Somewhere around 10 years ago, I got into hiking, which is a more impressive way of saying walking outside. The local terrain doesn’t really constitute what I would call hiking, since it’s just flatland. But regardless, it is outside and it is on a trail, so I can say that I hiked trails. I was a hiker.
I did that for some time and eventually it kind of stopped being a thing. I just slowly stopped doing it. But recently, I’ve decided I want to start doing the hiking again. it was a tentative beginning, I wasn’t sure if I would still enjoy a physical activity and honestly, I didn’t see any way it would be fun. It sounded boring now, but whatever I was or wasn’t doing around the house was as much or more boring, so I also didn’t have much to lose. And anyway I needed to do something to take positive strides in my health.
I was 10 years younger back then, and as you get older, that nice round milestone becomes more and more significant. However, I never have seen myself as the actual age I am. Maybe I’m deluded or stupid or something, but I don’t think I am my age. I probably think and act my age, but I don’t perceive myself that way. The point I’m trying to make here is, however I was then, that’s how I think I am now, and I’m probably not. And that’s not smart. My new experiences with hiking have been a collection of smart and not so smart things; mostly the latter. So I will chronicle the most recent events.
A couple weeks ago, we had a tropical storm moving in. This caused me concern, not because of the storm itself, but because of the coming rain. All of the nearby trails have been flooded from the summer monsoon and it pisses me off. If there’s a couple days without downpours, the flooded trails can turn into muck instead of lakes, which makes the hike more tolerable. The first time I had visited this particular trail, I had left the house and a mile down the road realized I did not change into my hiking boots, I still had my sneakers. "It’ll be fine," I said. "This trail is not as low as the other one I go to." When I get there, right past the entrance gate – lake. I had to go back home and change into my boots. I haven’t made that mistake again.
Since that time, I’d been back to that trail and the water had gone down, mostly. But today I was trying to get in a hike before the tropical storm hit. I checked the radar and it looked fine. I did not consider, and I should have known, weather here changes fast. So I get a mile or so out on the trail and I’m seeing some dark clouds forming. "It’ll be fine." Then it becomes obvious that it’s not going to be fine and I need to get back to the car, like soon. The moment of my realization was captured by my fitness band.
I suffered a few minutes of downpour, but I escaped the worst of the storm, and there was no nearby lightning, which was the bigger concern, since these trails are open fields. Lesson learned? I got caught in another downpour on another day and I was far enough out on the trail to cause me to don my rain jacket I carry in my pack. So, no.
Last week, I decided I was going to do a bigger hike, which at this point in my redevelopment is over 5 miles. If you think that’s weaksauce, remember I am doing this while the temperature and humidity are over 90. To reduce UV exposure, I wear a long-sleeve sun shirt, but I’m still wearing shorts. I need to get some water-wicking hiking pants. I reset my GPS and set my exercise band and go. And very quickly, the sweat starts to go too, because I’m upping my pace to cover more ground quickly. 10 years ago, I could cover 5 miles in an hour. Based on past hiking records, I move about 75% of that speed now and I need to get that speed back.
I have a trail map and I refer to it frequently, but it’s disintegrating from being soaked with sweat in my pocket. At some point, I checked my band to see how far I’d gone. My sweat-soaked sleeve had impersonated a finger and cancelled my recorded hike. That had happened about 1.5 miles in. No idea how far I’d gone since then. I checked my GPS and it said I was about 2.5 miles. Ugh. Onward I went, referring often to the soggy paper map for what path I wanted to take to loop me around and back close to the entrance.
I ended up on an unmaintained part of trail and worse, it was flooded. I thought I’d be better off pressing forward than backtracking so I navigated the water best I could. Luckily none was over ankle deep so my socks stayed dry. Still it slowed me down. I checked my GPS to see where I was, relative to the path I had taken so far. The GPS battery is dead. Right now, I have no idea if I am better off going forward or backward or exactly where I am on the trail. I really have no idea how hikers survived without GPS units.
As luck would have it (because it ain’t been brains), I had purchased replacement batteries and packed them just before leaving for the hike. With a quick swap of batteries, I had GPS again. And I saw that the GPS had died some time ago. So now, I had no reliable track from either my band or the GPS to tell me how far my hike was today. Yay. I’m done.
