The image that makes us happy.

Often, that tweaked version of ourselves involves loosing some weight, of trimming the excess and having more energy. That version excites us — until we contemplate the perceived route it will take to get there: an hour a day in the gym doing things we don’t much care to do, frankly. Thanks that don’t make us happy. Then there’s the whole diet thing, which — again, to be frank — makes us not particularly excited about mealtime. Suddenly, that version of our new self, the happier version, gets sullied by our having to do lot of unhappy things. We go from optimistic and excited to, well, to thinking that 2020 isn’t going to be much different than 2019.

The problem? We convince ourselves that in order to achieve “happy,” we must first go through a period of not-so-happy. And that needn’t be the case.

Think about the happiest time in your life. Probably when you were a kid, right? When Saturday rolled around and you were turned loose, with the only directive that you “stay out of trouble.” Remember that feeling of independence, of being on your own and responsible only for yourself? Of being able to explore and discover new things, like the fact it’s easier to climb up a tree than down. Even then, the trip down — the scary trip down — gave us a sense of control, quite unlike the feeling we got at school, at home, on our rigorously coached sports teams. During what many consider the happiest times of their lives, we were happiest being outdoors. So why wouldn’t the same apply today?

Here are some of my happiest moments from the past month:

Playing hooky. On a Wednesday morning, in the middle of the work week, I draped my jacket over the back of my office chair, turned off my computer’s sleep function and snuck out the back door* on a cloudless, 45-degree morning for a 6-mile hike on the Mountains-to-Sea Trail. Feelings of guilt? Not a bit. Work was the last thing on my mind — until I got back to work. By then, I was in a better frame of mind to deal with things.

Lost in the woods. Not lost, exactly, since I was leading the hike and no one wants to hear that the leader doesn’t know where you are. “Lost” in the sense of being off the trail, deep in the woods where few people venture, seeing things few folks have laid eyes on. My path not dictated by blazes, but rather by curiosity, by wondering what’s over that next ridge, or where this old roadbed leads. We don’t have much opportunity for true adventure as adults, but this was certainly it.

Enveloped in darkness. You want a true sense of childlike exhilaration? Sneak out after dark. At night in the woods, your world shrinks to whatever your headlamp illuminates — typically, a world about 20-feet in circumference. As adults, we tend to be wary of the dark, but as a kid darkness beckons and excites. Head into out into the night and recapture that sense of awe, inspired by the unseen world beyond.

Letting go. On my usual morning walking route I happened to see an opening into the woods, which led to a faint trail that shortly crossed a railroad track I knew, and, just beyond, a spur line I didn’t. I walked railroad tracks as a kid (including a harrowing “Stand By Me” crossing of a live trestle over the mighty Susquehanna River), so I followed. Shortly, I was on the unfamiliar south bank of the Eno River, following first an old roadbed and then the path of least resistance through a floodplain forest. Before I knew it, an hour had passed. I was stymied in my attempt to hike upstream and complete my survey of this terra incognito. I vowed to one day return.

Eons from “civilization.” At the most chaotic time of the retail year, when masses where elbowing their way past one another in search of 30 percent off a big screen TV, nine friends and I were experiencing the anti-Black Friday by enjoying the serenity of a hike along Falls Lake. Water lapped at the shore of the coves we ducked in and out of, freshly fallen leaves crackled under foot, the clear sky made the remaining fall color all the more brilliant. The talk ranged from a debate over canned vs. fresh cranberries, to adventure plans for 2020. Cell phones switched to Airplane mode were used only to take pictures. There was no talk of work, of chores, of great deals on big screen TVs. 

Yeah, I could stand to lose a pound or two, maybe cut back on the Little Debbies. But when I “work out,” when I’m on the trail, I’m about as happy as can be. 

Something to consider as you mull a happier version of you in the year ahead.

• This is a dramatization (I work for myself) and is simply meant to portray the guilty pleasure of sneaking out of work for some me time.  

Join us!

