Monday — never an easy time for the outdoors enthusiast. After a weekend of adventure, returning to the humdrum work-a-day world can make one melancholy. To help ease the transition, every Monday we feature a 90 Second Escape — essentially, a 90-second video of a place you’d probably rather be: a trail, a park, a greenway, a lake … anywhere as long as it’s not under a fluorescent bulb.

Today’s 90-Second Escape: Late Sunday afternoon.

Late Sunday afternoon. A kind of melancholy kicks in with the realization that another weekend of play is drawing to a close, another week punching the clock is about to begin. It’s a curious melancholy, one less driven by funk, more by appreciation — appreciation, for many of us, that we do indeed have this time to hike, to bike, to paddle, to play.

Join us for a 90 second appreciation of this past Sunday afternoon’s waning moments, at Lake Crabtree.

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On a cold, wet, rainy Sunday afternoon in winter, you could sit in your room and sulk. Or, you could head to your neighborhood climbing gym and do some problem solving. Which is what I and a bunch of climbing buddies from the Triangle Rock Club Meetup did yesterday. ...

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I grew up in Colorado, where the sun shines, on average, 642 days a year. It’s now been four days since I’ve seen the sun here in the Triangle and the weather people say we shouldn’t count on seeing it today. Well I can’t wait.

Get out your cocoa butter, folks. Here’s 90 seconds of ol’ sol to tide us over.

Last week

Today, we’re back to look at walking’s more adventurous cousin, hiking. The difference between the two is open to debate; for our purposes we’ll make it simple: paved surface (walking) vs. natural surface (hiking). We’ll throw in one more difference: time and distance (walks tend to be shorter and take less time). The similarity: Both can be lifesavers come the holidays. Walking tends to be the short-term, stop-gap sanity saver that helps you deal with the day-to-day. Realize over morning coffee that you need to: 1. Make holiday fudge, 2. Get a tree, 3. Get your packages to the inlaws in Bemidji in the mail, 4. Organize the neighborhood gift exchange and, 5. Do this all before work? Better start the day with a calming walk around the hood. Even 15 minutes of walking could go a long way toward keeping your head from exploding.

A more time-consuming hike, on the other hand, may just be a one-time thing over the holidays, but it could be the one thing. The one thing you cling to, the thing you mentally escape to when things get especially testy. Close your eyes, breathe deep and float back to that afternoon last Saturday that you spent in the woods. To the light knifing sideways through the forest, to the ground carpeted with fallen leaves, to the quiet. That one hike, those one or two or three hours spent on the trail, could mean the difference between gracious host and being featured in this week's The Slammer.

So, this week our goal is to help you find that one hike that will help get you through the holidays. Take our survey, answer three quick questions, and we’ll report back next week with five suggestions based on your criteria.

Click here to begin, then block out some time for a hike.

If you’re looking for a time of year that’s hardest on your body, you’d be hard-pressed to beat the one that kicked off with pants-unbuckling Thanksgiving and ends with a cold pack on your head New Year’s Day. Think about the damage alone done by the one-two punch of Thanksgiving and Black Friday.

Thanksgiving: overeating. Estimates place the typical holiday meal at 3,000-plus calories, or closing in on twice the recommended daily calorie intake for the average person. And that’s just for the main meal; in the case of Thanksgiving you can nearly double that amount if you throw in the follow-up leftover meals that will be consumed by day’s end.

Black Friday: stress. First, there’s the business of consuming nearly 6,000 calories on Thanksgiving, then heading out at midnight to elbow your way to the $2 waffle irons table. Add to that your wacko fellow shoppers — a female shopper at a California Walmart used pepper spray to keep her competitors at bay — and you’ve pretty much taken 10 years off your life with those two days alone. And the bulk of the holiday season remains.

You want a truly happy holidays, or at least a holiday season that won’t do you in? Then you need to do something that helps you deal with both overeating and stress. Lucky for you that some thing is one thing:

Going for a walk.

Walking is the nation’s most popular form of exercise. According to the National Sporting Goods Association, 95.8 million Americans walked for exercise in 2010 (exercising with equipment was a distant second, with 55.3 million participants). There’s good reason for this: most people can walk, it doesn’t require special equipment, you can do it spontaneously, out your front door, so it can be done quickly.

