Season 1, Episode 2: Take a Hike. Seriously.
LISTEN TO THE EPISODE:
On Today’s Episode:
Spending on outdoor recreation accounts for 2.2 percent of the American economy at just over $400 billion a year! This seems pretty incredible to me, especially since more expensive pursuits, like domestic oil and gas extraction, technically account for less of the economy.
So why is it that Americans are so willing to spend our precious paychecks to get outdoors? Why not just spent it at the gym? Or just walk outside for free?
I talked to an outdoor educator, a fellow hiker, an exercise physiologist and a burnout expert to answer the question — what can being outside really do for us?
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MASTERFUL MIX OF OLD AND NEW
“I thoroughly enjoy this podcast! Liz Russell masterfully mixes research, expert commentary and her own delightful viewpoints into well crafted episodes that navigate lessons of the past with ideas for our future. It’s thought provoking, educational and fun!”
With Special Guests:
Tyler Socash - Tyler Socash is the Adirondack Mountain Club’s Education Programs Coordinator. He believes in fostering a personal connection with our public lands through exposure, education, and stewardship. The day after completing his master’s degree at the University of Rochester, Socash embarked on a 7,000-mile thru-hiking journey across the Pacific Crest Trail, Te Araroa in New Zealand, and the Appalachian Trail. This grand immersion into wilderness inspired him to defend rare wildlife habitats in New York State's Adirondack Park. In an effort to meld humor with conservation efforts, Socash also co-created and co-hosts Foot Stuff Podcast, which spotlights outdoor adventure, antics, and activism around the country.
Tim Noble - Tim Noble first came to the Adirondacks when he was six weeks old and his soul has never left. He spent his summers living with his grandparents, exploring the streams and trails surrounding Fourth Lake near Old Forge, N.Y. He retired from the Marine Corps and lives in a log cabin that he designed and built in Lake George, N.Y. His desire for adventure is shared with his wife and children. Together, they’ve spent many hours hiking, canoeing and camping all over the Adirondacks. They are aspiring 46ers, and he and his wife have completed the Fire Tower Challenge.
Competition has been a big motivator for Tim — he’s run the Marine Corps Marathon, several Spartan races, numerous 5 & 10k's and looks forward to running the Utica Boilermaker 15k every July. He has also completed four '90 Milers', two 'Black Fly Challenges' and many canoe races all over the Park and he’s not done yet! It's that competitive nature and love of the Adirondacks that’s Tim’s real passion.
Cait Donovan - Caitlin Donovan is an expert in Chinese Medicine, a Burnout Coach, and the host of FRIED - The Burnout Podcast. All of her projects are ruled by one thing: End Burnout Culture as soon as possible. She truly believes that stress management is the true medicine of the future and is relentless in her goal to teach as many female entrepreneurs as possible to be more resilient, have more energy, and more fun.
Ben Reuter, PhD - Ben is a faculty member at California University of Pennsylvania. An exercise physiologist, he holds certifications from the National Strength and Conditioning Association (NSCA), and the National Athletic Trainers Association (NATA). He has interests in injury prevention/performance enhancement for endurance athletes and using movement to enhance quality of life. He firmly believes that movement is a lifestyle, not just an activity.
After travels through Pennsylvania, Virginia, Kentucky, Georgia, Alabama and Florida for school and work he has been in the Pittsburgh area since 2004. Ben is an active contributor to his profession, with work on a variety of committees of the NSCA, as well as presentations and publications both nationally and internationally. The idea for his podcasts Moving2Live and FitLabPGH came from his interest in listening to long form movement related podcasts that were directed either towards professionals or the general public.
Resources:
I find it almost impossible to explain ALL of the ideas and influences that come up while researching every episode. So here are just some of my most used and referenced resources for this week’s episode.
Bureau of Economic Analysis - Here is where the GDP data at the top of the episode came from; I don’t think I mentioned that the report was a 2017 one because I checked a few sources that varied from 2016 to 2018; it seems to be holding generally pretty steady.
Outdoor Recreation is 2.2 Percent of the U.S. Economy, New Report Finds - If you don’t want to read the BEA stuff above (because it’s super economic-y — I get it), check out REI’s write-up about the Bureau’s 2016 report from an industry perspective.
Adventures in the Wilderness - This is the book that Tyler references by William H. H. Murray. Full disclosure — I’ve not read it. But if you’re interested in learning more, you should check it out!
Foot Stuff Podcast - Tyler, this episode’s first guest, is one of the hosts of the Foot Stuff Podcast, which is all about hiking stories and was an inspiration for me for this specific episode. If you want to hear a lot more hiking stories in a fun format, check it out!
Adirondack 46er History - I’ve been trying (very slowly) to become a 46er, so this site wasn’t new to me — but finding it’s history section was.
Fried, the Burnout Podcast - Cait Donovan talks about burnout throughout the episode, and it’s clear why - she’s an absolute expert on it! Check out her podcast on burnout if you can relate to any of the stuff she’s talking about in the episode - seriously!
