No, this is not another cheesy late night TV-Shop miracle diet ad. And I can guarantee the photos below were not retouched at all… Only my pictures, I am not sure about these ones here:

It is convenient to explain I was extremely lazy before I started hiking. I was not practicing any kind of sports for more than 10 years, my job consists in being at a desk, I got a few extra pounds when I stopped smoking 3 years ago and well, I eat a lot. Some day, for no reason at all, I decided to join a group that goes up the Saleve mount (Geneva-Switzerland) every Sunday morning. Guess what? It was extremely hard to go uphill, non-stop for more than 3 hours. The group leader, 73 years old, made me feel really old since he looked like he was just walking in the garden. Then, completely exhausted, I get to the summit, look at the view and… whoa, I did this? How the hell was I able to get here by foot? From that moment, I changed completely my point of view about “limits”.

I stopped feeling a lot less overwhelmed when accepting big and insane projects (it happens a lot in advertising), I started testing the limits in everything, I started going beyond things I did superficially before (at work and in my personal life), I started using the stairs instead of the elevator to the 4th floor where I live, I started walking to certain places I used to take a tram or my car, I started swimming on the lake once in a while, I bought A Bike and guess what? I started hiking the Saleve every Sunday.
Yes, every single Sunday. (Thanks Andra, it’s your fault!). Second time was easier, third a little bit easier and a few Sundays later, I was trying the Jura mountains, around Mt-Blanc, the Valais and the Swiss alps in general. I can say I got addicted to this thing. The difference between the pictures above is around 7 months… and 12 Kilos. I never worried with “diet and workout” kind of things and still don’t (I still eat a lot) but I went from 86 to 74 Kg and I noticed I had way more energy to waste. I even had to find an alternative activity (Airboard) to do after the hiking season was gone due to the snow, since I can’t Ski or Snowboard due to a knee injury.

Anyway, the hiking season is back and I started the every-Sunday-hiking-thing again. Right in time: my parents were visiting for a full month and I still eat a lot, which gets multiplied by the fact that my mother was in the kitchen. It turns that I obviously got a few extra pounds. I leave here some pictures of “intermediate stages” between the before and after (yes, the shirt is almost always the same). Also, here’s a link for the Saleve trail I captured with my GPS and Palmtop (damn mountain geek), so you see what I did in the first hiking day.

Bored? Getting kind of sedentary? Need to lose some weight?
Start hiking!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 9th, 2007 at 14:47 and is filed under Hiking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.