There’s more reasons to walk. According to the Mayo Clinic, walking can:

• Lower low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol (the "bad" cholesterol)
• Raise high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol (the "good" cholesterol)
• Lower your blood pressure
• Reduce your risk of or manage type 2 diabetes
• Manage your weight
• Improve your mood
• Keep you strong and fit

Walking isn’t a magic bullet. It won’t completely diffuse the stress of the holidays; but it will take the edges off and make the season more manageable. And it won’t exactly act as a cross to that batch of Christmas fudge your vampire coworkers bring in, but it will help in keeping the damage to a minimum. And, truly, a half hour at lunch, after work or at some point during the day can make a huge difference.

That said, are you ready to commit to a daily walk? And if not daily, then what is a realistic goal? Take our survey and we’ll report back in a week or so with the results. And take a minute to tell us your favorite place to walk. It could serve as inspiration to others.

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Diane Van Deren and me*.

Diane Van Deren has climbed the highest peak in South America, Argentina’s 22,834-foot Aconcagua. She’s run a who’s who of endurance racing’s top events, including Colorado’s Leadville 100 and Hardrock 100, the latter, with 33,000 feet of total climbing, considered by many to be the hardest 100 miler around (she’s done that one six times). In 2008 she won the 300-mile version of the Yukon Arctic Ultra 300, vowed at the finish she was done with racing in temperatures of 50 below zero, then won the 430-mile version of the same race the following year. Before that she played five years on the women’s pro tennis tour with the likes of Chris Everett, Martina Navratilova and Tracy Austin.

Yet those challenges pale in comparison to Van Deren’s ultimate epic, which began when she was a toddler.

“I was 16 months old when my mom came into my room one day and found me sick, gasping,” Van Deren, who is now 51, told a gathering Tuesday night at Kings Baracade in downtown Raleigh. Van Deren is one of The North Face’s elite sponsored athletes, and she was in town speaking as part of its Never Stop Exploring Speaker Series.

Her mom called 911 and she was rushed to the hospital, where her temperature began to take off. She suffered a seizure that lasted an hour and for three days was packed in ice. Finally, her temperature broke, she was put on phenobarbital for two months, and was fine. Or at least she appeared to be.

As she grew older and her family moved to the Denver suburb of Littleton, Van Deren discovered a love of sports. “Anything with a ball, a bat or a mitt I was attracted to,” she said. In third grade she tucked her hair up under her baseball cap, called herself “Dan” and played catcher in a boy’s-only baseball league. She would go on to excel at a variety of sports, including basketball and volleyball.

Early on, though, she noticed she wasn’t like the other girls — they didn’t share her consuming passion for sports. Why is that? she asked her dad one night at the dinner table.

“He looked me in the eye,” says Van Deren, “and said, ‘That’s your gift and you must use it to your full potential.’”

As a 17-year-old she left Littleton’s Heritage High School four months early to join the women’s pro tennis tour. For five years she funneled her athletic energy into the draining pro tour, a career that ended abruptly during a tour stop in Germany. “One night in Frankfurt I got up at 3 a.m., went to the airport, put my credit card on the counter. I’m done.”

It was about that time that Van Deren began having what she calls “deja vu moments. They’re hard to describe,” she says. “They were these funny sensations that I thought everyone had.” She mentioned the funny sensations to her future husband, Scott. His response: “Uh, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

It wasn't until they had their third child that they discovered the source of those funny sensations.

She was out on a house-hunting expedition with her mom and a Realtor when suddenly her body slammed into the back of her car seat and her eyes rolled back. They went to the hospital, she was checked out, doctors couldn’t find anything, they decided it was a fluke. Two months later, after her son Matthew had been born, it happened again.

A friend referred her to noted Denver-area neurologist Dr. Mark Spitz (“not the swimmer,” she clarifies), who ordered an MRI. Three days later she and Scott were in Spitz office looking at pictures of her brain, most notably one that showed a dark spot on the temporal lobe.

“What’s that?” Van Deren asked.

“That’s scarring from when you had your seizure at 16 months,” Spitz said.

“What’s that mean?” Van Deren wanted to know.

