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Day Three… and itty bitty steps which feel like hiking Mount Rainier

Doing Better – Not perfect but better

The photo to the right is one that I took on a trip to Seattle Washington, where I attended the Emerald City Hoedown, which was this year’s IAGLCWDC Annual Convention and where I taught a workshop at the event.

We stayed an extra day so we could go on a bus tour of Mount Rainer National Park which I really enjoyed. On the tour, we stopped at several points, got out of the bus and was able to enjoy a bit of the scenery. One of those stops took the tour group down into a ravine created by a glacial melt river full of rounded rocks washed down the mountainside by the water.

The park service had used some of these rocks to create “stairs” on the path down into the ravine for visitors to the park to use to get closer to the water and to a log “bridge” which allowed you to cross the river. I was toward the back of the group and was doing pretty good, until I saw the steps in the photo.

That’s where I bailed and said “There’s no way!”

Two years ago, I would have happily gone on down with the rest of the group but when I saw these rocks, my self-preservation instincts kicked into high gear and did some fast calculations involving the lack of a hand rail, the roundness of the rocks, the wetness of the rocks, my physical condition, and memories of a fall on stairs during a vacation last year and the result was visions of my dance career flashing before my eyes.

I went back up and watched from the ledge.

It was just one more realization of just how out of shape I am. And how badly I need to get back into shape. And just how much my physical condition (or lack of it) is affecting just about everything in my life.