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A Toast To Fitness: Hiking Plus Wine Hits The Spot

A Toast To Fitness: Hiking Plus Wine Hits The Spot

By Mary Orlin, San Jose Mercury News (TNS)

SAN JOSE, Calif.–On a warm, sunny Sunday morning, a hiking group gathers in the parking lot of Saratoga, California’s Sanborn County Park. Folks are decked out in hats, backpacks and hiking boots. Some carry poles, others water bottles in preparation for an 11-mile hike through the redwoods.

But whether they’re seasoned hikers or newcomers to the Great Hikes Plus One club, they’re all here for two reasons: They want to socialize while doing something active outdoors. Then afterward, there’s a picnic at a Santa Cruz Mountains winery nearby.

It’s a powerful incentive.

The Bay Area is a haven for hikers. Google “Bay Area hiking groups” and more than 1.4 million results turn up. There are casual groups, independent clubs and Sierra Club affiliates. And then there are the groups, like Great Hikes Plus One, that organize via Meetup, the website that helps like-minded enthusiasts find each other.

Meetup accounts for about 140 active Bay Area hiking groups. You can hike the stairways of San Francisco, join the Sleep Late and Hike Meetup in Palo Alto, or get fit with the Well Walkers in Orinda. While most of the gatherings focus on just the hike, Great Hikes Plus One adds a foodie and social element.

The group was started by Patty Kamysz, an avid hiker who had tried other hiking Meetups, but felt frustrated. “You’d go and you’d be with these people on a beautiful hike, and then it’s over and they go to their cars and leave,” she says. “I just felt like something was missing.”

That missing piece turned out to be a post-hike stop at a local winery, brewpub or “funky little restaurant,” Kamysz says. “I like the idea of continuing to socialize.”

So two years ago, the Los Altos hiking enthusiast started her own group, Great Hikes Plus One–the “plus one” is the post-hike activity. Within the first week, 75 people had signed up. Now nearly 600 members have joined her group. Kamysz organizes and leads three weekend hikes.

“I don’t see all 600 at once,” Kamysz says. Of the core 40 to 50 members, there are 12 to 15 she sees on every hike, “no matter what.”

In the process, she has brought together a congenial, friendly group of people, she says, who “liked each other and would support each other.”

Pattie Na, of Palo Alto, was on the Great Hike’s first trek–and nearly every one since then. It was the foodie aspect of the group that appealed to her. “I like that this takes me to places near where I live that I never knew about or had gone to before,” she says.

At the start of each hike, Kamysz has everyone form a circle and introduce themselves. She asks a random question to break the ice, such as “Who is your favorite historical character associated with the Fourth of July?” After several names–Benjamin Franklin, Betsy Ross and Uncle Sam–are bandied about, the group sets off.

The pace is swift as they head to the San Andreas Trail head at Sanborn County Park. This hike is known for its majestic redwood trees. And it’s relatively close to downtown Saratoga and the hikers’ extracurricular destination, Savannah-Chanelle Vineyards, for post-hike wine tasting and picnicking.

As the inclines get steeper, the group stays pretty much together, no one peels off ahead of the others. The pace is conducive to both a good workout and conversation.

“Every week of doing this helps get you in shape,” says San Francisco hiker Ed Kopakowski, who joined the group two years ago. “I do this two to three times per month. If you keep hiking, you start getting into shape after four, five, six weeks.”

That health benefit is a big incentive for Los Altos’ Eric Breydo, who belonged to a hiking group for 20 years when he lived in Virginia. “I thought I didn’t have time to take a whole day hiking,” he says. “Then I realized I couldn’t afford not to. It’s for my health in every sense, both physical and emotional.”

Indeed, Great Hikes is an all-day commitment. Hikes average eight to 12 miles; this particular hike is an 11-miler. Kamysz calls a snack break at Indian Rock, a scenic viewpoint where hikers can watch rock climbers scaling a steep wall.