Finding Myself in Finland, Part 1 - Cait Donovan’s INSANELY cool ski trip in Finland, and all the amazing stuff she learned while she was there, is described in a two-part blog post on her site. CHECK IT OUT; the pod just couldn’t really do it justice.
Finding Myself in Finland, Part 2 - See above. ⬆️
Internet Detox: The Best Method to Boost Creativity - Cait Donovan talked about this on the podcast, but here’s more about being phone-less and internet-less in Finland, and the impact it had to her well-being.
Fitness Lab Pittsburgh - In this episode, Ben Reuter says that he believes that movement should be a lifestyle. We didn’t get into it in the episode a ton, but if you’re interested in hearing more about Ben’s vision, check out his website and its plethora of content,
FitLabPGH Podcast #20-’17: Rachel Carson Trail Challenge - Steve Mentzer - In the episode, Ben Reuter talks about this interview he had with Rachel Carson Trail Challenge organizer, Steve Mentzer. Check out that episode to hear the whole story that Ben is referring to! And check out tons of Ben’s other episodes as well!
Hiking in America - I thought this history on hiking in America was pretty comprehensive. I wish that I had been able to cover more aspects of hiking history, but it was a bit too broad of a topic. So maybe we’ll have more episodes in the future that break this down - who knows!
The Was Is Could Be podcast is produced by Liz Russell at To Eat and To Love, LLC. Each episode is carefully edited by Joshua Rivers of Podcast Guy Media, LLC. Our theme music is made by Neil Cross and published by ImageCollect Publishing.
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Liz Russell: Ok, how much do you think the money spent on outdoor recreation accounts for in the American economy - like if you had to guess in dollar amounts or in like percent of GDP, what would you guess?
Guesser #1: I think I would be surprised if the outdoor recreation industry provided all that much at all to the overall American economy. 1% sounds like that might actually be high, but that would be my guess.
Guesser #2: I think that the outdoor recreation industry contributed maybe 2 million dollars to the American economy last year.
Guesser #3: I think the outdoor industry is worth $300 million a year?
Liz Russell: Outdoor recreation accounts for over $400 BILLION dollars in the US economy. At just over 2 percent of GDP, it accounts for more of the economy than domestic oil and gas extraction, which hangs out around 1 percent.
Now this number includes all outdoor recreation — and that’s like hiking, skiing, hunting, running, and so on -- but it still amounts to a surprising statistic.
Growing up in the Adirondacks, I probably should have known this. Every year it seems like parking lots and trailheads are just packed with more people. And by the numbers, outdoor recreation is growing in popularity, and people are spending money on it — despite the fact that going outside is generally free.
Yet, statistics show that Americans are a very sedentary people. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, only 1 in 3 Americans get the recommended amount of physical activity. Our jobs have just shifted from farming and other labor-intensive tasks to desk jobs and office work.
I talked to an outdoor educator, a fellow hiker, an exercise physiologist and a burnout expert to answer the question - what can being outside really do for us? Why is something that is seemingly free — like going outside — become something we’re willing to spend billions of dollars on? And what is the rest of the population — the sedentary folks — missing out on by NOT being outside?
This is Was Is Could Be and this is one story of outdoor recreation - Hiking in the Adirondack Mountains.
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Liz Russell: Now you may be wondering why I chose to focus on hiking in the Adirondacks specifically for this episode. After all, there are so many outdoor activities that we can do and I that I could discuss here. The reality is because there are so many, its very hard to fit the history of them into one 40-minute episode. Since I grew up hiking in the Adirondacks, I decided to focus this episode there. But don’t worry, I’m sure there will be plenty of other opportunities to discuss other outdoor activities in coming seasons.
Tyler Socash: My name is Tyler Socash. I am the Adirondack Mountain Club’s outdoor programs coordinator. The Adirondack Mountain Club is a nonprofit organization dedicated to the conservation, preservation and responsible recreational use of New York State's forest preserve and all wild lands and waters spread out across the Northeast and even the country. And as an outdoor educator, my primary goal is to help connect people with nature so they can use those lands responsibly and hopefully walk away from that outdoor experience with an enhanced outdoor ethic. And that maybe one day they’ll become stewards of that landscape and help protect it for generations to come.
So, Liz, like you, I grew up in New York State's Adirondack State Park and I didn't know it when I was younger, you know, playing at some big rocks behind my house and playing at a frog pond through the woods behind my house. I had no clue at the time, but I was fortunate enough like you to grow up in the largest protected land area in the contiguous United States. In the entire lower 48, there's no bigger park than the Adirondack State Park. It's actually bigger than the state of Vermont, and you could even fit about eight Rhode Islands inside of the Adirondacks. You can even combine 5 heralded national parks: Great Smoky Mountains National Park on the border of Tennessee and North Carolina, Glacier National Park in Montana, Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming, Yosemite National Park in California, and even toss in the entire Grand Canyon.