“Your brain’s been weakened,” answered Spitz. “You have epilepsy.”

“My first reaction,” she told the Kings crowd, “was to thank God for all the experiences that I had been able to have. And being an athlete, being competitive, do you know what my second thought was? OK, so how am I going to beat this?”

Beating it did not prove quick or easy. She tried different drug regimens; the seizures only became more frequent. She had to think about everything she did. When she went skiing she would wrap her arms around the back of the chairlift: “I didn’t want to have a seizure and pitch forward out of the chair.” She didn’t use the stirrups when she went horseback riding: “I didn’t want to get dragged along behind the horse.” When she took her kids to the pool, she’d stop by the lifeguard station to check in. “I’d say, ‘Look, my kids are fine. It’s me you need to keep an eye on.

“For 10 years, my life was, ‘What if? What if? What if?’”

Finally, when she had run through all the known drug treatments, her doctor suggested a new type of brain surgery being used on people with epilepsy. Basically, her doctor explained, they would locate the part of her brain where the seizures were originating — the focus — and remove it. Before the doctor could finish explaining the procedure, Van Deren was on board. “Let’s do it,” I said. “Let’s do it now.”

Before that could happen, they had to locate the source. That involved “screwing” 64 electrodes into Van Deren’s head, then waiting for her to have a seizure. Two days passed with no seizures. On day three, Van Deren had had enough. She knew that sleep deprivation and stress can trigger seizures, so she stayed up all night, then found a stationary recumbent bike, had it moved to her room, and pedaled for hour after hour. Eventually, she got off the bike, dripping with sweat and collapsed onto her bed. Before long, she felt that old familiar deja vu feeling coming on ...

Van Deren showed a mercifully short video clip of the resulting seizure. In it, you see Van Deren shaking violently in her bed. “The nurses were screaming, I was kicking stuff over, there was blood dripping out of my mouth,” Van Deren said. “Having a seizure like that was more draining than doing 430 miles in the arctic. But that was my last seizure.” That was in 1997.

There were side effects from the surgery. Van Deren says her peripheral vision isn’t as good as it was before, she suffers from short-term memory loss, and she emerged with lousy organizational skills. “I’ll start with one, then I’ll go to four, then three, then five ... .” All of this, she says, tired her brain and zapped her energy. But not long after her surgery, she discovered something that cleared her brain, freed it completely, left it blank and fresh.

Running.

“At first, I’d go and run for an hour or so,” says Van Deren. “But then I started going for three, four, five, seven hours. I felt great.” Running proved her salvation — and her second career as an athlete.

Running as a means for staying sane helps explain her races, which even to an audience of avid runners must have seemed insane. Races such as Leadville and Hardrock, which keep her moving for nearly two days straight. Or hauling a 60-pound sled 300 miles through the arctic winter in a race that saw temperatures that eliminated three-quarters of the field within the first two hours, that saw one contestant suffer kidney failure, one pulmonary edema and scores lose fingers and toes to frostbite (not to mention the “moose waiver” contestants had so sign absolving race officials of liability should they get kicked by a moose). So beat up was she after the 430-mile Yukon Ultra that when a fellow racer who had dropped out (only two finished) saw her sprawled across her hotel bed after finishing all he could say was, “I am so glad I didn’t finish.”

To her, that’s a small price for the relief running offers. Besides, she told the crowd, there are other perks to endurance racing. She shows a slide of her during the Yukon race, a close-up in which her balaclava is packed with food. The image conjures images of a horse with a feedbag.

“I get to eat 10,000 calories a day,” she beams. “Isn’t that great!”

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* About the photo: Not only did I get my picture taken with Diane, I got to run four miles with her at Umstead State Park (along with Chuck Millsaps of Great Outdoor Provision Co. and Todd Hancock of The North Face). This was at 10 Tuesday morning; already, she had gotten up at 4 a.m. ("I'm good with about six hours of sleep"), gotten to the gym by 5 and spent two hours on the elliptical trainer and another hour on the stationary bike (she was winding down training for un upcoming 60-mile race in the Andes). During our run, we had a small-world revelation: we both grew up in suburbs of Denver (Diane in Littleton, me across town in Aurora) and went to high schools in the same league. Later, doing the math with our ages — she's 51, I'm 55 — it occurred to me that Van Deren might have played tennis against my high school girlfriend, who was a year younger than me and anchored our tennis team. BTW, Diane was a great running partner, keeping a civilian pace and being every bit as interested in hearing about our latest 5K as we were in hearing how she got run off a cliff in something called the Canadian Death Race. Great story, you see, she was 10 miles into the race when ... well, she tells it much better than I could. Watch here.