It’s the social aspect that keeps folks like Kopakowski coming back. He moved to the Bay Area from the East Coast two years ago. “In August, I’m heading off with two people from this group and going backpacking for nine days,” he says. “Any group that is activity-based is a good place to find people with similar interests.”

Sonia Appel, of Sunnyvale, echoes the sentiment. She’s been hiking with the group for a year. “I wanted to meet new people,” she says, “and do things with other people that liked to do the same things I did.”
For Appel and the other 600 members of the group, that means great hikes _ plus a gourmet extra or two.

Back at the trailhead, the hikers head for their cars, then drive to Savannah-Chanelle, where Kamysz has arranged for a group picnic spot on Pinot Hill. She has secured some special bottles of wine to taste, including a 2004 Estate Pinot Noir and a 2012 Insider’s Club Pinot Noir.

“They set those bottles aside for our group, since they don’t have many left,” she says.

Umbrellas shade the picnic tables, libations are poured and summery dishes shared. There are birthday cupcakes and a rousing chorus of the cheery song. It’s the perfect plus-one after a great hike with friends.

Start your own

If you’re passionate about hiking, you can start your own Meetup group. The website,www.meetup.com, takes you through the steps and helps publicize your group to help its members find it. Here are some tips to help you start:

  • Choose a theme to help your hiking group stand out from the pack.
  • Choose a hike length and difficulty level: easy, moderate or strenuous. Provide history, fun facts and other information about the hiking destination. Make sure new members know what to expect.
  • Plan time to scout hikes and any post-hike group activity.
  • Keep fees for any after-hike activities, such as wine tasting or dining, low to encourage participation.
  • Limit the number of hike participants to keep the group manageable and more intimate. Require RSVPs.
  • Stay engaged before and after the hike. Post photos on social media. Use the tools provided on Meetup for pre–and post-hike communication.

Photo by Ed Coyle via Flickr

Hiking In The Swiss Alps, Near Lucerne, In The Footsteps of Mark Twain

Hiking In The Swiss Alps, Near Lucerne, In The Footsteps of Mark Twain

By Christy DeSmith, Star Tribune (Minneapolis)(TNS)

My mother-in-law, Anna, reads avidly — in a handful of languages. Born in World War II-era Budapest, she was a bookish girl who grew up devouring Hungarian and Russian literature. After a stop in Holland, she moved to Lucerne, Switzerland, an idyllic Alpine city set on a crystalline lake, and turned to novels in German and Italian, two of the country’s four official languages. Later, she added English to her repertoire.

Anna’s spoken English bears traces of her favorite British and American writers: Jane Austen, Shakespeare, and Mark Twain. For her, my husband, Mischa, and I were never engaged; we were “betrothed.” My daughter’s stroller was a “pram.” And she’s always asking me to “fetch” her things from the grocery store.

Mischa and I now visit Switzerland every summer.

While we’re there, Anna likes loading me up with literary references to her adopted homeland. She jabbed me in the ribs during an early visit — this was probably 2009 — gasping with laughter while pointing me toward W. Somerset Maugham’s mocking description of Lucerne.

“It was true that the lake was absurd, the water was too blue, the mountains too snowy, and its beauty, hitting you in the face, exasperated rather than thrilled. … Lucerne reminded him of wax flowers under glass cases,” the British author wrote of Lucerne in a short story called The Traitor.

I loved this passage immediately. It perfectly captured my early impressions of Switzerland, a gorgeous but oppressively perfect and overachieving kind of place.

A few years ago Anna handed me a copy of Mark Twain’s 1880 book A Tramp Abroad after dinner. “To hear an American read Mark Tvvvvain!” she purred, with her palm pressed to chest. She demanded a live reading. I searched Anna’s face for a hint of irony, something I often detect in her expressions. I found none. She reclined in her chair and awaited the performance.

