Stamina Fail, Parenting Win
Posted September 27th, 2008 by Howard TaylerBackground: I’ve hiked the summit of Mt. Timpanogas half a dozen times, and done another half-dozen hikes to the Timpanogas basin. These were all when I was forty pounds lighter and eighteen years younger.
My son got his Arrow of Light from Cub Scouts on Wednesday, joined the Boy Scout Troop on the same night, and today, Saturday the 27th, was the troop’s big Timpanogas hike. It’s a twelve mile round-trip, with four thousand feet of elevation change making it feel more like a twenty-miler. That’s a lot for an eleven-year-old boy, especially one who has never done a five-miler.
I opted to join him. It was not convenient. I’m supposed to be re-stocking the buffer and signing books. Two factors entered into my decision to not only go with him, but to bring my 13-year-old daughter along as well (the Scoutmaster actually suggested it, and invited everybody’s families to join the troop on the jaunt.)
(”Jaunt.” HA! I kid.)
Where was I? Two factors. Right.
1) The point of the book signing and the buffer-stocking is so that I can be a Dad who spends more time with his kids. If cartooning ever gets the best of the family, cartooning will find itself maimed or dead. Family is far more important to me.
2) If I wait for the easy and convenient opportunities to spend time with my kids, I’ll never do the fun stuff, and I’ll probably end up resenting them for being difficult and inconvienent. Which they are, but then again, so are most of the very best things in life.
I wont give you a full trip report. I will however give you a map.
The green is the part we hiked, both ways. It’s drawn from memory, but I studied the topo-map before AND after the trip, and I’m pretty sure I counted the switch-backs right. Also, “Scout Falls” (sounds like a Scoutmaster’s nightmare of a newspaper headline) was a “wrong turn” (well… wrong don’t-turn) at the end of a switchback, so I’ve got a good landmark.
The red is the part we missed out on. In terms of elevation and trail distance, we made it about half way. In terms of spectatular view, we missed roughly 70% of the trip. I know. I’ve seen it before.
The green “X” is where my asthma and my weight ganged up on me. We were hiking up this long, steep shot through some rock tailings (rocks ranging from gravel to boulders that have broken off of cliff-faces above over the last jumblety-rockillion years) and suddenly I was short of breath. And gasping. And trying not to panic, because that’s JUST what every eleven-year-old boy needs to see. I took an inhaler hit, and couldn’t breathe deeply enough to get it in. Second try, same result. Third hit was true… my lungs opened a bit, my vision cleared, and I was still short of breath.
So we stopped for breakfast. Kiki, Link, and I (names have been changed, obviously) ate MREs, and even used the water-powered heating envelopes. Mine was labeled “Chicken and Chunky Salsa,” and was the worst of the three. Link enjoyed (that word is not a lie, I swear) “Beef Enchiladas” and Kiki devoured “Beef in Barbecue Sauce.” Then she devoured the rest of Link’s “these-aren’t-enchiladas-but-I’m-really-hungry.”
And throughout our forty minute breakfast break I took inventory:
Number of times my vision fuzzed out while bending over to make breakfast? Three.
Number of times I felt like all I needed was some food and rest and I’d be fine? Zero.
Number of additional inhaler hits I took? Four.
Number of times I evaluated my children’s performance thus far, and suspected they were at the far edge of their own endurance limits? Two.
Number of times I suspected said evaluation was colored by my own condition? Six.
After a short spot of deliberation me and mine turned around. The rest of the group still had their two-deep adult leadership, strong older boys, and about four miles and two thousand feet of elevation ahead of them. I convinced Kiki and Link that we had to turn around because of ME. They were doing fine.
Fortunately for my ego, by the time we got back to the car they were both completely wiped out. No way would they have finished the hike without exhaustion, tears, turned ankles, and possibly some “carry me?”
I apologized to them for not being able to take them all the way up. Kiki said “It’s okay, Dad. We got to spend time with you, and that’s what’s important.”
