, at some of the largest companies in the world, creating several fitness startups, overseeing millions of dollars in consumer research, and five decades of hiking and climbing on all seven continents.
Hiking is the fourth most popular outdoor activity and growing rapidly. Let’s now explore why this might be and discover the myriad of benefits hiking bestows on its participants.
But first, the foundational idea behind the book and the webinar is that you can proactively take charge of the way you age. Our objective, and the contention that hiking is the proverbial fountain of youth, is that your level of physical and cognitive activity can put you on Line A above, or you can give in to age and slowly head downhill, Line B. You can decide to radically improve your trajectory of aging, and hiking is one of the best ways to do it.
One early influence for this book is the Disney movie “Third Man On The Mountain” by James Ramsey Ullman (this movie is why there is a Matterhorn at Disneyland in Anaheim). It is a fictionalized account, with elements of the true story, about the first ascent of the Matterhorn and the hero is a young boy named Rudi Matt, catnip for a young me watching from very flat Brooklyn.
Another influence is “Americans on Everest,” also by James Ramsey Ullman. It is the official account of the first ascent of Mount Everest by an American team in 1963, and one of the first ascenders was Jim Whittaker who at the time was head of sales for REI, and later its CEO.
Jim and his twin brother Lou, founders of Rainier Mountaineering Inc., are prime examples of the ‘get outside’ message of this book: now in their nineties, still active and sharp. Legends both.
My own fascination with hiking as an anti-aging and longevity tool began here, in 1990 on Mount Washington. From the book:
“I noticed far below me a solo hiker — actually a trail runner, before that was even a thing — bounding uphill with an impressive pace as he crested a feature known as Lion Head and headed straight for me. As he got closer, I could see this was not a young man. In fact, the closer he got the more I watched in disbelief as this lean runner, clearly old enough to be my grandfather, made his way toward me in shorts and sneakers, no backpack, and only a water bottle and trekking poles for equipment, bouncing from rock to rock with the confidence and balance of an acrobat.
This man, 75 years old I was to learn, and fitter than I, pulled up and said hello. “How…how…how are you doing this?” was about all I could mutter in disbelief. “I’ve been running up this hill twice a week since I was younger than you, son. Keeps me young! Have a great day!” and he resumed his relentless uphill jog to the summit 500 vertical feet above. As I descended I kept looking over my shoulder to see how he was progressing, still amazed that his pace had not slacked at all on his way up to the summit.
Mind totally blown.”
I interviewed over 100 people for the book and 25 of their stories are given mini profiles in the book. It was gratifying to hear so many deeply moving and personal tales about the significance of hiking in people's lives. It convinced me I was on to something with this book.
Gym workouts can be powerful supplements to the ultimate fitness we talk about in the book. It can make you a better, stronger, safer hiker. However, it is not necessary and many people just will not go into a gym for various reasons. I call what you get from hiking ‘the kind of fitness you cannot get in a gym’ because it encompasses so much more, as we will see ahead.
Since the pandemic, many have discovered the benefits of hiking. The amount of people who are active hikers has nearly doubled in the last decade.
One of the most basic measures of a fitness activity is how many calories it burns. Hiking excels at this: major calorie burn during a hike, significantly more than walking or using a treadmill. That’s the starting point for the many benefits.
Where hiking begins to demonstrate extraordinary benefits however is when you understand that it delivers both physical and cognitive rewards.
Not all steps are created equal.
Zoning Out: most of the steps you take during theday you are on autopilot. You don't think much about them because they are on flat, predictable ground. Even a treadmill is totally predictable. They are still good for you because you are upright, moving, and getting the heart pumping a bit.
Dual Tasking: the steps you take outside, on a hike, are exponentially more beneficial to both brain and body. The physical benefits of moving and carrying a pack uphill are clear and many, but walking on uneven terrain, where your eyes must watch every step and your brain must calculate how to keep your balance is also a workout.
This cognitive stimulation — using your brain to control and coordinate your body as it performs complex movements and fine motor skills — builds a better brain for you. The more complex the movement is, involving the most muscles and high levels of exertion and mental processing, the better it is for your brain. More on this shortly.
Downhill hiking might seem easier because it is less intense aerobically, however it is far more involving physically because it uses more and different muscles and requires heightened focus and balance to avoid falls. It also engages your brain far more than the uphill part of a hike.
High Intensity Interval Training is a training protocol alternating short periods of intense or explosive anaerobic exercise with brief recovery periods. There are many HIIT workouts but for me, hiking represents an easily controllable and accessible method of getting your heart rate way up, then resting to get it down, and alternting that back and forth during a training hike of a recreational hike.
It can build heart rate variability — the difference between your resting heart rate and your maximum heart rate — a key measure of cardio fitness and durability.