I stammered through The Awful German Language, possibly the book’s most famous chapter (it was the only one I knew). Then Anna directed me to a handful of essays Twain wrote after spending some time near Lucerne. In The Jodel and Its Native Wilds, Twain recounts ascending nearby Mount Rigi with his agent in 1878.

Anna likes this essay, in part, because of her affections for Mount Rigi–she can admire its grass-covered slopes from the comforts of her garden or living room. (All the other mountains in her view are baldfaced and jagged.)

I started reading aloud: Rigi is “an imposing Alpine mass, six thousand feet high, which stands by itself, and commands a mighty prospect of blue lakes, green valleys and snowy mountains–a compact and magnificent picture three hundred miles in circumference.”

I felt my face redden. I’m not fond of public speaking, but more than that, the florid prose embarrassed my Midwestern sensibilities.

“For some days we were content to enjoy looking at the blue Lake Lucerne and all the piled-up masses of snow-mountains that border it all around …” –Mark Twain

This wasn’t what I expected from Twain–he seemed intoxicated by Switzerland. Thankfully, the essay takes an irreverent turn, poking fun at Rigi’s yodeling shepherd boys, its alphorn players and Twain himself. After all, it took him three days to reach the summit–most hikers can master gentle Rigi in less than a day.

An hour later, I was lounging about Anna’s living room, dousing my phobias with white wine while gazing out the window at the soft contours of Rigi’s kulm (or peak). Anna re-emerged with yet another literary reference to central Switzerland: a clip from the Neue Luzerner Zeitung newspaper about the new Mark Twain hiking trail, which traces the writer’s route to the top of her favorite mountain.

At Anna’s insistence, we were hiking the 6.5-mile Mark Twain trail just two days later.

I quickly learned that Rigi is steep compared with, say, the famous Barr Trail on Colorado’s 14,000-foot Pikes Peak, which I had hiked in the late ’90s. The first two hours on Twain’s trail were punishing: an uphill climb via rutted paths and an improvised, earthen staircase. Anna, age 70-plus, fared much better than I did, though I am younger by four decades. So she scavenged in the bushes for a sturdy branch I could use as my alpenstock.

Hiking is an especially beloved pastime in Switzerland, a nation veined with wanderwegen or footpaths that wind through the surreal landscapes. No matter where you travel in Switzerland, you’re sure to find a pleasant wanderweg marked every few meters by triangular yellow signs–they’re affixed to tree trunks, signposts, even privately owned barns.

After we had followed the yellow signs for two hours, the Mark Twain trail eased into switchbacks. We spent a comfortable hour or so marching a path framed by beech and spruce trees, encountering the occasional sign inscribed with one of Twain’s gushing endorsements: “And of course the colors in the water change and blend and dissolve, producing marvel after marvel, miracle after miracle.” I rolled my eyes. But as we walked, my eyes kept wandering to the blueness of Lake Lucerne and all the toylike steamboats sputtering below.

“After that, we found a jodeler every ten minutes; we gave the first one eight cents, the second one six cents, the third one four, the fourth one a penny, contributed nothing to Nos. 5, 6 and 7, and during the remainder of the day hired the rest of the jodelers, at a franc apiece, not to jodel anymore.”–Mark Twain

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As a tourist destination, Mount Rigi saw its heyday around the time of Twain’s visit. Today Rigi retains the flavors of the Belle Epoque, thanks to a strict prohibition on car traffic. As we hiked the mountain, 136 years in Twain’s wake, we passed a string of dairy farms without driveways or even pickup trucks. I marveled at all the gravity-defying milk cows, how they grazed atop cliffs and along steeply pitched meadows. Alas, no yodelers were seen or heard, though we encountered a different agricultural relic: hand-painted advertisements for local alpine cheeses.