All of those national parks combined easily fit inside of the Adirondacks. I had no clue when I was little that I was growing up in this haven, not just for outdoor recreation, but a place for wildlife to live and thrive as well. I have been thinking about Adirondack outdoor recreation history a lot. And really you have to think back when Europeans came over across the Atlantic Ocean and colonize in the Americas. I'll never forget hearing the story of the Puritans landing at Plymouth Rock in Massachusetts, and their motto was where a wilderness exists, a garden should be made. People really feared the wilderness and saw these landscapes, these primeval lands as being a bit threatening to their livelihood, and they thought of these places as dangerous. But as time went on, and especially after the American Revolutionary War ended, there were a few land surveys that went out: the Totten and Crossfield purchase in the late 1700’s, the Macomb's Purchase, and, in 1797, a man named Charles Brodhead actually had the first recorded ascent of one of the Adirondack Park’s tallest mountains, Giant Mountain. And in 1797, he set out to try to survey this land so that people who stopped fighting in the American Revolutionary War could have land to farm and in the wake of that war a place to raise their family. And you know, that's the first time that I know of someone going up and hiking an Adirondack mountain. You know, fast forward 200 years later, I was hiking mountains in my hometown of Old Forge like Bald Mountain, although for different purposes. Well after Charles Brodhead’s climb interest in the Adirondack region, which was virtually isolated, had barren soils, very inhospitable climate - it made living in this part of New York very hard for people.
In 1825, the Erie Canal was completed so people were bypassing the Adirondack region to go westward to fulfill that Manifest Destiny in search of those fertile lands in the Genesee River Valley in Western New York and the Ohio River Valley beyond. People forgot about the Adirondacks until 1837, when there was a man by the name of Ebenezer Emmons who got permission from then New York State governor, William Learned Marcy, to do a geological survey of this inaccessible interior of the high peaks of the Adirondacks in upstate New York. It hadn't been fully surveyed since Charles Brodhead’s climb a few decades earlier. In 1837, Ebeneezer Emmons, a bunch of unknown woodsmen, William C. Redfield, a botanist, and an artist with the last name Ingham, they all climb Mount Marcy, the tallest peak in New York State, for the first recorded time. And these men brought back sketches. They brought back details of the flora and fauna of this newly discovered high point of New York State. And those sketches, those reports, drew intrigue. That leads a little bit later on in 1869. They were just trying to do a full state-wide geological survey. Massachusetts had done a full geological survey in the years prior, but New York had not yet done this survey. And it's actually these surveys that would help showcase New York State's wildlands, help people have actual maps to establish their towns, their communities, their villages, and these towns, communities and villages would later go on to host hotels, possible vacation destinations for tourists that would begin to hike and enjoy the Adirondack State Park.
In 1869, a man by the name of Adirondack Murray - William H. H. Murray - writes this book called “Adventures in the Wilderness.” This is actually the book that took the term holiday and transformed it into “vacation”. He encouraged city slickers to vacate their city homes, to leave their increasingly industrialized, stuffy, and increasingly becoming overcrowded cities to escape to this Adirondack region of New York State. And uh one man by the name of Verplanck Colvin picked up that surveyor’s equipment and continued that surveying legacy. One year later in 1870, he decides to climb in the Adirondack High Peaks Region himself and summits a mountain called Seward Mountain in the Western High Peaks. And while on Seward Mountain, he looks down into these valleys and the tourists are coming into the Adirondacks in droves for the first time, which causes a wave of great camps, Liz, to be developed and built in the Adirondack interior to host all of these city visitors that are coming and to give them some opulence and splendor to enjoy while they're in a slice of Adirondack wildness.
Well, Verplanck Colvin from the summit of Seward Mountain sees utter desolation in the valleys below. Over-logging was a real crisis at the time. And in fact, New York State's interior was quickly becoming a tinderbox with all of the slash and burn techniques by the lumberman left behind in their wake. The Adirondack Park was becoming quite the kindling box and prone to, to erupt into forest fires. Well, Verplanck tries to stave this off and calls for a New York State Forest Preserve to be created. And this is important for hiking because this New York State Forest Preserve was a new idea. Imagine having this vision vision to create a protected forest landscape for people and wildlife to enjoy forever. That actually, once the Adirondack Park became formalized as a park in 1892, the New York State Forest Preserve, which protects the forest as forever wild, where trees can't be cut on these public lands for perpetuity. All of a sudden by 1895, once the Forest Preserve had been ratified and then enacted in law, suddenly since 1895, there have been publicly protected landscapes across the Adirondacks and the Catskills, a little bit further South in New York State and these forever wild forest preserve parcels would soon be crisscrossed by hiking trails. There would be campsites developed near lake shores and ponds and, into the 20th century, as the Industrial Revolution had taken hold, people have more free time. This invention from Henry Ford in 1911 - the Model T - was created and suddenly more and more people are getting access out of the metropolitan areas of the Eastern United States and they're driving up into these newly-made roads into the Adirondacks and they're going hiking.
Accessing these public lands, these protected lands certainly isn't easy today. And that was exacerbated back in the 1800s and early 1900s. Before you had a Model T, the only way to conveniently arrive at the Adirondacks back then was by train. And it certainly would take over 16 hours to take a train from New York City along the Hudson River up to the state capital of New York, which is Albany, New York. And then you'd have to hop on to a different train line, which would get you all the way up towards North Creek. And then you'd have to ride by stagecoach most likely, into your back country destination, which was probably in the 1800s, a great camp, whether it was Paul Smith's Hotel, whether it was the Adirondack Loj, whether it was Durant’s Prospect House in Blue Mountain Lake. It definitely wasn't easy to get to these locations and certainly wasn't cheap.