Looking for a happier version of you in 2020 — and to be happy getting there? Our GetHiking! 2020 Winter Program for New Hikers is the perfect program for getting you on the trail. Every Sunday afternoon at 1 p.m., we hike a local trail. We start out at a mellow pace hiking just a mile and a half, then, over eight weeks, gradually increase our distance until come March you’re capable of hiking more than 5 miles! We provide additional support along the way to help you develop as a hiker. Learn more and sign up here. 

Intrigued by the notion of hiking at night? Our GetHiking! Tuesday Night Hikes program heads out at least one Tuesday night a month during the winter and explores a new trail — in the dark! Headlamps and hot chocolate provided. Learn more and sign up here. 

Tired of hiking the same old trails? Or just trails in general? Our GetHiking! Winter Wild series takes you to the places you thought you knew, and exposes you to their wilder, less-visited side. About 90 percent of each hike is either on long-abandoned roadbeds or off-trail. Learn more and sign up here.

The post 2020: A happier you through hiking appeared first on GetGoing NC!.

We like to ward off the beginning of the work-week blues with thoughts about life on the outside.

It’s only one day. But it’s a day that can make a difference.

Sunday is the first day of the new year. Dating back 4,000 years to the Babylonians, we’ve looked at the day as a time for renewal and rebirth. We vow to be better people, we pledge to take better care of ourselves. In fact, the latter, staying fit and healthy, is the most popular New Year’s resolution we make, according to at least one survey.

According to another, it’s the most common resolution we break.

Despite this dubious track record, we persist. Using the New Year as a crutch is especially attractive if the year about to pass failed to meet expectations. Judging from the woe-is-me Facebook rants we’ve been seeing the past couple weeks, Sunday could be a record-breaker for New Year’s resolutions. So we want to do our best to help make sure you at least get January 1 off to a good start.

On Sunday, thanks primarily to North Carolina State Parks, there should be no reason not to get the year off to an active start. On Sunday, more than 40 guided hikes are scheduled at North Carolina’s state parks as part of the nationwide First Day Hikes Program. The First Day program is relatively new, though the concept in North Carolina dates back more than 40 years at Eno River State Park. Last year, 3,469 hikers logged 8,228 miles on First Day hikes in North Carolina.

The hikes offer something for just about everyone. Don’t want to waste a second putting your 2017 resolution to work? Chimney Rock State Park’s hike starts at 12:01 a.m. (on a 7-mile hike that gains 1,200 feet of elevation). If it snows, Grandfather Mountain State Park will give its hikers snowshoes. At coastal Fort Macon State Park, they’ll break in the new 3.2-mile Elliott Caues Trail, while at Falls Lake State Recreation Area, four short hikes will include scavenger hunts.

It all sounds like an attractive and painless way to get the year off to a good, active start, no? It is, and you’re not the only person to think so: if the weather’s right, the hike at Eno River State Park has been known to draw as many as 800 hikers.

So while 40-plus hikes throughout the state may seem like a lot, we feel there’s always room for more. The Hike NC! hiking initiative launched by Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina this fall (and in which we are a happy collaborator, along with N.C. State Parks, Friends of State Parks, N.C. Recreation and Park Association and Great Outdoor Provision Co.) is adding another six hikes to the list (learn more about the hikes and sign up, here). They are:

• Blowing Rock area: Mountains-to-Sea Trail, Holloway Mountain Loop, 2.4 miles, noon.
• Charlotte: Seven Oaks Preserve, part of the Carolina Thread Trail, 5.6 miles, 1 p.m.
• Greensboro: Laurel Bluff Trail (Lake Townsend), 4 miles, noon.
• Durham: Horton Grove Nature Preserve, Triangle Land Conservancy, 3 miles, 10 a.m.
• Raleigh: Mountains-to-Sea Trail at Falls Lake, Friends of the Mountains-to-Sea Trail, 2.5 miles, 2 p.m.
• Wilmington area: Stone Creek Gamelands, Friends of the Mountains-to-Sea Trail, 3-4 miles, noon

That’s our effort to help you get 2017 to an active start. And rest assured that our help doesn’t begin and end on Day 1. We’ll be here throughout 2017 to help you make it a fit and healthy year.