At 3,700 feet, right around 11 a.m., we came across Felsentor, a spiritual retreat center where habit-clad nuns maneuver wheelbarrows around massive rock formations and flower gardens. Founded in 1999, the center didn’t exist in Twain’s day–he only mentions a distinct rock formation in the area dubbed Felsentor. Felsentor is now home to a guesthouse, a meditation hall and an outdoor restaurant especially for hikers.

We each ordered a salad and a kaffeecreme before seating ourselves on a patio appointed with modest wrought-iron furniture. I untied my boots, wiggled my toes in the fresh air and kicked back to enjoy an immodest panorama of the Swiss Alps. In this perfect moment, I felt my cynicism recede. I grasped what Twain meant when he wrote that Rigi’s views “were as enticing as glimpses of dreamland.”

“I suppose we must have stopped oftener to stretch out on the grass in the shade and take a bit of a smoke than this boy was used to, for presently he asked if it had been our idea to hire him by the job, or by the year? He said he wasn’t in such a very particular hurry, but he wanted to get to the top while he was young.”–Mark Twain

The trees eventually thinned out, revealing the hazy blue skies of a typical summer day in central Switzerland. We wound our way through mossy scenes before arriving, finally, to a resort settlement called Rigi Kaltbad, located at 4,700 feet. Twain spent his second night there. Anna, Mischa and I stopped there for our second lunch around 2 p.m.

The first thing you notice when you reach Rigi Kaltbad is the architecture: lots of traditional Swiss chalets rising in gradient from the slopes. But Rigi Kaltbad is in the midst of transition. In 2014 the brand-new Mineralbad & Spa Rigi-Kaltbad opened in a glistening modern edifice — complete with cantilevered swimming pools hanging off the mountainside.

The spa wasn’t complete when we visited, yet we were able to linger on its ultramodern veranda and sigh over the framed-up views of the Alps.

Rigi Kaltbad proved a fine place to ogle feats of Swiss design. Twain stood there and gaped at Europe’s first mountain cog rail, completed on Mount Rigi in 1871. “It was planted straight up the mountain with the slant of a ladder that leans against a house,” he wrote.

Now I was eyeing the construction site for some luxury condos, perched on a precipitous plot beside the ladderlike railway.
We encountered few hikers before reaching Rigi Kaltbad. Now they were everywhere. Visitors like traveling to Rigi Kaltbad via railway or cable car before walking 2.5 miles to the summit. After Rigi Kaltbad, there were no more Twain-themed signs to distract us from thirsty mouths or burning thighs. There was only a thick spread of Swiss, German and British tourists trying to coax small children up the steep path.

We started hiking in silence, like marathoners conserving energy for the final sprint. Anna occasionally stopped to enjoy the edelweiss and other wildflowers. I paused to wonder about the high-altitude birds or to coo over path-blocking mountain goats.

We reached Rigi-Kulm a mere eight hours after we started, outpacing Twain by two full days. We mustered just enough energy to snap the obligatory top-of-the-world photos for social media. Mischa pointed east to the high mountains of Graubunden, where residents still speak Romansch (another of Switzerland’s official languages). Then the three of us eased our way to the Rigi-Kulm train station, just as Twain had, and waited for that magical cog rail to lower us home.

“Well,” said Anna, breaking our exhausted daze. “We are surely faster than Mark Twain.”

Photo: Hiking in Lucerne, Switzerland via Flickr

How To Stay Fit In Your 60’s And Beyond

How To Stay Fit In Your 60’s And Beyond

By Steve Brandt, Star Tribune (Minneapolis) (TNS)

MINNEAPOLIS — Dr. Jamie Peters counsels his patients on fitness for the aging, and Denis Nagan is the model patient.

Nagan, 69, has been active in sports or fitness since grade school. Peters is a sports medicine specialist caring for aging athletes and other older adults wanting to preserve or improve their fitness.

Peters advises older people to stay active, with at least three days a week of moderate activity, intensifying the effort if possible to the point of not being able to carry on a conversation. He advocates cross-training to spread the stress of exercise among different muscles. It’s particularly important to exercise the core muscles, he said, because a strong core will diminish the kind of awkward gait people adopt when compensating for joint pain. But when cross-training isn’t possible, Peters advocates walking — it’s better than not walking.