Stamina fail. Parenting win. Also, it’s 3:41pm, I’ve had a two-hour nap, and I’m not still on that soul-crushing-though-awe-inspiring mountain. Oh, and I’m not dead, too.
Next week I shall flaunt my superior stamina by drawing pictures in the remaining seven hundred and four Teraport Wars sketch editions.
Explore posts in the same categories: Home & Family, Humor, Health
September 27th, 2008 at 3:11 pm
Man do I know how that feels. Well… the loss of stamina at least.
Two friends and I did some backpacking a few weekends ago. That turned out to be the most difficult hike I have done, which is pathetic considering it was not the longest, or most elevation gain. I don’t know what happened with this particular hike, but on the few mile ascent up the last hill, I was seriously thinking about ditching my entire pack. Gasping for breath (and I don’t have asthma, so I can’t imagine how that would be for you), I had to will myself up one step at a time. I kept telling myself “just over that hill will be the peak and I can take a rest”. My buds were waiting, rather patiently, for me up there. Every few hundred feet I had to take a break.
Despite the difficulty on that last day though, I had a blast and it looks like you had a lot of fun too. I always feel there is nothing better than enjoying the outdoors (and usually enduring that which makes it difficult) with friends and family. Hope this doesn’t make you think twice about doing a hike again. “What do we do when we fall of the horse?”
Your kids sound like great little people. But, that is to be expected when their parents spend quantity time with them. I’m sure they will continue to appreciate how great of a dad you are as they see the world and basically all the other families around about them go down the crapper.
September 27th, 2008 at 6:37 pm
Wow. Creepy situational coincidence. My wife and I went to this all-day music festival today. Emphasis on all-day (1045 to 2300 in the Phoenix sun). About 1400, she was pretty severely sun-and-heat-exhausted. I suggested we find some shade, and have something cool to drink. We chilled in the shade drinking $4 lukewarm water for about 3 hours, halfway listening to the rest of the bands that were playing. At about 1715, I said, “Yes, I want to see the rest of the bands, but your health is more important to me.” At about 1745, she relented, and decided that it really would be best for us to go. It was a great day, even though we cut it short. She’s feeling really bad that I didn’t get to see a couple of the bands I was looking forward to, but I was really concerned about her. When we got on the road, I realized how exhausted I was, too. Thankfully we didn’t spend the rest of the day; I’m pretty sure she would have passed out from heat stroke or something before the end.
I was in boy scouts for ages (eagle!). I don’t think I went on anything longer than five-mile hikes with the new scouts. Most young scouts haven’t done anything more than a couple of miles at a time.
Here’s a tip: drop some significant coin on good shoes for all of you, and good socks with them. Don’t buy hiking shoes to “grow into.” Also, bring plenty of fluid. About 2 litres per person per 5 miles or per every 3 hours.
About breaks; take breaks under 5 minutes, or more than 20 minutes. If you take off again in that 15-minute period, you’re liable to cramp all to hell, and you won’t be able to continue on anyway.
As a camp counselor, we took hikes with a group of new scouts every week (new group every week, all of them new scouts). Having had a lot of experience hiking, I had a hard time slowing down to the level of the younger scouts until I started carrying about 25 pounds of rocks with me on those hikes, dumping them, and carrying water containers back.
September 27th, 2008 at 7:10 pm
@MadAlric: Thanks for the pointers. We’ve got good shoes, and comfortable ride-on-the-hips packs with Camelbak or lookalike hydration systems in them. None of us tried to break in shoes or boots on this trip. :-)
I was carrying too much, though. My pack weighed in at just under 25lbs. I had a first-aid kit, 4 liters of water (70oz Camelbak and a 2-liter bottle), binoculars, and assorted foodstuffs. I SHOULD be able to carry that much, but I’m already carrying 40lbs of dead weight, and apparently I’m not in good enough shape to tote around 65lbs (30 kilos for those following this in Europe) of not-helping-with-the-locomotion mass.
Still, if it hadn’t been for the asthma we would have cleared the saddle into Timpanogas Basin, and gotten roughly 80% of the gorgeous view available on the trip. The last 20% is looking out over civilization… not necessarily worth it, except for the fact that with the binoculars we would be able to see our house from the summit.