The trail continues to be flooded, so at the first sign of a cutoff path that would lead me back to my prior track, I took it. Granted, it was not on my paper map, so I was making an educated (if that’s even possibly appropriate at this point) guess. The trail dried out and and I also continued to dry out. After a certain point, your body won’t absorb moisture quick enough to replenish what’s been lost, and I feel I was there, or close to there. I was mouth breathing at this point. My gait was unsteady. I was walking with a forward lean. None of this was good.
But as I’m not writing this from the afterlife, I did make it back to my car. Not without getting bit by a deer fly, twice. It’s almost been a week and I’m still suffering from the bite on my knee.
Despite the stupidity I’d accomplished so far and my knee still swollen and itching (but not sore or painful), I decided to grab a quick hike after work yesterday. Again, I planned this as a 5+ hike. I would go to the trail nearest me to start as soon as possible. I got on the trail at about 5:30. The first mile was a warmup pace, then I sped it up. I didn’t have a trail map, but had a decent memory of the trails and the path I wanted to take. After a short trail ended in a tiny loop, I doubled my path and ended up on the big loop. I had been on the trail a couple weeks ago and it was totally flooded, so I hoped things had improved. I was pleased to see that the area that stopped me before was dried out. And I kept going.
Probably about 50% of the way through the trail loop – lake. About 30 feet of water with no high spots and certainly more than ankle deep. I had plenty of expletives to summarize the situation. I had no choice but to backtrack my whole track, which was over 3 miles at that point. Not only that, but the sun was going down.
Once I got all the swearing out of my system, I just resigned myself to my fate. And no point in pretending to be tired, sun’s setting, gotta go fast. And so I did. I upped my pace to the quickest of the entire hike and went back the entire length of the trail. And lets not discount the fact that mosquitos really love dusk, in a swamp.
All told, that hike was 6.75 miles, accomplished in exactly 2 hours. So far, my dumbest hike this year. But there’s still plenty of days left in the year, plenty of chances to beat that record.
Aerobic training effect: "Improvement". Fuck you.
Watching The Races
I’ve been keeping an eye on the COVID race for a few months now. The players I watch are all standout players: FL, TX, PA, and GA. Those are the places that have people that I know, so I watch their progress.
I remember when FL was the star, I seem to recall it was in the top 5 for a while. But PA put forth a massive effort and shot right up the charts. TX was a slow starter, but it’s been doing pretty well lately. GA has always been mediocre, which I suppose is a good thing, honestly. But FL is recently finding its mojo and is climbing in rank again. Go, FL! Obviously, no one is going to take the crown from NY, and NJ is probably always going to be second to NY (in everything), so there’s only so far you can go.
For three of my players, I watch their personal progress dashboards. Two of them, FL and TX, use the same software, so it kind of gives some equal comparison of the numbers. But in both cases, they use graphs that are misleading. Well, they aren’t if you understand the data, but for casual observers and those that don’t want to put the minimal effort into understanding, the response could be either, "this isn’t so bad", or "this is great" when the reality is neither of those sentiments.
Take a graph from FLs dashboard:
Wow, that’s impressive. Deaths are falling, and dramatically at that! This is all behind us, let’s go party!
But there is a small disclaimer below the chart, for those that care to read: "Death data often has significant delays in reporting…". That means that those low numbers in the near term are low because there’s no data yet. Those numbers will rise as time goes on, but that’s just fine, because there will be newer, lower numbers to report as time goes on as well.
Here’s a graph from TX’s dashboard.
This is just dumb design: plotting two values, one that will constantly increase, and one that will remain relatively constant on the same scale. This will have two effects. First, the number of deaths per day (in blue) looks like a really small value. And comparing 20 to 1,698 does make 20 seem very small. But as the total number grows, and it will, every day, the scale is going to eventually have to be adjusted, and the daily value is going to be insignificant.
TX does the same charting with the number of cases, with the same effects.
Maybe its incompetency that made these charts, but in the current political climate, and judging that these two states have pushed very hard to justify their reopening plans, it might not be a stretch to think this is just propaganda. The numbers don’t lie, they’re not telling you anything false. It’s just being presented in a way that looks most favorable.