Nagan has found his own path, on the brink of qualifying as a septuagenarian, to most of what Peters prescribes. Fitness has been an integral part of his life since he joined a swim club as a kid. But in his late 60s, he found himself adapting his regimen to meet changing physical and mental health needs.

He has biked throughout his life — for transportation, for fitness and to compete, culminating in the 1,200-kilometer Paris-Brest-Paris ultramarathon bike tour. He was a runner for the same reasons, to the point of logging 50-kilometer training runs with former Olympians. But these days he’s more likely to move at a pace that fits his age and lifestyle, something that many older adults can emulate.

“I walk for utility and I walk for aimlessness,” the northeast Minneapolis resident said. A trip to pick up an item at Home Depot? That’s a two-and-a-half-mile walk. A walk downtown to the library, or to catch the Blue Line to the V.A. hospital, is 7 or 8 miles round trip.

“It’s been very beneficial both mentally and physically,” Nagan said. Walking lacks the cardio intensity of biking and running. Sometimes he’ll jog up a hill, just to push his heart rate and get some of the cardiovascular benefits Peters prescribes.

“My legs are strong and I can hike all day,” said Nagan. “I just can’t go as fast as I used to, and I don’t know that that’s important. There’s no reason to go fast other than you did at one time go fast.”

For a greater challenge, Nagan tackles the physically demanding ups and downs of the Superior Hiking Trail, a trail edging Lake Superior in northeastern Minnesota. “If I’m in the city, I call it a walk. When I’m in the country, I call it a hike.”

Unlike many walkers, Nagan eschews headphones. That leaves his mind free to operate on two tracks. “I’m very aware of what’s going on around me. I’m always aware of who’s around, what’s around, what’s going on. I’m always tuned into the immediacy of the moment.” That includes the temperature, the breeze, the surface he’s walking on. “It’s always different even if you’re going the same route.”

Meanwhile, his mind is working subconsciously. “All of a sudden I might have a solution to a problem … The subconscious part of your mind is back there grinding away.”

That mindfulness is a carry-over from Nagan’s meditation and yoga practices, something Peters also prescribes for building core strength and balance. Why is yoga better than, say, pushups and situps? Yoga can be modified by a capable instructor to avoid positions that might impose undue stress on the body.

Lifelong athletes inevitably will find themselves making adjustments, with performance beginning to diminish after 40 or 45 years old. Peters recommends age-group competitions as a healthy adjustment for people driven to maintain high levels of fitness. “I think the healthy attitude is you set expectations that you can achieve,” he said.

Nagan finds other benefits from a less punishing exercise regimen. “The biggest is you’re not beat up all the time.” When he ran hard, “You’re always sore — there’s always something that’s sort of semi-broken. It feels good to not have to be worried about how fast you’re doing something.”

Joint issues are a common concern for aging athletes. The older a person, the greater the chance for joint pain caused by degenerative arthritis (i.e., thinning cartilage lining in the joints). Peters still emphasizes the importance of exercise, even for patients suffering from stiff or aching joints. Peters points to solid evidence that movement prolongs joint life by keeping the synovial fluid healthier and the cartilage better nourished. Here, too, it can help to emphasize core strength — a stronger core prevents exercisers from adopting one of those strange gaits, prone to cause even more problems. One low-impact way to exercise with arthritis is riding a bike or a stationary bike with mild to moderate resistance for 35 to 40 minutes a day.

Arthritis can also be addressed by relatively inexpensive steroidal injections. These can relieve discomfort for several months, Peters said. That relief makes exercise easier while allowing for a more normal gait and diminishing the chance of further injury.

Another big issue for older athletes is losing muscle mass, which can’t be replaced once lost. Peters recommends resistance activities such as weight workouts for all his patients, but especially those over 60.

