Whenever we get struck down by life; be it an injury, illness, job loss, or other stressful event, it’s just so easy to forgo and ignore your fitness. It can also be really discouraging getting back into a fitness routine when you *know* that you’re fitness level is (or should be) significantly higher.

I am desperately struggling with that.These little walks or hikes I’ve been doing shouldn’t be a success but…they are. Let’s face it though: doing the same old trail can get really boring – especially when that trail used to simply be the access trail to get to something way cooler/harder/more rewarding. Alas…

So what do you do to overcome that? How can you shift your mindset into appreciating what it is you DO have available to you? How about shaking and changing things up a little bit? This is something we did this past weekend. Instead of going for my “standard” walk which I do during the week, we decided to head up the highway to investigate and search for an elusive trail. It’s an old mountain biking route, almost a a myth, since nobody has actually biked it but everyone knows someone who knows someone that’s done it. It meant some bushwhacking, some exploring, and some forest road walking.  It was something different and that made it a lot of fun!

I grabbed my camera, just in case something interesting caught my eye, and we went out for a couple of hours to simply see something new. Shasta sure loved it: running around the bush, sniffing new things, hopefully not bringing a grizzly back to us! We wandered around and found the remnants of an old cabin, I found a totally legit Sasquatch* nap spot, and we even found the end of the trail! Now we need to go back with a map and see if we can properly trace it up – we ended up losing it in the mess of downfall and overgrown brush.

All in all, it was fun. It was a mini-adventure that allowed me some exercise and enjoy the fresh air, within my limitations, and also gave me a little shake up from the standard walks I do in town. We created our own adventure.

How do you keep the doldrums from setting in? How do you get over those little humps in life? What kind of mini-adventures do you plan?

*Yup! Sasquatch! We’re totally in Bigfoot country and it seems that searching for sasquatch is totally conducive to my current limitations as it needs to be done slowly and in the evenings.