How much persuasion do we need to expand our lives?
Yet another research summary from the Health section of the NY Times came into my in-box this week with yet another angle of evidence for getting up off the couch and pushing out a run or fast walk.
I’ve been on a biking/ running/ walking routine ever since I was a teenager. Now that I am finally collecting Social Security, I have the time and motivation to get this exercise thing dialed in just right.
I am spending 2016 with a goal of 70 minutes a day moderate to intense activity. I’m backpacking, hiking, walking, and biking to get there.
How’s it going so far?
It’s not easy, but, 60 days into 2016, I am there. Here’s some hard earned hours, thanks to Strava’s support:
I got some support and direction from what I read this past year in Younger Next Year,
a book I read at the end of 2015. 
The book’s premise is this: exercise six days a week, don’t eat crap, and connect and commit to others.
What I find missing in most people’s fitness plan is that they lack one, or they set themselves up for abandoning their plans by not making the exercise activities fun enough to look forward to.
Since I gave up my decades-long practice of hitting the gym several days a week in September of 2013, I’ve kept 15 pounds off my frame, and have improved my cholesterol numbers.
This book helped- Microadventures. 
It turned around my thinking about the meaning of an adventure. We crave adventures in our lives, but think of them as divorced from our everyday routines. Humphrey shatters that misconception in this book, which encourages viewing your local terrain as a rich source of potential mini-adventures.
I had a microadventure last night, when I veered off my usual routine 5 mile loop, and revisiting an old woods road that I have not been on in the last thirty years, despite the turn to that hidden world coming up less than a mile’s walk from my house.
I also got to practice improvisation on yesterday’s hike, where complete darkness settled in just as I reached the corner of a gigantic wild blueberry field. If I were to carry out my intended route, I’d need to enter the woods and bushwhack up to the ridge above, where I’d connect with a known route. Sure I had a GPS and a flashlight, but given the air temp of eighteen degrees and a steady north wind coming at me, my inner warning system got activated.
It’s taken me 6 decades to get there, but I now I can hear the speechless voice inside, telling me, “Not a good idea! Go back, now.” So I reversed direction and retraced my route back home, guided by Orion above me.
Today, I plan to enjoy our snowless winter landscape on another route, right out my back door door.
from the NYTimes : How Exercise may Lower Cancer Risk
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