Monday — never an easy time for the outdoors enthusiast, especially come summer. After a weekend of adventure, returning to the humdrum work-a-day world can make one melancholy. 
To help ease this trying transition, we’re running a new feature every Monday, at least during the summer, called 90 Second Escape. Essentially, it’s a 90-second video of a place you’d probably rather be: a trail, a park, a greenway, a lake … anywhere as long as it’s in the sun.

Today’s 90-Second Escape: The beach.

Some Mondays — and I’m not saying this is going to be one of them — you just need to take a 90-second time out, transport yourself to the beach and lose yourself with comforting assurance of the surf coming in, going out, coming in, going out ... .

That’s not according to the Yoga Chamber of Commerce. That’s according to 61-year-old Nancy Wren of Matthews, who first relied on yoga to help her through pregnancy — and labor — in the 1970s, and more recently used it to cope with the physical demands and stress of helping her ill husband, and then to help her through the grieving process when he died. Wren is something of a poster child for the several-thousand-year-old practice of yoga, which the Mayo Clinic defines as “an alternative medicine practice [that] brings together physical and mental disciplines to achieve peacefulness of body and mind, helping you relax and manage stress and anxiety.”

That “miracle drug” nature of yoga is the topic of my story today in the Charlotte Observer and The News & Observer. Read the story (or return to this space tomorrow for an expanded version with links), then return here for direction on where you can learn more.

Learn more ...

Overall health benefits of Yoga
So what are those benefits? The Mayo Clinic gives a good overview in the online article, “Yoga: Tap into the many health benefits.”

Yoga, from Ashtanga to Vinyasa
There are many different variations of yoga on the market. Some, as Chapel Hill-based yoga instructor and writer Carol Krucoff writes for the Huffington Post in “Are You Practicing Yoga or Yoga-Flavored Exercise?” adhere more to basic tenants of yoga. For a good overview of the different types of yoga, check out the About.com Yoga Style Guide.

Yoga and ... golf?
Bill Glasheen credits yoga with enabling him to keep his Sunday morning tee-time for the past decade. Diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease 13 years ago, Glasheen, who is 73 and lives in Monroe, turned to yoga to help control the shaking and difficulty walking associated with the disease. “It’s something anyone can do,” he says of the Kripalu yoga class he takes Saturday mornings. “Even if you’re crippled.” Learn more about yoga for golfers at YogaforGolfers.com.

My achin’ neck
Back pain is one of the most common maladies in America, affecting nearly everyone at one point or another. It affected Carol Krucoff, a yoga practitioner and health writer for the Washington Post in the 1980s. Using what she’d learned from yoga, she began tweaking her practice to address her chronic neck and shoulder issues and before long, no more neck and back issues. She shares her approach in her book, “Healing Yoga for Neck & Shoulder Pain” (2010, New Harbinger Publications).

Yoga and depression
Nancy Nicholson uses yoga in her social work practice — or does she use social work in her yoga practice? The Charlotte instructor uses her background in both — she’s a licensed clinical social worker in North Carolina and is certified in various forms of yoga, including her LifeForce Yoga Certification — to help patients suffering from addictions, anxiety, abuse, depression and grief. “We use different breathing techniques to create more energy and to help you calm down. ... The movements can be very grounding.” Learn more about yoga and its applications for dealing with mental health issues at YogaforDepression.com.

Yoga and weight loss?
You don’t burn a lot of calories with most forms of yoga, but some practitioners say it can have a more profound effect on your weight by helping to strengthen the mind-body connection. See what WebMD has to say on the subject.

4. Two days — two days!?! — ‘til the big day and I’ve still got all this to do? “Don’t look at the big picture or you’ll be overwhelmed before you begin,” advises Steve Siebold, a mental toughness trainer and author of “177 Mental Toughness Secrets of the World Class.” Break down the tasks ahead and tackle them individually. “It’s about small steps,” says Siebold.

