Baddabing

I’m blogging this from 38,000 feet. I’m on route to Los Angeles and have some time to spare. I start my training with tiltware tomorrow. I’ll be down in LA for about two and a half weeks. I’m feeling pretty excited, nervous, and anxious to get started.

On Sunday evening, Christine & I impulsively hopped in the car and drove to Jasper. We wanted to spend the remainder of Canada day long weekend connecting with the Canadian wild. We tried to find camping, but coming late on a long weekend, all the camp sites were full. We ended up snagging the last room left in a motel on the Jasper strip. We got up early and enjoyed our included breakfast. It was your standard north american buffet breakfast — scrambled ‘eggs’, bacon, sausage, hashbrowns, pancakes, and the like. Oh how I love that stuff. Loaded with saturated fats and besides the protein in the eggs, not very nutritionally dense. But it is my weakness, and I can’t figure out why. I really love diner style breakfasts. Past-Aaron would have had two or three plate-fulls. Reformed CR-Aaron settled for one. My normal quotidian breakfasts are around 300 calories. This one was in the neighborhood of 800.

However, we were going to need that extra energy to burn. We drove out to the Miette Hot springs, where the sulphur ridge trailhead starts. It took us roughly two hours to hike the 5km trail, which moves entirely upwards (+2300 ft) in elevation. The view from the top was phenomenal. I just love being in high places like that. I’ve attached three of my favorite shots from the top.

The descent was not much fun. While I virtually flew up the trail effortlessly (a good sign of my improved cardiovascular health, and a side-effect of being 40 pounds lighter than I’m used to), I found coming down very painful. My nemesis from last year, an injured knee joint, made a return about 30 minutes into the descent. Just as last year, it only hurts when walking downhill, when making a very particular motion. It’s painless walking on flats or uphill, or even going down stairs. But when walking down a slope, nasty. It put me out of hiking all last summer, and I thought after a full year, it would be healed. I went downhill skiing in the winter, and have been out dancing, roller-blading, and mountain biking without any pain. But it seems I still cannot hike into high-places, if I have to walk back down. This really really sucks. Even with two hiking poles (I had mine, and borrowed Christine’s), it was a very painful two hours to get back down to the car.

I’ll have to really get serious about strength training the muscles around that knee. If that doesn’t solve the problem it might be a joint or cartilage problem only surgery can fix. Uhg?