Bob Marshall was the first person to hike all of the Adirondack High Peaks from 1918 through 1925. Bob Marshall, his younger brother, George Marshall, and their guide, Herbert Clark, were the first three individuals to hike all of the mountains in the Adirondacks, to achieve the arbitrary elevation of 4,000 feet above sea level.
And today, almost a hundred years later, after their completion of these Adirondack High Peaks, hikers are now coming in droves to enjoy the splendor of the Adirondack Mountains. And I currently work in Lake Placid where we receive millions of visitors every year coming through our town and our trailhead where the Adirondack Mountain Club’s at Adirondack lodge is situated is the busiest hiking trail head in New York State. And I always think all the way back to a guy named Charles Brodhead in 1797 climbing Giant Mountain for the first time, how much this has changed, now that the Adirondack State Park gets about 10 to 12 million visitors per year. It's currently the largest protected land area in the contiguous 48 States, and hiking as an outdoor recreational pursuit has really taken hold.
Liz Russell: But what someone create a hiking challenge like the 46-er challenge of the High Peaks?
Tyler Socash: Bob Marshall picked up at his family camp, Camp Knollwood on lower Saranac Lake. He picked up a copy of Verplanck Colvin’s Adirondack survey records, and Verplanck Colvin, you know, the same guy that climbed Seward Mountain in 1870 and dreamt up the Forest Preserve, cataloged his climbs and ended up measuring the summits of New York State's tallest peaks. In his Adirondack survey records, there were 46 summits that achieve this elevation of 4,000 feet above sea level. Bob Marshall as a young man became intrigued by the challenge and his dad, Lewis Marshall was the main framer for the “forever wild” clause, article 14 of New York State's constitution that created the Forest Preserve. So I think it's funny how all of these names, these people are all connected. And Bob, Bob Marshall just had the ingenuity, the imagination, the industrious work ethic to go after these peaks and to hike them with joy in his heart. And he actually became a very staunch wilderness advocate. He ended up being one of the main founders of The Wilderness Society. And I often like to think that the very national ideal and the worldwide ideal of wilderness was started by Bob Marshall in the Adirondacks.
Liz Russell: The history of outdoor recreation in the Adirondacks is naturally intwined with attempts to commercialize it. As people came to the region to experience the wilderness, things like lodging, restaurants, and other attractions just naturally grew. And so too did the need for gear for these. Material technologies and other technologies improved, and important survival and safety gear just became better and more accessible to people - and these are the types of purchases that I found led to the economic growth that we discussed at the beginning of the episode. But what I wanted to understand is, if going outside were free - if we could leave our house and walk outside at no cost at all - then why are so many people willing to spend their hard-earned cash on these activities? I decided to ask my uncle, who has been hiking the US throughout his life.
Tim Noble: My name is Tim Noble. I'm Liz's uncle. I'm married to my wife Kathi for going on 40 years now. I've got two kids, Kelcey and Toby. Uh, we live in Lake George in a log cabin, I designed a built and still building. I'm medically-retired from the Marine Corps after 27 years and uh, work as a civilian for the Army. Now I'll be retiring from that job, um, in a couple of months and then I’ll finish building my house and uh, pursue more of my outdoor activities and goals, like, uh, being a 46er. I'm working on the highest mountains in Northeast, the Catskill 36 and stuff like that. Do a lot of camping, a lot more paddling. And uh, that's my plan.
Well, to start off, you know, as a little kid, you know, playing little league baseball and then little league football. And then we got, uh, ironically we were playing football before you were allowed to play basketball back when I was growing up. So I just, I did the football growing up in Columbus, Ohio. You know, football is a thing there with Ohio State so we went from one sport, basketball, football, baseball, and this repeated, repeated, repeated. And in the summer times, I came up here to Old Forge with my grandparents and um, you know, living on the lake and having all the woods and the creek next to the house and uh, the trails, which are, you know, Trail 5 and all that. It was a lot of, freedom, a lot of exploring to do as a little boy. I liked being outside and being up here in the summertime just made it real easy.
Going up on Trail 5, there's a hiking trail there that goes up to Mountain Pond and we would camp. That was an adventure, you know, as a little boy, go up there to camp. And I always, anything I could see on… watch on TV, used to have Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom and at school there would be these National Geographic movies. They would have like a family night a couple of times a year and you'd go and you’d watch, you know, people would be venturing in national parks or up in Alaska…. And, and I used to read any books I could, you know, watching Daniel Boone on TV of course, but read any books I could on, on the outdoors. And I had a paper route back in Ohio and I saved my money. And the first two things I bought was a bike and a canoe, an Old Town canoe from Rivett’s Boat Livery in Old Forge. And I would go and I was 13 years old and I already had my first canoe, paddling out here, you know, on the lake and going into the bays and fishing and things like that. So try and con some other people's fathers into taking us to canoe on the top of the station wagon, throw it into Moose River so we could paddle down the Moose River, you know. We did that a few times and I was just a lot of fun.