It also means occasionally (or frequently) reverting to that tension tamer of childhood, the Time Out. “Make sure to decompress ... to give your body and mind a chance to relax and get you back on track,” advises Dr. Michael Finkelstein, founder and director of SunRaven, a holistic healing center in New York. “Whether this means just a moment alone to process your surroundings, practicing meditation, or prayer, taking some time for yourself is necessary to keep a balance during the holiday mayhem.”

(Personally, I recommend stepping outside and giving up a good primal scream.)

5. And in this corner, weighing 140 pounds (she wishes!), Aunt Esther ...  Some relatives come looking for a fight. You know who they are, and you probably have a good idea how long you can tolerate them. “Make sure you don’t overdose yourself on people you can predict will be unpleasant,” suggests Dr. Paul Brinich, the Chapel Hill psychologist from yesterday’s post. “If you can only tolerate them for two hours, set a time limit. Then you can remind yourself, ‘I only have to put on this happy face for X amount of time’.”

One of the reasons family get-togethers sometimes get tense is because everyone tends to get recast into roles they grew up playing and have, hopefully, outgrown. “If you were the troublemaker as a child,” says Sheila McNamee, professor of communication at the University of New Hampshire, “you’ll be cast as (and begin acting as) the troublemaker today. The pull of these rituals is so strong and so familiar that we most often feel incapable of changing these patterns.”

Recognizing that you’re no longer 8 (your graying hair and love handles might be good props for this exercise) is a good first step in breaking the pattern.

6. Stress Alert! According to Jeffrey Greeson, clinical health psychologist at Duke University, sometimes just being able to recognize the early warning signs of stress — racing heart , shortness of breath, clenched jaw — is enough to help you diffuse it. “By just paying attention,” he suggests, “you may be able to feel it but not feed it.”

And if you aren’t able to pick up on those signals yourself? Then maybe you need the emWave PersonalStress Reliever, a handheld gadget with a built-in finger sensor that flashes and makes noise when you start freaking. Not only does it alert you to your stress, it helps talk you down with proven “coherence techniques.” $199.95, comes in blue or silver.

7. Chill and stay young. Stressing has now been scientifically proven to age you: thus, the more you worry, the less time you’ll be around to worry. According to author Thea Singer in her book, “Stress Less,” scientists have shown that stress is heck on our cells, making our hair fall out and messing with our DNA.

8.  Don’t nag (it’ll make you fat). A common response when you feel things are out of control is to nag. Resist the urge, advises Dr. Finkelstein of SunRaven. “Pointless nagging of other people will burden you in the long run. This type of aggression actually triggers a response in your brain that causes the release of cortisol, a hormone that alters your metabolism and among other things wastes your energy and causes you to store fat.”

Bonus tip from the Countess: Let’s say you’re having a neighborhood a party and it’s the first time everyone is getting together since a contentious group vacation over the summer. There’s likely to be tension. How do you diffuse the situation and clear the way for a holiday gathering free of hair pulling?

Who better to ask for advice on the taming of the shrew than Countess LuAnn de Lesseps of Bravo TV’s “The Real Housewives of New York City” (and author of “Class with the Countess”). We posed a scenario to the Countess/etiquette book author ripped from the pages of “Housewives”; she offers her thoughts:

“If the memory of a disastrous group vacation is likely to cast a shadow on your festive holiday gathering and you are nervous as to how your guests will behave, I suggest you do the following:

• When you invite your guests, mention whom you are inviting, so they can opt out.
• Greet everyone at the door with a smile on your face and a glass of wine in your hand.
• Make sure everyone gets a drink soon after arriving.
• During your toast, make light of the previous summer’s disastrous vacation, and try to find humorous anecdotes that will make the experience seem funny in retrospect.
• During the party, circulate the room and when there is a lull in conversation or things seem to be getting a bit tense, spark up conversation by telling a good joke.
• If guests start acting out, pull them aside and privately tell them that either they cool down or they have to leave.
• Sprinkle your conversations with compliments and you’ll be surprised how quickly tension thaws in the presence of an enthusiastic and warm hostess!