Fitness from the Road: Out of Stagnation

View from Top of Cerro San Bernando

Thus far in our blog we have done a few different series: Travel Thoughts, Recommended Travel, Being Helpful, and a Day in the Life. I thought that I would start a new series. This series, Fitness From the Road, is about fitness and health while we wander.

Improving fitness from the road is harder than I imagined when I quit my busy job 10 months ago. I assumed that, as an unemployed traveler, I would have plenty of time and motivation to seek optimal fitness and health. But, even unemployed and childless, time still remains a precious quantity. Days still turn quickly to nights. And motivation (at least for me) still takes effort. Obviously there are other aspects to health and fitness from the road beyond excerise-- two big ones are avoiding getting sick and calorie consumption, and we plan to cover these topics in later posts.

So here I am, almost a year after quitting my job, at a fitness stalemate. I would like to move past stagnation and increase my overall fitness. Up to this point, my exercise strategy has been haphazard and it has kept me at about the same point that I have been for the past 3 years. But I think that in order to really increase my fitness, I need a systematic approach.

In the pursuit of a systematic approach, I took (or tried to take) three fitness tests: running, upperbody strength, and core.

The running test simply requires 12 minutes of hard running (and warm-up/ cool down to avoid injury). But amazingly, I have not yet been able to do the running test because I have not yet found a track or any other method that would accurately measure the meterage that I've covered. However, I know that my running fitness is not in amazing shape because when I jogged up the Cerro San Bernando (approximately 4700 feet tall, where the above pic comes from), I had to transition to hiking at some point. I hope to take the actual test soon...

The second test, upper body strength, is simply a push-up test. As a woman, I was supposed to do the modified push-up. Doing 40 modified push-ups gave me an "excellent" score for my age category. But getting the excellent modified push up score felt both sexist and like cheating at the same time. So I think my goal for improvement will work off my standard push-up number (24).

The third test, core strength, is a 3 minute plank with various modifications. I lasted for 2 minutes before my back seriously arched, and i was done. The scoring for this test is divided into two results: good and poor. I recieved the "poor" score and I am looking forward to when I jump from poor to good.

In addition to these three exercise categories, I have one more priority: injury prevention. My joints are not what they used to be and so I have to practice vigilance, as well, get in physical therapy exercises. Another thing that helps in this department is a 30 minute yoga app, Black and White Vinyasa, that both Wilson and I love. The app cost us $3 but a conservative estimate is that we have used the app 250 times (W = 150, me = 100) since Wilson downloaded it 10 months ago. So if you estimate that a yoga class is at least $10 per pop, W and I have got $2500 of value from this healthy, challenging, app.

Finding a systematic approach for these 4 priorities -- running, upper body, core, and injury prevention -- will not be easy. Wilson and I usually don't know exactly where we will be or what we will be doing in a week, sometimes not even in two days. We also don't often control our own itineraries (Chile/Bolivia debacle) or schedules -- e.g., we have to go when the bus goes, and if it is 5 hours later than expected, that is part of traveling. So my systematic approach has to create a system with an the inherent chaos. Wish me luck!

Run/walk at Iguazu falls

 

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