More here: https://www.polar.com/blog/heart-rate-variability-hrv/
Bursts of HIIT are great for brain health. Exercise that elevates your heart rate to 60%-75% of maximum heart rate begins to create a hormone in your bloodstream that is the basic building block for new neurons. BDNF (Brain Derived Neurotropic Factor) is the protein that induces the growth of new bran cells and supports cognitive functionaing.
An HIIT day: finding challenges like the Manitou Incline, an insanely steep, former cog railway converted to a giant staircase, is one way to get HIIT in massive doses. Stadium steps, hotel stairwells, a small local hill you can do laps on: also great for HIIT.
Your body has many built in anti-aging systems. All you have to do is activate them. One of these built in capabilities is Angiogenesis: the physiological process through which new blood vessels form from pre-existing vessels. Exercise triggers this process, and these new capillaries deliver more blood, nutrients and oxygen to your organs and tissues. The anti-aging implications here are profound as the above thigh cross sections would indicate.
Here are a few ways to stimulate angiogenesis:
Training Tip 1: A weighted vest is a simple and almost effortless way to add some intensity to a walk or a hike. 6–10 lbs is hardly noticeable when it's evenly distributed as in a vest. As you progress, you can add more weight and move to a rucking pack, specifically designed to hold heavier weight, such as the 25-lb lead plate I use when I’m in training.
Training Tip 2: As we’ve said, you don't need a gym. Four of the most foundational and basic things you can do to advance both endurance and strength are the very simplest functional fitness exercises: jumping rope and skipping are great for stamina, flexibility, balance, and leg strength. Lunges are for the all-important hip power and flexibility. And, simply walking or running steps with a backpack, or your weighted vest, are as close to the real thing as you can get.
Here we see what is perhaps the most incredible finding of modern neuroscience: your brain is capable of building new brain cells and rewiring itself.
Neuroplasticity is the brain’s ability to reorganize and rebuild itself by forming new neural connections or pathways. These neural pathways are the connections that link brain cells together. More neural pathways create a stronger, denser brain. And increased neural pathways are created through physical activity and learning.
Cognitive Reserve. This is the real payoff for your efforts. Hiking creates denser neural pathways over time. More neural pathways create a stronger, sharper, more resilient brain that can offset injury and delay or prevent cognitive decline. This cognitive reserve, denser neural pathways, is one of the critical elements in taking charge of the way you age. And this is one of the procipal reasons we believe hiking is as close as were going to get to the proverbial fountain of youth.
One of the little known benefits of hiking is its ability to improve your eyesight. There is a new and rapidly evolving school of thought called Natural Vision Improvement which refers to methods that teach people how to use their eyes in a way that leads to improved performance of their full visual system, and therefore to improved seeing without the need of traditional vision aids, such as eyeglasses or contact lenses. The methods are based on the fact that eyesight is a variable skill.
A big, wide open vista as above, in addition to giving you a new perspective on the world, is also very good for your eyes. Movement, focusing off to infinity, the blues and greens of the outside world…all like medicine for strained eyes. If you’re used to narrow cityscapes, flat computer screens, and tiny mobile phone screens, you can feel your eyes thanking you at a locale like this.
“To achieve clarity, the human eyes must constantly move. While they move, a relative movement of all objects within their visual field happens.”
The eyes are controlled by two complex sets of muscles. Like any muscles, they need to be used as intended and exercise regularly to be optimally fit.
Optic nerve is a direct extension of the brain and there is growing evidence that the new neurons created by exercise also support the optic nerve and can act to improve eyesight. More here:
Too much indoor screen time, two dimensional and static, on computers, smart phones, and TVs, can begin to impact these eye muscles and effect your eyesight. The downside of this is now at epic proportions:
One antidote to the surge in myopia is more time outside. It’s often that simple. Your eyes need to experience the depth, the distance, the colors, and the movement of being in the outside environment to work the way they were intended.
Dark Sky: Too few people have access to the true dark sky, but the dark is good for our sleep, our biology, and the health of our ecosystems. It’s good for our creativity and our spirits, and, yes, it’s even good for our safety and security. It’s inspirational to see a truly dark sky, away from light pollution.
Here’s an overview of why dark sky is important: https://earthsky.org/astronomy-essentials/paul-bogard-on-why-we-need-darkness/
Nature Deficit Disorder. Not hard to believe, but there is now a term for a medical condition that occurs when you do not experience nature enough. More time outside erases this deficit and offsets the negatives it creates.
You do not have to travel afar the way I often do in order to find places that can give you a big dose of the outdoors. Most of my ‘get outside’ time happens at easily accessible places that are near my home. Do this: into your favorite search engine, type in ‘hikes near me’ and you’ll be opening up a world of opportunities for short hikes that can get you started.