September 27th, 2008 at 7:43 pm
It’s easy to forget that you haven’t been doing this stuff for ages! Boots and stuff aren’t going to make up for sedentary practices. If you pushed your pen as hard as you tried to push yourself you’d go thru the paper and never get your art done. Either.
Walk in the evening with your kids. Now that they know you have a bit of trouble, ask them to walk with you as you increase your walks daily and increase in decent increments. They’ll like the idea of helping Dad so that the next time you hit the hills, you’ll go all the way!
September 27th, 2008 at 8:28 pm
@Capn Lazarus: I don’t think that’ll work. The problem wasn’t “out of shape” so much as it was “out of shape for the altitude.” I put in plenty of time on my feet with no difficulty at 4500 feet above sea level. But at 9600+ feet my asthma kicked into overdrive. A lighter pack (and a lighter ME) would certainly help, but this isn’t something I can walk off around town.
The plan is more hiking at 7200-8000 feet come spring, in addition to a more religious approach to the cardio workouts at the gym. Yeah, I’ll be taking my kids on walks, but they’ll be one- to three-mile hikes in the nearby mountains.
September 27th, 2008 at 8:49 pm
I’ve always found chicken with salsa to be delicious (and it literally is Chicken in salsa). The enchilada scared me (too much resemblance to plastic…). Of course, I’m the weirdo that wishes they could bring back beef frankfurters, chicken stew, and beef stew ( i think beef stew disappeared)… ah MREs… the only way to brown bag it.
September 27th, 2008 at 9:09 pm
Your calculation is off: it’s equivalent to a 26-mile hike, not a 20-miler. As a general rule, every mile traveled when you’re more than a mile above your acclimitization altitude counts double.
I carry a digital camera with me when hiking. It makes pacing myself easy: I’m always looking around for things to photograph (and enjoying the scenery), and the time needed to take a good picture of a flower or a bird or whatever is a decent five-minute break. If I finish the hike with fewer than ten pictures per equivalent mile, I’ve been moving too fast.
I try to keep my pack under 20 pounds for dayhikes, 40 pounds for overnight. It might be more difficult for you in Utah, but where I hike, I can usually count on finding surface water, so I’ll sometimes only carry a one-quart bottle and a water filter. MREs are too heavy for my taste: if you assemble your own meals, you can cut the weight of food in half. Also, look at your first-aid kit: unless you know how to use everything in it, it’s too heavy.
September 27th, 2008 at 9:19 pm
@Carnildo: Surface water is plentiful on Timpanogas, and it’s fairly uniformly contaminated with giardia and cryptosporidia. You can even contract campylobacter jejuni from it, thanks to extensive human traffic on that mountain.
There’s also a ban in effect on campfires (stoves are okay, but HEAVY) so boiling the water isn’t a good option for those packing light.
In short, if I want to depend on surface water, I need to bring a good filtration pump, and maybe some purification tablets.
September 27th, 2008 at 9:40 pm
As a fellow asthmatic, I’m quite relieved for you that sanity won out over machismo. Your plan for conditioning sounds like a good one - your kids should enjoy it too. Why not have them check for merit badge tie-ins? Might prove to be an incentive for you as well…
September 27th, 2008 at 9:48 pm
*boggles at American use of units*
madAlric, Howard: You do know that litres are metric, right?
I can’t really relate to the altitude issue. In Brisbane, Mt Coot-tha’s considered a mountain. The altitude at its peak? 287 m (942 ft). I’ve been to (and even hiked in) more mountainous places, but I don’t recall ever feeling the effects of altitude outside of an aeroplane.
