5 Mile Hike And Aftermath

The Sentinel Dome - Taft Point hike in Yosemite was encouraging. I had the usual up and down for 3 days and then was right back up on my feet. No lasting PEM; I continued to register more than 40,000 steps a week. So I figured I should make the hiking a weekly event.

As usual, I got over-ambitious. I went for 5 mile hike last Saturday on Southfork American River Trail. It was the best rated trail near Sacramento on the website. Except that it wasn't. There were some distant views of the river soon after the ascent, but the trail was lined mostly with poison oak and dried up bushes the rest of the way. It was drab. But then, anything would be a drab after Sentinel/Taft.  I started at 11 and finished near 5PM, so it took me almost 6 hours for the effort.

I thought I was going to get away with it when I came out of 3 day recuperation period. But no, not this time. My exercise ability is now so shrunk, I struggle with 5000 steps a day. This week I barely registered 30,000 steps total.  An exertion would keel me over for 30 minutes, and then I'd get paralyzed for two hours, 5 hours after. The post-exercise inflammation wave is now highly pronounced and the constant need to lie down returned.

I'll have to lay low and abide my time for 2 more weeks. Except that I'm going on a 3 week trip through Western US/Canada to Banff National Park next week. It'll be 4,500 mile trip, a mini version of the cross-country trip we did in 2017. I think I'll manage alright. The novelty effect will kick in and I'll be road-worthy once I start out. If not, well, I can always turn around and come back. Just like I was prepared to do when we left for the cross-country trip.

Sentinel Dome and Taft Point

This one was worth 4 miles, and 20,000 steps total for the day. It's the most I've ever done since 2008 and it handily beat 16,000 steps I did in NYC in 2017.

I wasn't ambitious enough to the 5.5 mile loop. I was going to go as far as Roosevelt Point and back, then I realized I could do both Sentinel and Taft for the same distance. All I had to do was come back to the trail head and then head in the other direction. If I didn't feel up to it after Sentinel Dome, I could call it quit and my car would be right there too. I didn't quit. I probably could've done the loop the way I felt at the end of it.



I planned to take a 10 minute rest every 1000 steps. Going up to Sentinel Dome, I did. Then it became 10 minutes every half a mile from Sentinel Dome to Taft Point. Same thing on the way back up from Taft Point. It was getting past 6 PM and I only took only one break for the last 1 mile.

Strange thing's been happening this summer. Whenever I overdo, I have difficulty sleeping. It's similar to the sudden wakefulness that happened back in 2016, except that it is now happening after heavy exercises. It happened about 4 times and it was the same this time: I only slept 6 hours and I was ready to get up this morning. And there was no fatigue of sickness variety; only the exercise fatigue, and some dizziness, that you'd expect if you were healthy. It's as if I am recovered.

Except that I'm not. In between these exercise induced wakefulness, I fall back to the CFS state struggling with 6000 steps and then sleeping like a baby. I could play Jesus and try to walk on the water by keep over-exercising before I fall into the CFS state and wallow. I tried that, and it didn't work. My brain may be awake, but I was constantly in the exercise-recovery mode that I wasn't functioning, neither physically nor mentally. I was more like a zombie. Then, my ability tailed off after 2 long walks in 3 days, making me further useless. So I limited the over-exercise to a day or two a week.

Tomorrow I will poop out and get back to sleepy state, I'm sure. I'll rest one more day, get some work done -- I'm still working on deriving the fatigue measure from Fitbit intraday data so that I can wrap up my project -- and then go for 2 mile walk on Wednesday.