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“You know,” Chris said, “there aren’t too many people who could do this.” After catching his breath, he added, “And I don’t mean people our age. I mean people, period.”

We were on day three of a four-day, 50-mile backpack trip on a particularly rugged region of the  rugged Nantahala National Forest in western North Carolina. Specifically, we were about a third of the way up a climb that would see us gain close to a thousand vertical feet in less than a mile. It was not the first such climb we had encountered. In fact, much of this trip had been something of a roller coaster, with long, slow, steep climbs followed by long, slow, steep descents (I said something of a roller coaster). My quads and calves ached on the former, my knees on the latter. Yet here we were, me at 55, Chris David at 67, plugging along at a good clip, averaging about 2.5 miles per hour.
Chris’s proclamation wasn’t old guy braggadocio or uninformed speculation. He’s been backpacking since the early 1960s, thru-hiked the Appalachian Trail in 1983, and has been leading hikes for the Sierra Club for more than a decade. He’s hiked with beginners, he’s hiked with people who are on the trail as much as he is. He knows backpackers.
“I’d say about 1 percent,” he said, throwing a statistic into the mix. “No, make that one tenth of 1 percent.”
I won’t deny I found some satisfaction in Chris’s assessment, but I was mainly just glad that I could do this. That I could hike all day with 35 pounds on my back, that I could experience the winter-clear 360-degree view from atop 5,342-foot Wayah Bald, that I could stand beneath London Bald and stare down a treed bobcat not 10 feet away, that I could survive the wild gorge trying to contain Ledbetter Creek and stand atop Cheoah Bald, enshrouded in a cold rain trying to turn to snow wondering what the view might be like. That I, an absent-minded guy who is just as likely to find his car keys in the fridge as in the key bowl, would be able to remember nearly every step of this trip two weeks hence.
That reminded me of the one other thing I’m good at remembering, the thing that made it possible for me to be here in the first place:
The importance of setting the right goals.

Setting the right goals
Set a goal and the rest will follow. Advice that may seem obvious on this, the first day of the new year when so many of us are intent on erasing our bad habits and charting a new course. Goals are the carrots we employ to help us achieve an end to a means. Unfortunately, many of us won’t make it to February with our goal for the year intact.
Why?
We may set goals, but often we don’t set the right goals, the goals that we’re truly motivated to achieve.
Take Chris. Chris is a long-time runner, with 68 marathons under his belt since his first, the Marine Corps, in 1986. But it’s not the races that continue motivating him to run 50 miles a week. It’s the opportunity to do trips such as this, or his recent 63-mile backpack trip through the Smokies, or the 155-mile solo trip he did in the Nantahalas a couple years back. Or that make him think about another thru-hike on the AT. Backpacking in the wild is his true motivation.
My mountain biking buddy Peter Hollis is likewise driven by what for him is the right goal. Most people either lie about their age or demure when the topic is broached. Peter is likely to bring up his age, apropos of nothing, in the first sentence or two of an encounter.
At the start of the Huck-A-Buck cross-country mountain bike race at Lake Crabtree this summer, Peter lamented the fact that they didn’t announce our ages at the start (at 59, he was the oldest contestant — and proud of it). When I ran into him at Umstead a few days ago, the second thing he said (after updating me on trail conditions), was, “Well, as of January 1 my race age for this year is 60.” Peter claims he races to stay in shape, not to win. But he’s quick to add that he wants to be the fastest 60-year-old on the trail, and if he can whip some 40- and 30-year-olds in the process (which he does), so much the better. Being able to ride a gray streak is his true motivation, his real goal. If he wins the race, and he often does, so much the better.