September 27th, 2008 at 11:38 pm
Sam - the US uses both metric and imperial measurements. Some stuff is sold in liter/litres, some is sold in gallons/pints/quarts. The only way the US as a whole will switch entirely to metric is if all of the suppliers outside of the US decide, at once, to never use any imperial measurements - for at least a decade :)
Even Britain still uses Imperial for a lot of things. (For that matter, weight can’t be calculated properly in metric except at the earth’s surface. A gram is _not_ a measurement of weight. It’s a measurement of mass - which will seriously throw off people on the moon or Mars. )
September 28th, 2008 at 1:02 am
I vaguely recall doing stuff like that when I was in Cub Scouts
(before anyone actually noticed that atheists like myself weren’t
supposed to be involved… :) ). Then, later, the same in Civil Air
Patrol. (CAP ground teams do a *lot* of hiking after someone
flies into a Cumulogranitus cloud….)
My problem wasn’t asthma (and I lived in the LA Basin, for crying
out loud!) — it was my lack of friends and my total inability to Pack
Lightly. Picture: 100-lb. kid toting 70-lb. pack. Picture: CAP Senior
Member explaining to Cadet in a voice audible just the other side
of the Rockies why this is a Bad Idea…. :)
September 28th, 2008 at 2:02 am
Bookworm: That’s like saying that mass can’t be properly calculated in imperial units.
Weight is a kind of force, and is therefore properly measured in Newtons, although kgf is currently more common.
Pounds are a unit of force - the proper imperial unit of mass is the slug, but pounds mass will *always* be more common.
Attempting to use the same units for both mass and weight will seriously throw off people on any world with different gravity from what the units assume.
csadn: Cumulogranitus! LOL.
September 28th, 2008 at 8:23 am
15-20 years later, what your kids will remember is the time spent with them.
When I was about 15, my family and I were camping in Rocky Mountain National Park, and we attempted the hike up to Andrew’s Glacier (11 mile round trip, 2000 foot elevation change). We got to the final split in the trail, saw a thunderstorm rolling in, and had to turn back. Dad was disappointed.
Last year, I hiked that trail with my husband, and I realized we would never have made it to the glacier the last time I tried. That last mile contains a little under 1000 feet of the total elevation change and was a scramble over rocks up a minimally marked trail. We almost didn’t make it - there was no way my 15 year old self with siblings at 10 and 13 would have made it.
But whether we made it to the end of a hike or not, I look back at all the childhood hikes with my family with pleasure.
Except Bryce Canyon, where I was crying by the time we got to the top because I was so tired (age 12) and my dad caught it on video to show to all my future boyfriends.
September 28th, 2008 at 9:24 am
Oh man. I had to pause and catch my breath just reading the travelogue.
I really really want to hike Timp someday. My first step towards that goal, as well as the goal of being able to play with my kids for more than 90 seconds without getting winded, was to see a doctor on Thursday about my chronic back issues. Now I have a prescription for an X-ray, and from there we’ll talk physical therapy.
Hopefully then I’ll move on to that “exercise” thing, followed by “training”. This time next year, I want to be able to make this hike.
Never having even hiked the Y, I don’t know if my 5-year old would make it. What say ye, brother? Could I take her on a hike up that steep, or no?
September 28th, 2008 at 12:04 pm
A five-year-old child can hike the Y, yes. It’s about a mile of uphill travel, fairly steep, and if you do it at the right time of day it’s quite pleasant.
Note: Y mountain faces almost due west. The right time of day is “be done before noon.” That means leaving at dawn.
September 28th, 2008 at 2:11 pm
“Good socks”, yes. Surprisingly key.
For a long time, I just bought the “six pairs to a plastic bag” mega-mart all-cotton athletic sock specials, and used them for everything.
Then a friend (with more money than I have) hauled me off to a specialty shoe store called The Walking Company, and thwacked me into buying a few pairs of socks made by Thorlo. At first I thought she was trying to bankrupt me, or had a buddy deal with the salesman-20 dollar pairs of socks?
Now I know the difference socks make. It’s huge. Better wicking, thick only on the impact points, thin at the top of the foot and the arch to allow for heat dissipation…
September 28th, 2008 at 2:19 pm
Edit: thorlo now seems to have its own website with online shopping. Prices are lower, and they have many more custom designs than I remember. Not that it’s a surprise since I would also have been paying the retailer’s cut-in Hawaii, to boot.