When you're a kid, your relative freedom is a bicycle. And when you like growing up up here on the lake or river, another relative freedom is a boat, a canoe, a john boat, a little fishing boat. So those were my two routes to freedom. You can get away from everybody.
Liz Russell: So what do you love specifically about the Adirondacks?
Tim Noble: Uh, well, it's, it's beautiful. Uh, it's where I got a lot of fond memories, you know, from my youth, you know, spend the time with my grandparents growing up. My, my close friends here, they're still my closest friends. And the, the variety, I mean, I've been, like I said, I've been all over and the variety of outdoor opportunities in the Adirondacks is probably greater than any place I've been, uh, in the United States. You know… the Pacific Northwest is beautiful, you know, uh… Utah, Colorado - they're beautiful, but what they lack, what the Adirondacks have, you have a great mixture of, of mountains, okay. With the high mountains, with the 46, and they're dangerous, okay. And you have water. The Adirondacks has a lot of water and few other places have that combination, you know, of challenging mountains and a lot of water to paddle. And that draws me back because paddling is a passion of mine. Um, and few other places they may, they topped Adirondacks in beauty but what they lack is the combination of beauty and challenging with mountains, with water, okay. And, uh, public accessibility is, it's pretty good in the Adirondacks. Not as great as it is on, uh, Forest Service land or National Park land out West, um, but stuff that they think is challenging hikes out there, you know, after hiking in the Adirondacks and the high peaks, they're not so challenging. The Adirondacks are far, far more challenging. So I liked that. It’s the challenge.
They'd been hiked for well over a hundred years now - the same, the same trail. So they're down to rocks and roots and rocks and roots are… they're not fun, you know, and it's a lot easier in the wintertime when all those crevices between the rocks and the roots are filled in and put your spikes on and go. Um, but you know, most people, they're afraid to hike in wintertime because of the cold and snow and the ice, which actually technically I think it's, it's easier on the body cause you're not, you know, going from rock to rock and tripping over roots and things like that. Plus you go into well-worn trails in the High Peaks in wintertime, you can glissade down - sit down and slide down. That's fun.
You know, you gotta pay attention to the weather obviously. And you know, the simple old adage, uh, hope for the best, but prepare for the worst. You know, I don't want to be on one of those, uh, DEC web reports I get on the ranger rescues. I don't want to be on that. Okay. And when you read those, you… a lot of the time, most of them are like what were those people thinking? Okay. Uh, and I'm not going to be that guy. Plus with my, my, my medical history and my injuries, I, I can't take a chance. So, I pack well, pay attention to the weather and um know when to say when, you know. Haven’t had to turn around on any yet, but I won't be afraid to. Be wise and uh, don't put yourself in precarious situations. Cause the Adirondacks have taken lives and uh, I don't want to be a statistic.
Liz Russell: You mentioned your injuries. Can you talk a little bit about your diagnosis and how that impacted your ability to get outside and what you've done to get back out?
This is actually my favorite part of this story but - quick warning for you - there are some details about a medical procedure in this story, you might want to hit skip a few times if you’re particularly squeamish.
Tim Noble: Sure. I had a, I was diagnosed with the clear cell chondrosarcoma. It’s a bone tumor in my left hip. It was in the greater trochanter region, which is the knob. If you look at a picture of a skeleton, it’s the knob on the outside of your hip. It was on the backside of that. So it was in, um, 2005, I was diagnosed. I was in the Marine Corps at the time. Um, and they sent me down to Walter Reed and they did a biopsy, surgery. Came back, was willing to have me right back in her next week and uh, laid me open. 60 something staples in my hip. Uh, they removed the tumor, uh, no treatment for chemo or radiation, just take it out and get what they call clear margins. They cut the bone back till they're sure there's nothing, uh, malignant in the bone. Um, told me I'd never be able to run again. I was going to have to curtail my lifestyle. Um, and the Marine Corps, medically retired me, uh, due to that, they put, uh, the doctor also placed a dynamic hip screw on my hip. You know, it's a titanium plate with like a large lag screw that goes up in. A year later, they removed it because that, that type of cancer has a high likelihood of coming back. And the easiest way to find if it comes back, was with an X-ray. Obviously with metal, your body, you can't have an X-ray. So they removed it and uh, so I took me… I wasn't gonna let my medical condition, dictate my lifestyle and change it. So it took me seven years before I could run again and hike, uh, and it was a lot of work, you know, a lot of, a lot of pain putting it through it.