The right goal for you
Setting the right goal may require a little introspection.
Take the No. 1 health-related goal that so many people will set today: to lose weight. Is it really the weight that’s important? Is it strictly a numbers game, to see the scale record 10 fewer pounds by the end of January, 10 fewer still by Leap Day?
Or is weight loss a secondary benefit of your true goal? Is your true goal to fit into a size 4 dress  by prom? To abandon your 1920s-fashionable tank suit for a bikini come summer? To shave three minutes off your 5K time? Focus on your true goal and secondary benefits, such as weight loss, will follow.
Knowing your true goal will also make it easier to come up with an effective strategy for reaching said goal.
During my junior year in college (my second junior year), I had managed to balloon up over 200 pounds going into winter break. For Christmas, Santa brought me a lime green polyester Addidas running suit. The running boom of the ‘70s was just kicking in and I decided then and there that I would be able to run 5 miles by the end of the semester. Starting that afternoon and continuing for the next four months I put one foot in front of the other faster and more often than I had the day before.
Darned if the semester didn’t come to an end and I was running 5 miles. And darned if I hadn’t lost 45 pounds in the process. Walking across the quad one day in April, a former suitemate whom I hadn’t seen in a while stopped me, eyes agog, and asked, “What the hell happened to you?”
I hesitated, both to let my friend twist over what he could only be thinking — that I was deathly ill, because in our acquaintance I had never once demonstrated anything resembling discipline or restraint — but also to ponder the question: What the hell had happened to me?
I thought back to my rotund self sitting next to the Christmas tree contemplating the lime green polyester Addidas running suit which had inspired my true goal.
“I want to be a runner.”

* * *

Need help?

You’ve set your goals — now, how to make them reality? Sometimes all you need to help you achieve a goal is a little help, a little direction. Someone to help you set a challenging goal, someone to help you form a plan to get there, someone who sticks with you until your goal is in the books. What you need is an Adventure Coach.

Adventure Coach?

Read about this new service from GetGoingNC, here.

The post This year, don’t just set a goal, set the right goal appeared first on GetGoing NC!.

It’s an all-too-familiar lament this time of year: I meant to get out more, be more adventurous. I don’t know what happened …
You look back on the camping weekend that instead turned into a garage-cleaning weekend, the paddle trip that wasn’t because the water wasn’t just right. The hike that, as the day neared, you didn’t feel you were in shape for.
And now, the year drawing to a close, you find yourself melancholy with regret. You felt this way at the end of last year, now that you think about it. And perhaps the year before that as well.
To be clear, no one gets out enough. Asked, “Getting out much?” I doubt anyone has ever replied, “Sure. More than enough, actually.”
There’s not getting out enough and there’s not getting out anywhere near enough. Followed by a heavy sigh.
The good news?
Now is the time to make sure the pattern doesn’t continue, that you don’t feel this same way again next year.
Start by putting your woe-is-meness to good use. How many nights would you have been content — no, happy — to have spent in a tent this past year? Write it down: that’s your 2016 goal. Same with your number of days on the trail. Was it half as many as you’d hoped? Write down your ideal number. Maybe you wanted to try backpacking in 2015 — but didn’t. Add that to the list. Likewise, your number of days on the water, or whatever your adventure of choice.
Making a list of adventure goals is a good first step. In fact, it’s the key step because these are the goals you want to reach, unlike those health goals from New Year’s resolutions past: to drop three sizes by bikini season, to evict refined sugar from your diet, to see your toes again.

Adventure goals: enjoy the journey

Adventure goals are as worthy for the journey as for the end result. (Who gets as excited about six months of cottage cheese and grapefruit as they do about being able to slip back into their high school parachute pants?)
You’ve set your goals, you’re excited. Here’s where the problem typically arises, when you ask yourself, How do I make it happen?
What you need is direction to help you figure out these key questions:

• What’s realistic? You say you want to spend 50 nights next year in a tent, but is that feasible? What about your other obligations, your family, for instance? Do you have enough time off from work to get 50 nights in? You can quickly derail a goal by setting it, realizing it’s not possible, then abandoning it altogether. Better to set realistic, but still ambitious, expectations.
• Where do I want to go? Let’s say one of your goals is to take a week-long backpack trip. First obvious question: where do you want to go? Do you want to go alone? Would you like to go with locals familiar with the area? What season is best? And what specific gear will you need for where you’re going?
• I want to experience the “best.” Maybe you want to hike the best trails in the state. So, er, what are the best trails? And by “best” do you mean trails with the best views? The best waterfalls? The best old growth forest? It can take a little investigating to find your personal best.
• How do I prepare? Here’s a popular goal: Climbing a fourteener — that is, a peak that tops out at 14,000 feet or above (there are 54 in Colorado, prime country for achieving this goal). Where can I find trails around here that will prepare me for the elevation gains I’ll face? What about the altitude issue — how do I prepare for that? And what’s a good fourteener to start with?

Adventure Coaching: what it’s about

For some folks, the thrill of the adventure includes wrestling with these questions and issues on their own. Odds are, though, if you continually find yourself at year’s end lamenting the trails not traveled, the adventures not taken, you are not one of these people. Odds are you could benefit from GetGoingNC Adventure Coaching. With GetGoingNC Adventure Coaching, you get:

• Initial consultation. After filling out a questionnaire identifying your goals (general or specific), we’ll meet to discuss them in detail. From that initial consultation comes an IPA (Initial Plan of Action).
• IPA. Your IPA outlines various options and what will be required of you to fulfill each option. This is not a detailed plan of attack; rather, an overview of what would be required, to give you a better sense of the task.
• Plan of Action. We’ll go over the IPA and come up with your final Plan of Action, which will include a detailed plan of attack. Together, we’ll devise a plan that’s realistic and meets your adventure goals. The Plan will include your chosen goal, logistics for achieving that goal, and a training plan for meeting that goal. A key element of your plan will be an in-depth look at the gear you’ll need, how to plan and execute a safe trip, and resources you can use to achieve your goal. The goal is to have a Plan of Action in place within two weeks of signing up for GetGoingNC Adventure Coaching.
• Monthly phone check-in. Once a month, we’ll touch base by phone to see how your goal is coming along, making adjustments, if necessary.
• Open email access. Feel free to check in with questions via email as need be. If an answer is better handled over the phone, we’ll make that happen.
• One goal or more. Your Plan of Action needn’t be limited to one goal. If you want to learn to backpack and climb 10 of North Carolina’s 40 6,000-foot peaks, we’ll devise a plan that addresses both goals.
• Journal. You’ll receive a journal to help you keep tabs on your progress.
• Twenty percent discount on any Get! programs, including GetBackpacking! and GetHiking! The Southeast’s Classic Hikes, and others that may develop during 2016.
• Cost: $175. That covers a year of coaching.

Why me?

That is, why trust me, Joe Miller, to help you avoid feeling like you do now at the end of 2016? Because I love seeing people get out of the outdoors what I get out of the outdoors. I experience this regularly through our GetHiking! and GetBackpacking! programs — and I want to experience it more in 2016. As for credentials, you’ll find those here.

Sign up below and avoid the adventure blues at the end of 2016. You’ll receive your 2016 Adventure Questionnaire within 24 hours of signing up.

Questions? Contact Joe Miller at joe@getgoingnc.com or call 919.791.6155.

The post Avoid the adventure blues in 2016: get an Adventure Coach appeared first on GetGoing NC!.

I wrote the following for The News & Observer and Charlotte Observer. It ran in both papers on Feb. 12, 2013. It runs here, with links.

If you were one of the millions of Americans who vowed to live a healthier lifestyle in 2013, you may be edging toward the window of despair. But you probably already knew that.

“We’ve tracked the patterns,” Sue Dissinger, Health and Wellness Director for the YMCA of Greater Charlotte, says of people who vow to improve, “and after 30 to 60 days people start to slowly decline or quit.”

The YMCA’s figures, based on years of study, are echoed by the health and fitness world at large: Despite the best intentions, people tend to lose enthusiasm for a new and healthy lifestyle after about a month of sweating and watching what they eat.