Almost every part of the country has a ‘Rails-to-Trails” locations, organized by a non-profit organization dedicated to creating and promoting the nationwide network of walking and hiking trails that are made from former rail lines. These tend to be flat and pretty tame, though often beautiful and it’s hard to imagine a better resource for nearby places.
A Better Mindfulness:
“For people who have struggled unsuccessfully with meditation and mindfulness techniques, my hunch is that hiking will work better for 99% of us. My version of mindfulness is, as you might expect: solo hiking and climbing. According to Psychology Today, mindfulness is “a state of active, open attention to the present.”
About Rain, from the book:
“The most intense sensory experience I’ve ever had in my many, many years of hiking came on a short, two-mile walk into The Flume Gorge in New Hampshire, in a heavy rainfall.
Flume Gorge is a narrow ravine, about sixty feet deep and a quarter of a mile long, through solid rock carved by meltwater from the mountains above it (see photo in the Picture Section). It contains a couple of waterfalls and a raging stream that did the carving. Just as I arrived, the rain became very intense, driving, heavy, and thick. And as I walked into the entrance of the gorge, thunder and lightning were concentrated right above me. The waterfall and the stream intensified and magnified the rain and thunder echoing in the canyon, from side to side, again and again. I had anticipated this might be interesting in the rain so I brought an umbrella in addition to my rainsuit to make sure I could enjoy it to the fullest.
I’m glad I did because the experience was exponentially greater than anything I had anticipated. I was able to stand in the center of The Flume, just feet from the torrent, with its vertical walls 10 feet on either side of me, and enjoy this experience for about 45 minutes, non-stop. An overwhelming sensory assault, the sound and fury of nature at its best, and the energy I absorbed was palpable, real, powerful, and invigorating. And oh my what an incredible mindfulness session!
A sensory experience like this isn’t just about the soothing and invigorating sound of rain. It’s biochemical also. It’s Petrichor. That’s the scent you breathe in when it rains, the result of water droplets falling on dry leaves and ground. Falling rain clears the air of dust, pollen, and microbes so you breathe in better air, laden with petrichor, the scent of nature.
I’ve felt versions of this before, but this one experience was a whole new level and it reminded me that sometimes skipping a hike or walk because it’s raining, well, you’ll never know what you’re missing.”
This is where the benefits of hiking begin to far exceed what you can get from a gym.
“No matter how big the challenge, no matter how long the trail, no matter how tough the problem, or how high the mountain, the way you approach big challenges is to break them into a series of smaller problems. Individual little steps, little manageable pieces, and surprise(!) they add up over time to a seriously big accomplishment.”
“Get Used to the False Summits
Of course, there is also the dreaded false summit to contend with, a particularly challenging illusion that occurs on mountain ridges and is one of the hardest lessons to grasp and digest.
Humans are puny compared to mountains, and so there are times as you’re walking uphill you can see a clear point ahead that you believe is the highest point. As you get closer, you come to what you thought was the top but then suddenly another higher point that was hidden from view appears. Sometimes when hiking or climbing a long ridge you experience a series of false summits. You get closer, and surprise you see another summit beyond, then closer still, then another false summit.”
One of my favorite hikes in New Hampshire is the Franconia Ridge, a mile-long undulating ridge with three false summits. The first time I did it, even being aware of the false summit phenomenon, I was utterly amazed at how deceptive these false summits could be. How sure it seemed that I was about to come to the high point, only to have my hopes dashed when I saw the next peak, 1/2 mile and 500 ft higher. It can rob a person of willpower, demoralize, and crush the spirit.
What I love most about being outdoors, hiking and climbing, is that it is the perfect mental preparation for the ups and downs that anyone who ventures outside of their comfort zone experiences: the real world, life, business, entrepreneurship, or relationships for that matter.
Comfort Zone.
I get antsy unless I’m trying to stretch my comfort zone. I feel like things are too easy. I feel like I’m not making progress, on what I can’t always say, but it just leaves me feeling like I am underperforming if I’m too comfortable. I won’t deny it from time to time, it is a great feeling to be safe and protected, but sooner or later I’ve got to put myself out there, whether it is the physical challenge of hiking and climbing or in my work as an entrepreneur. I am compelled to not play it safe, but to test myself, and try to do something worthwhile and difficult.
“Comfort Zones Are a Trap”
A comfort zone is a place where you feel safe, familiar, cozy. A place where, sing it, “everybody knows your name.” There are no obstacles in your comfort zone. No risk. You can pull the covers up over your eyes and block out the world. Even live vicariously through others, or through YouTube. Safe is good, right? Well, no, not necessarily.