Like Nagan, Peters at 61 has a stake in preserving a high level of fitness for his age. “I want to keep being able to hike high up in the mountains,” he said from Colorado, where he’d just finished a daylong hike at altitude. He runs weekly, which is as much as his knees allow, but also bikes both on the road and on a stationary bike, works out on roller skis for dryland training, and skate-skis during the winter.

Some of Peters’ patients embody the benefits of workout regimens like his. “I have the honor of taking care of a lot of octogenarians who are healthy and doing well,” Peters said. “They have a lifelong habit of staying active.”

Photo: Wicycle via Wikimedia Commons

Japan Volcano Rescue Suspended As Death Toll Rises To 36

Japan Volcano Rescue Suspended As Death Toll Rises To 36

Tokyo (AFP) — Five more bodies were found near the peak of an erupting Japanese volcano on Monday, as rescuers suspended their search because of the growing danger from toxic gas.

The grim discovery takes to at least 36 the total number of people feared to have died when Mount Ontake erupted without warning during a busy hiking weekend.

A police spokesman told AFP the five bodies were in addition to 31 discovered Sunday.

Hundreds of firefighters, police and troops had spent much of Monday around the peak, with helicopters flying overhead, despite the gases and steam billowing from the ruptured crater of the 3,067-meter (10,121-foot) volcano.

A Japanese army official who took part in the search said rescuers had been wearing helmets, bullet-proof vests, goggles, and masks to protect themselves from any fresh eruption.

“I saw rocks up to probably one meter (3.3 feet) across (that had been thrown through the air by the force of the eruption),” he said, adding the search had been difficult and involved digging through ash.

Heartbreaking stories have begun to emerge from survivors who made it down the mountain as rolling clouds of volcanic debris swept down its flanks, smothering everything in their path.

“Some people were buried in ash up to their knees and the two in front of me seemed to be dead,” one woman told the Asahi television network.

Another told how she had heard the last moments of a victim battered by a cascade of rocks.

“There was someone lying outside the hut after being hit in the back,” she said. “He was saying ‘It hurts, it hurts,’ but after about half an hour he went quiet.”

Seiichi Sakurai, who had been working at one of the huts around the top of the volcano, told public broadcaster NHK that he had tried his best to help people but could not save them all.

“Ash was constantly falling… Some people were buried alive but I could do nothing but tell (rescuers) about them over the radio,” he said.

Another survivor told the Yomiuri newspaper he had seen a boy shouting “It’s hot” and “I can’t breathe!” near the peak, before the ash clouds brought blackness and silence.

– ‘It’s over. I’m dying now’ –

On Monday morning, eight bodies — both men and women — were airlifted from the mountain.

About 60 people suffered injuries in the disaster, the government has said, including people who were hit by flying rocks and inhaled hot or poisonous fumes.

For anguished families, the wait for news was taking its toll.

A tearful father sobbed as he clutched a photograph of his son and the young man’s girlfriend, who had not been heard from since the eruption.

An elderly woman told the Asahi network that her son had telephoned her just after gas, rocks, and ash began spewing from the volcano.

“He told me it erupted… He said ‘It’s over. I’m dying now’ and then the line was cut off,” the woman said.

The meteorological agency forecast further eruptions, warning that volcanic debris may settle as far as four kilometers (2.5 miles) from the peak.

Japan’s meteorological agency keeps a round-the-clock watch on 47 volcanoes thought to be at risk of violent activity over the next century, including Mount Fuji, whose eruption could have catastrophic effects.

But Toshitsugu Fujii, a volcanologist at the agency, admitted accurate forecasting was very difficult.

Steam explosions such as those on Ontake often occur without warning, he said.

“People may say we failed to predict this (because there were earthquakes in September) but this is something that could not be helped, in a sense. That’s the reality of the limit of our knowledge,” he said Sunday.

AFP Photo

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