Well at first I couldn't walk. It took a long time, crutches to a cane and then you can only can only walk so far because the pressure and the pain was so great in my hip. So just pushing a little bit more and I'd still would, you know, I have a little gym on my basement and I’d still do, you know, weight training and upper body stuff. Um, and went and bought a, a full carbon bike because I looked at bikes cause I like, I love biking as well and carbon dampens. So I got a full carbon bike and was riding that. Uh, and that helped a lot because that gave me that freedom that I was telling about earlier - bikes and canoes are a great access to freedom. So I got that, that back. Um, and that was painful ‘cause you know, it's, it's still not a very well padded seat but, um, it also helped build my leg strength and my muscle strength ‘cause my muscles had atrophied so much, especially in, uh, in the rear end because they, they, when they did my surgery, they cut, uh, some tendons and ligaments out in the gluteus region that help support my knees. So I was, have a lot of knee problems and still, still do. But uh, biking was able to build all those muscles back. Um, and uh, I think speed, speed, my recovery, um, to the point where I could, you know, go for a slight jog. He'll start off quarter mile on a track over at the high school. Cause that's padded. And then I, I didn't run on blacktop ever. It was always trails, the track, running around the football field at the high school, no pavement whatsoever. That… because that was very, very painful to the point of excruciating trying to do any length of a run on that.
But yeah, that's the way they're just baby steps. Literally. Literally baby steps.
Liz Russell: How many hours a week? Ish.
Tim Noble: I couldn't at first, I couldn't do, I'd have to go every three days. And then, um, probably about after nine months maybe of being steady at that was I comfortable that I could go every two days. But it was once I started, it was over a year before I could go two days in a row where I, I wasn't, you know, limping very bad and really sore. Like just, I couldn't do it again. So that took at least another year before I could go… year, maybe year, a little less than a year and a half… before I could go back-to-back days. So now I can, now I can, so, but that took, it took a long time.
Liz Russell: It’s an amazing story — its a story of perseverance. And it’s really important to the main point of this episode — what about the outdoors is so alluring that someone would fight tooth and nail to get back out in them? To spend billions to be a part of it all? Why didn’t someone like my uncle just stick with physical therapy or the gym - why was he fighting to be on that bike and eventually on that mountain? What was he getting out of being outside.
Cait Donovan: Hi everybody. My name is Cait Donovan and I am an expert in Chinese medicine, a burnout coach, and the host of Fried, the Burnout Podcast.
Liz Russell: When I started asking this question online in various Facebook groups, the universe aligned and I found Cait Donovan, who is a burnout expert and who also incidentally loves the outdoors. She has her own story of healing too - not in the Adirondacks, but this time in Finland.
Cait Donovan: I graduated from… with a Master's degree in Chinese medicine in 2007. I was 24 and I promptly moved to Poland and to be with my fiancé who is Polish - my husband now 13 years later, 14 years later. And I was in Poland. I learned a new, I learned Polish fluently. I worked at an infertility center for awhile as an acupuncturist until I opened my own practice. And the combination of working in a foreign language all day every day, even though I spoke fluently, overworking like mad because I was seeing about 60 or 70 patients a week that were very high intensity because we're talking about trying to have a child, which is, you know, sort of the most emotional thing that people go through. If you're having a hard time with that, it can be a real burden. And so I was taking on that, having poor boundaries and over-giving to people all the time, sort of agreeing to come in early, agreeing to stay late, agreeing to work through lunch, things like that. And I found myself at, you know, 28 or 29, doing a job that I loved, but hating it and resenting my patients for needing too much from me.
And at the time I blame to being in Poland, um, which Poland was not the best place for me. So that was a portion of the story. But at that moment I thought it was the whole story. And so I told my husband, we need to get out of here. And so we left and we moved to Prague and I built another practice in Prague and it was successful, but not the way it was in Warsaw.
In Poland, I was, you know, I was seeing a crazy amount of people. I had a three-month waiting list. I was on TV regularly. It was just a very intense experience. And Prague was much more chill. And after three or four years, I found myself in that same sort of burnout space where I was starting to feel resentful. I was gaining weight, my thyroid was breaking down, sort of, nothing was working. And during that time, while we were living in the Czech Republic, we started, uh, cross country skiing on a regular basis throughout obviously throughout the winter. Cross country skiing is big in the Czech Republic. Um, oh, everybody grows up doing, everybody knows how to do it. It's not, you know, something strange for them to do. And we had a center that was not far from our house, you know, an hour and a half or so that we could go to every weekend in the winter if we wanted.
And it was a really good way to be in nature. You know, you're not taking your phone out 17 times a day because your hands are cold and your battery's going to die anyway because it's too cold outside, you know? So it was just this really nice way to sort of separate myself and my husband found this trip to Finland and it was 120 kilometers over six days. We had to carry packs with all of our stuff behind us, you know, attached to our hips. We had, you know, one pack for two people. So he was carrying it sometimes and I was carrying it sometimes. And on this trip there was no internet, there was no cell phone service. Your battery would die immediately because it was Celsius, it was about minus 25 every day. And you, you had no choice but to be there and be present because you had to in order to basically survive.
I mean we were doing 25 to 50 kilometers a day and we were going from hut-to-hut. In the huts, we were sleeping on basically like a long bench where all of us, there was eight or nine of us and we would sleep side-by-side in sleeping bags on this bench and eat, you know, our dried food that we added hot water to that we, and the hot water we got from boiling down snow. So it was just this very like you skied all day, you were exhausted, you ate something you passed out for an hour, you woke up and watched the Northern Lights and then went back to bed and get up and did it all again.