When you are at ease, unstressed, and protected, it’s very alluring. It can be restful and comfortable there on the comfy couch, in your office, or in your safe space, and it can be seductive and addictive. But, living always in your comfort zone makes you complacent and overly content that all is well. I don’t think we are on this planet to sit passively and do little or nothing. Which means you’ve got to get up, get out into the world, and take action. Use what you’re given, find your potential, and engage, and that means you’ve got to take a risk.”
Self Reliance.
“So, to intensify the sense of being alone and self-reliant, on a rest day about halfway up the mountain, I decided to make a solo, side trip to a small, neighboring sub-peak. My three companions and I were alone, hundreds of miles from the nearest humans, but I wanted to be more isolated still, to see what that was like.
I climbed two miles across a glacier, up a rocky, narrow ridge to the red X in the photo, and I sat down with my foot hanging over the edge. Ten degrees below zero, on a pinnacle, where one misstep would be fatal, and no other human being on earth knew where I was, or would ever find me if something went badly wrong. The conditions in this spot are cold enough to freeze boiling water instantly, the snow squeaks like styrofoam, exposed skin will be frostbitten very quickly, and it’s two steep miles back down to the relative safety and warmth of the tent and my three companions.
I sat there and soaked it all in for an hour, knowing I was probably the first person to ever be in that spot. And how amazing that a single hour almost 30 years ago is still with me every single day. You instantly develop a heightened sense of absolute self-reliance. Because without it, just staying alive in a place like this for a month until the plane returns will be difficult.”
Continuing to test and expand my comfort zone has become second nature to me at this point, and I continue to do it. One of my personal bellwethers of resisting aging is to hike the most difficult and dangerous trail in the White Mountains — Huntington Ravine — annually, and solo. Forty straight years and counting. It keeps me secure in being self-relient and confident.
I recently found another challenge to push myself out of my comfort zone: climbing the highest outdoor stairway in the world. It lies on the pyramidal top floors of the 107-story Hudson Yard skyscraper in Manhattan.
Physically not much of a challenge, and quite safe due to the extensive harness you wear, but the mental challenge of moving uphill with a 1200-foot drop at your right elbow is quite ennervating and energizing, essentially an urban Via Ferrata. A totally unique experience that truly stretched my comfort zone.
I want to impress on you that not every challenge has to be a tall mountain, or the world’s highest outdoor staircase for that matter. People face their own stubborn, discouraging, daunting, seemingly mountainous obstacles everywhere in life.
Your mountain doesn’t have to be my mountain. It doesn’t have to be a big one. It doesn’t even have to be a mountain. And you don’t have to go to the top. I totally get it that mountainous, uphill, remote places, etc. can be daunting and scary and hard to access. So it can be a dream, a wish, or a plan. Mountains are merely a metaphor for a goal. Find your own peak.
I know you’ve heard about ‘FOMO’, the fear of missing out, the little twinge of anxiety you get from seeing your Facebook and Instagram ‘friends’ posting about their fabulous jet set doings, luxury meals, and so on, and realizing you’re not as fabulous. Well, forget it, try unplugging more, and reframe your thinking to experience the “JOMO”, the joy of missing out. Better yet, try this: don’t miss out, but get more of the joy for yourself; try to get some ‘JOBO’, the joy of being outside
Some of the people profiled in the book, experiencing the Joy Of Being Outside. It’s addictive.
Kalus Obermeyer: a living proof icon of Aging Well. His quote says it all.
The Ten+ Essentials.
REI has a great list, here: https://www.rei.com/learn/expert-advice/ten-essentials.html. I’ve expanded the list a bit and modified it for my preferences to include a few other items I like to have on hand in case of emergency, bad weather, or accident. These items can mitigate 99% of the situations that can change a simple day hike into an uncomfortable, miserable or even dangerous experience.
Why do you need a whistle, you ask? Because when calling for help, your voice carries about 100 yards in the woods. A whistle carries for miles and is what your friends and rescuers will hear and zero in on.
Should I Use Poles? The answer is yes. Four points of contact with the ground are better and safer than two. You can leave them in your pack if the terrain is flat, but even the most anti-pole stalwarts need them on steep downhills. If you are above age 40, the answer is emphatically YES!
My anecdotal proof: I use poles, always. I likely have many, many more uphill steps than you. Estimated at more than 100,000,000 uphill steps on all seven continents over fifty-plus years. I’m 67. And I still have my all-original equipment, fully functional knees and hips.
What Are Cairns?
Here’s a great overview of everything you need to know about cairns: https://bearfoottheory.com/what-are-rock-cairns/. In short, leave the cairn building to the people who are responsible for trail management.
And remember to follow the Leave No Trace ethos. More here: https://lnt.org/
Thanks for making it this far and hanging in with us. Contact info is above. Scan the QR code to join our mailing list and receive an occasional newsletter on fitness, anti-aging, training, hiking, equipment, suggestions, advice, great destinations, and other inspiration.
Keep walking uphill.