Why does that happen? “We often make our goals too big, too ambitious,” says Lori Stevens, a registered dietician with WakeMed Cary Hospital. “We say, ‘Once the year starts I’m going to cut all sugar out of my diet.’ That’s extreme. It’s not sustainable.”

It’s also not inevitable, this throwing in of the gym towel.

Strategies that will keep you on track:

* Revisit your ‘plan’. You do have a plan, don’t you?

“The main reason most people fail is because they don’t have a plan,” says Ronnie Neal, a wellness instructor at Rex Wellness Center of Wakefield in North Raleigh. It needs to be a specific goal, not just “I want to lose weight,” or “I want to get in better shape.” You need both short-term and long-term goals, and you need to be able to visualize those goals.

• Have a realistic goal. Cutting out all sugar, as Stevens noted earlier, isn’t feasible. What is, she says, is vowing to skip dessert on weeknights and indulge only on weekends. “Or instead of saying, ‘I’m going to work out every day and run a marathon in March, say you’ll work out five days a week and do a 5K in April, then maybe a 10K in June and a half-marathon or marathon in the fall.”

• Write down your goal. “Writing down your goals hardwires them a little more into your subconscious,” says Neal.

• Be patient. That malaise you’re starting to feel may be because you noticed quick and immediate results the first two or three weeks of your fitness regimen, but now you aren’t losing weight as fast and the inches aren’t disappearing from your middle as quickly. That’s because your body is hitting a plateau.

You hit a plateau because your metabolism – the process of burning calories for energy – slows as you lose weight, advises the Mayo Clinic. “You burn fewer calories than you did at your heavier weight even doing the same activities, ” Neal says.

Solution? “You gotta change the routine,” says Neal. Your body has adapted to your exercise routine and has become more efficient, burning fewer calories. For instance, suggests Neal, “If you’re doing circuit training, either change the order of your routine or do new exercises altogether.”

• Be really patient. Mixing things up should get you past your first plateau, but it will take longer for your new lifestyle – the more active and healthier-eating you – to become routine. “It takes about five months for a new behavior change” to kick in, says Dissinger.

* Track your success. Find a “grading” system that works for you. Numbers work for some people: number of pounds lost, inches off the waist. (But they can also obscure true progress. “I had one client who was upset because he gained two pounds despite losing half an inch around his waist,” says Neal. The two pounds could have been water, Neal tried to explain, adding the real goal was to lose inches.)

Neal sometimes suggests keeping track of progress with a string. “Wrap it around your waist, mark it, hang it up in the bathroom. Three months later, do it again and cut off the amount that you’ve lost.” Those bits of cut-off string can be quite satisfying.

* Don’t compare. Don’t judge your progress by the person on the treadmill next to you. “It’s all very individualistic,” Dissinger says. Weight is part of our genetic makeup, and some people need to move more to see results. Experiment and find what works for you.

• Don’t get suckered. If you do get discouraged, it’s tempting to be wooed by those late-night infomercials – by the magic powder that makes it OK to eat half a chocolate cake, or the miracle exercise device that claims to do all the work.

“The biggest issue we have is with the overabundance of information in the media, of fad diets and supplements that claim to fix everything,” says Stevens. “It can be confusing and overwhelming.”

Alas, she advises, saying what you likely already know, “There is no quick fix, no magic pill.” Better health is, in the long term, about a healthier lifestyle.

* * *

A variety of online resources can aid your effort to live healthy:

•  eatright.org: Sponsored by the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, which describes itself as “the world’s largest organization of food and nutrition professionals.”

•  heart.org: The “Getting Healthy” segment of the American Heart Association website includes information on nutrition, physical activity, weight and stress management, smoking cessation, healthier kids.

•  diabetes.org: American Diabetes Association Web site offers health and nutrition tips both for diabetics and non-diabetics. • Online fitness communities: As Ronnie Neal with Rex Wellness notes, it’s good to write down your goals. In fact, write down everything. Online fitness journals have become especially

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