And when I came back from that trip, I realized that I hadn't had anxiety in a week. I had been angry about being on the trip and I'd be mad about bad weather. And I had been frustrated about, you know, not being able to keep up with my husband and other emotions had come up, but I've had an underlying anxiety pretty much all my life. And I got back to Prague and I was like, oh, what is going on? The absolute lack of need for me to create boundaries really when I was on that trip because everybody was so focused on themselves and the elimination of every sort of outside influence in, in Northern Finland we were way above the Arctic Circle. And in Northern Finland there's not trees. So basically we could see the blue sky, the white snow and each other.
There was nothing else to look at. So we weren't seeing signs, we weren't reading news, we weren't like, there was just nothing else to enter our space. So it was so peaceful and so calm. You know, when I got back and I had the first day that I was just sort of getting organized and it was fine. And then the next day was the day before I was going back to work and I went to bed and I found myself really anxious all of a sudden. What am I going to write in my blog posts? How am I going to meet my patients online? How am I going to get back into, are all my patients gonna show up this week ‘cause I've been gone for 10 days? And I started going and I thought, okay, Caitie, this has got to stop.
I was on the computer or on my phone constantly. The juxtaposition of having this total attachment, addiction-like attachment to my phone and then not even having the option of picking it up when we were in Finland was massive for me.
Liz Russell: So what about being outdoors specifically helped you see this? Was it just not being on your phone all the time or is there more to it?
Cait Donovan: The parasympathetic nervous system - the one that's responsible for regeneration, for renewal, for digestion, for making sure you, you feel safe and for healing and all of that - it takes three minutes of controlled breathing to activate that system. Three minutes. You don't even need 15, because as soon as you're walking you are controlling your breath a little bit more, even if not consciously because you're falling into a rhythm. So if you go for 15-minute walk, you're going to be breathing to a different rhythm for that time and you are going to enter a healing state.
One of the reasons that we're burning out, and one of the reasons that there's so much burnout in our current culture is that we don't realize the value of non-brain productive time because we don't have that experience often enough. Because what I think happens, especially in this cell phone happy world, I think what happens is we're so used to being distracted that having free space for our brain feels uncomfortable because there's too much to do. We have, there's laundry waiting. There are things to be ironed. The dishwasher needs to be emptied. You can turn on your computer, you can turn on your TV, your phone is right here. There's too much distraction - too much distraction that's not enhancing in any way. Like go get distracted by the color of the leaves this weekend. Distract yourself with that because that creates space. Distracting yourself with Instagram does not create space. It definitely can. And, but I think more importantly, it just takes up space. There's only so much that we can take in, in a day and we're filling it with stuff we don't even care about. Go fill it with trees. Go fill it with grass. I love laying in the grass. Sometimes on dog walks, we just stop and lay in the grass for half an hour. Just lay down. I do, I do it like every week.
Liz Russell: Ben Reuter explained a similar concept to me. He referred to it more as a constant low-grade stress that we experience most in our indoor surroundings.
Ben Reuter: So my name is Ben Reuter. I'm an exercise physiologist and a lifetime mover. I firmly believe movement should be treated as a lifestyle, not just an activity. And as I think, uh, Liz will agree, moving outdoors is always more fun in my opinion, in my experience than moving indoors.
Most of us spend a lot of time indoors because most of us sleep indoors and we have jobs that require us to spend the time indoors. The next time you do that, just kind of pause for a second. When you're in your place of work and just kind of listen and what you find is there's a lot of background noise and you know, everybody talks about noise with different terminologies, but I'm talking about is think about the sound. The computer printer makes the sound that the fan on the computer makes the printer, maybe your cubicle mate who talks on the phone or brings cornflakes and is chewing on corn flakes. There's just all this noise that we have no control over.
And then we say, okay, we understand I'm going to work out. And I think that's kind of a bad word to use or an overused word, not necessarily a bad word. And so what do we do? We go to the gym and you go to the gym, and I don't know about you, but I have yet to be in a gym or a workout facility other than a yoga studio where there's not more noise. I mean, you walk into a gym and usually the lights are bright and usually you're just assaulted by this literally wave of sound that you can feel that most of the time isn't involved or doesn’t involve the music that you want to hear or the podcast that you want to listen to. So you go from a, a space, your work where there's low-level stress, even if you love your job, all that noise is stressful. And then you go and you work out and you have all this external stress from the noise, from the light, from at some level being judged by other people or feeling that you're being judged by other people. Even though, uh, most of us really aren't looking at what other people are doing. We're concentrating on getting our workout in. And so we just stay in kind of a low grade of stress all the time or a high grade of stress.