And yes, apparently they do have kid’s sizes.
September 28th, 2008 at 4:44 pm
Note for people from the east coast: the “sun” appears from the top left.
Took me a minute to realize that those “rivers” were actually peaks.
September 28th, 2008 at 6:48 pm
Howard wrote:
“My son got his Arrow of Light from Cub Scouts on Wednesday […]”
Howard, please convey my (total stranger’s) sincere congratulations to your son on his accomplishment. **applause**
I was in scouting as a boy, myself (well, Cub Scouts, anyway). I know just what an achievement that is - for the uninformed among us? Unless things have drastically changed in the past almost-fourty-years, the Arrow of Light is _THE_ single highest award in Cub Scouts, and the only Cub Scout award that can be worn on one’s Boy Scout uniform. It cannot be earned as a Boy Scout, either - so any Scout you see wearing that one? Deserves some serious respect, beause that’s not a terribly common achievement. (I missed it myself by about three merit badges, so I know first-hand what a LOOOONG laundry-list of achievements it takes to get the Arrow.)
September 28th, 2008 at 11:48 pm
zippthorne: Yeah, I get that inverted perspective too. I wonder if making the shadows bluer would make any difference…
September 29th, 2008 at 5:49 am
Hey, you made it to 9200 feet with asthma and two kids. I for one am impressed. And Kudos to you for setting the books aside. That in itself is an accomplishment to be proud of.
September 29th, 2008 at 10:00 pm
Don’t even want to tell you how many times I got that tired, trying to keep up with a bunch of boys that hiked at it seemed 30 miles per hour straight uphill. Howard, you were absolutely dead on right to take the time to go on the trip–your kids will grow up only one time, and you need to be there and share some of that with them.
I spent over 15 years in Scouting as an adult leader, and the parents that participate, no matter how little, have the best results from Scouting. All three of my sons made Arrow of Light, and Eagle as well. It was a wonderful experience for them, and it is STILL benefiting their careers and life. Scouting is a super program–keep up the good work, and tell your boy to enjoy it to the fullest–we all did…and we learned a lot–we still camp and hike when we can.
September 30th, 2008 at 7:39 am
Well, it seems there are enough other scouters here that know the fun and joy of hiking. I do have two things to add, though.
1) Asthma. You should start swimming, a lot. I will help out with your lungs. One of the scouts who climbed Baldy and Philmont the same day as my group had asthma and was first up the mountain in his group by a good 20 minutes or so. When he found out he had asthma, he started swimming every day to train his lungs.
2) Equipment. It sound like you used day packs, but at 25lb you were overloading whatever day pack you had. I’ve only carried that much with a full size hiking pack. Well, if you ever want advice on equipment to buy, I think there are enough of us here to help you out with finding equipment, if you need any.
September 30th, 2008 at 8:16 am
@adciv
1) I swam competitively as a kid. That’s one reason the asthma isn’t worse. Making time for it these days is tricky, but you’re right. It’s something I should do.
2) I had a full-sized 40-liter pack, well balanced and snug to my back. Yes, I was carrying far too much for the trip, but at least I was carrying it correctly. :-)
October 1st, 2008 at 1:28 pm
Socks: I favour HJ Commando
And I know all about being overweight and underfit, sadly. The parenting win bit was cool, though.
Once, we made an attempt on Snowdon in the dark with a bunch of kids. The weather turned just a bit too rough when were were about 700ft below the summit and still sheltered by the ridge, there were some hefty gusts, and I (as more-or-less leader) had visions of losing a child thorough them literally being blown off the mountain if we went higher. So, we turned back - and that hike back down is one of the hardest I’ve done.
However, one child got to do a REALLY good “what I did in the holidays” essay :-) - had to get it confirmed by her father, as the teacher didn’t believe “we climbed up Snowdon in the dark”.
You may be pleased to hear that on a later attempt we made it to the top. And, I may say, rode the train down again. Hiking down is harder than climbing.
October 2nd, 2008 at 1:40 pm
Howard: Get yourself an oxy bottle with a demand regulator.