But what you find when you spend time outside is it has a calming effect. If you go outside where there's woods or there's green stuff, or if you happen to be in a desert region, it's quieter. You may hear sounds in the background, you may hear traffic, but you can really find a place where it's relatively quiet and it has a calming effect where maybe you concentrate on your breathing, maybe if you're walking or hiking, you concentrate on, on your footfalls. And the other thing is you get to pick what you see because if you go to a fitness facility, which we all do on some occasion, but if that's your primary way of getting your movement on, so to speak, then what you see is it's always the same thing. You always see the same people. Whereas if you go and you do your movement outside, which you have the advantage of being able to do is you could take the exact same three mile walk or run every day, and if you did it for 365 days of the year or maybe 300 days of the year, cause you're taking a few days off, every day is going to be different. Every day the ground's going to look a little bit different. Every day the weather's going to be a little bit different and you may find yourself seeing things that you never expected to see. A great example of that as I'm near a 10,000-acre county park and most of the days I take my dogs there and I was down there, uh, late last winter and I actually got the opportunity to see three deer swimming across the creek, which was fairly high from rain. And I saw one of the deer kind of get washed down. And I remember my first thought was, Oh my God, this deer is going to drown and I'm going to have to jump in and try to save it, which probably wouldn't be right.
But as I watched it, it was kind of like a kayaker who was caught in a riptide. He kind of… the deer — he or she — kind of rode the current, and when the current lessened, it kind of trotted to the side of the bank, hopped up on the, on the bank of the stream and shook itself. It's like, I've taught spin classes, I've gone to a variety of gyms and fitness facilities. I've never had the opportunity to do that. So I think probably one of the best benefits or best arguments for saying try to get as much movement in outside is you'll get the opportunity to see things that you might never otherwise see.
And I mean the great thing is with the changing seasons, you know, maybe, you started taking this trail in the spring when there was already quite a bit of greenery and now you're probably in upstate New York, a little bit ahead of us here in Pittsburgh, where we still have a few leaves, but the greenery and the vegetation is a lot less. So now you're starting to see a lot more detail of the ground. Like, Oh wow, I never realized how this trail connected to that one. Or, Oh wow! I never noticed that really cool old tree because it was always hidden behind other trees. So it's just the opportunity to see a wide variety of things rather than going into the treadmill or the “dreadmill” as some people call it, or the StairMaster and saying, Oh boy, maybe today we get to watch CNN instead of Good Morning America.
Liz Russell: Everyone of my interviewees kept hitting on something. They called it “freedom” or “quiet” or “experience away from the chaos”. Away from cell phones even. But on top of a beautiful mountain, you see people on their cell phones. It sometimes feels like we can’t get away from the Instagram world. And to be clear - I’m as guilty of this as anybody. So I asked for comments from my interviewees on this.
Ben Reuter: We interviewed for our local podcasts @fitlabPGH a couple of years ago, a gentleman who was an event director for something that's called the Rachel Carson, uh, Trail Hike. It's a 30-some mile hike during, uh, this, the, uh, summer Equinox. It's not a running race, it's a, it's a hike, although some people run it and he said, just talking with him, he said, you know, I just get the idea that some of the people are doing this hike because they just like being outdoors. They just enjoy, Hey, this is a really cool opportunity to do something. And yeah, you get a t-shirt out of it. But just being outdoors with, you know, my friends or my family, we do that. And he said, and other people, you know, they're kind of checking it off the list. It's like, okay, I did a marathon. Okay, I've done a 30-mile hike. Okay. I've done a century. And I think there's a tendency with the industrialization, if you read, because there's so much social media and you see somebody standing at the top of a, a 14-er or you see somebody who's like, well, I traveled to Berlin and I did the Berlin Marathon for my first marathon. There’s a tendency to get caught up in with, Oh my God, I can't just do what I want to do because it's fun.
Some people would say, okay, I've done the Marine Corps, now what can I do that's kind of bigger and better than that? Well, can I go do the Big Sur in California or do I need to go to Europe and do one of these? Or do I need to go down to Mexico or South America to do one of these? So there's a tendency, um, with social media where you literally see the best of everybody. You know, if you post your marathon finished picture, uh, on Instagram or Facebook, everybody's going to say, “Oh wow, look at Liz.”
So I think there's a tendency that if you are an extrinsically-motivated person, you're doing things because other people, you want other people to look at you in a positive light.
Tim Noble: I have a iPhone. My nephew talked me into getting an Instagram account last year, you know, so I like, like posting that and I got five sisters and a lot of friends that don't do what I do. And, uh, and I like posting, I like posting stuff on there. And let them show what they're missing. If that can motivate some of them to get out and, uh, get healthy and, and hike then so be it.
Cait Donovan: Well to me it's really just being outside and not picking up your phone. Like if you're moving, movement and nature combined in any way that you want to combine them, your brain will naturally transform the information that's been happening in the background and bring you new ideas. You just have to stay quiet enough to listen. You just have to not distract yourself on purpose.
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Liz Russell: So what drew Bob Marshall to hiking the Adirondacks? And why do people still hang out outside? Why are people willing to pay for the gear and the travel and all of that other stuff that comes with outdoor rec? It’s an escape to a quieter world where we can be wholly present - we just need to resist our phones long enough to really be a part of it.
Do you want to learn how you can start enjoying the outdoors? Do you want to hear other stories about other outdoor adventures from our interviewees? Head over to wasiscouldbe.com and follow us on Instagram @wasiscouldbe to get additional content for each episode.