Homeostasis

 My hikes, especially the grueling ones, double as medical monitoring. I regularly tell my doctor that I've just completed my stress test....An endurance hike, if I can survive that, my heart must be in pretty good shape!

In my experience, if my general health is good, incidental and focal illnesses are not as intense and resolve quicker.

Living things maintain homeostasis  We are assemblages of tiny bags of chemicals. Try throwing a bunch of chemicals in a bag and see how long the reactions last. Living thing evolved to maintain the chemical reactions we call life for a lifetime.

So, I put cold and warm tap water, and water from our tea kettle into plastic cups and dropped in Efferdent effervescent tablets. And I videoed the process. Guess the temperature sequence!

The cup on the left has the hot water and the one on the right has the cool water. The rate of the reaction is determined by the temperature. The last thing a living creature needs is to be dependent on temperature 

I wanted to know how well my body maintained its internal temperature so I taped a temperature and humidity sensor (Cloudcom A1 by ACInfinity) to my chest (the upper right circle below). The transmitter is in the lower left circle just above the bottom circle around my smartphone.

The data logger communicates with my phone via Bluetooth. Then I put on a t-shirt and my floppy hat and went on a 2,8 mile hike in the 103° F Chihuahuan desert.

The ACInfinity app collected the data and I imported it to my spreadsheet and charted it 

 As shown in the legend, the blue dots trace my body temperature (a little affected by the air temperature since the side of the sensor not against me was against tape, a t-shirt, and the outside world) and the red dots trace the humidity inside my T-shirt (mostly determined by my sweat.)

Two things in particular affected my body temperature: the cooling evaporation of my sweat and the blood which was being shunted to my skin to get rid of its heat (Despite America's song about the "Horse With No Name", I didn't turn brown....I turned red). There's a little temperature fluctuation in the chart but it's on the order of four degrees around 95°.  Looking at the histogram provided by the ACInfinity app, .....

my body temperature was between 93.9° and 97.2°. The mean was around 96° which is pretty close to my regular body temperature. (Yep. I'm cool.....at least my body temp. is. Average normal value for humans is 97.9° but that value varies considerably between 97 to 99° with older people being a little cooler and axial (armpit) temperatures being about a degree below oral temperatures.

Those low temperatures happened when I got back to my air conditioned house.

The humidity readings followed my sweating, which dropped pretty quickly when I started back and stepped into the shade of a pecan orchard  Notice that,  that jogged my temperature a bit but it stabilized quickly.

All in all, my body does pretty well maintaining an even body temperature.

Blood pressure is a different matter. My homeostasis in the area of blood pressure has been rather faulty most of my adult life. Both of my parents' families had a tendency towards hypertension. But there are drugs for that. 

One way you can explore bioIogical processes is in your own body. Home diagnostic equipment like blood pressure cuffs, thermometers, and even stethoscopes are not expensive. I tracked my temperature, blood pressure and pulse through a day and came up with these results 

Only that top blood pressure reading (systolic and diastolic) is in a clinically significant range and for my history it's still pretty good. 

I take most of my antihypertensive drugs soon after awakening, which explains why my blood pressure quickly dropped after the first reading  Otherwise, my pulse and temperature behave during the day. The mildly effortful task of cleaning out the refrigerator didn't even appreciably change the readings 

If you're curious about the "systolic" and "diastolic",  check your blood pressure sometime, at home or at one of those department store kiosks. The cuff will inflate around your arm (or some of the home units use a finger) and then start to deflate. At a point, you will feel your pulse..... that's your systolic pressure where your heart's strongest stroke is fighting the cuff. Then at another point the pulse will almost disappear because the cuff's pressure no longer blocks your circulation..... that's your diastolic. It's the pressure behind your heart's weaker stroke. If you have access to a stethoscope, you can hear this double stroke.

Medical diagnostics are a rich source of information for students of biology. They measure homeostasis. The "normal range" is the values your body tries to maintain. The temperature range of 97° to 99° F. Is the optimal range for the chemical reactions that keep you alive. 

What I call "endurance hikes" are exercises I do to push myself a little outside those limits to see if my body can effectively bring me back to optimal conditions 

Some of the processes of over-exertion simulate the more dangerous process of starvation. You have the resources to recover quickly but you don't access them quickly enough to maintain balance. I've made several endurance hikes while writing these blog. You can search for "endurance hike" using the blog's search box in the upper left 

In starvation, you first draw on the glycogen stores in your muscles and liver. You can do that for about a day. Longer, and you start burning up protein stores in muscles  Generally, you want to conserve  your muscle tissues while delivering enough glucose past your blood-brain barrier to fuel your brain. That's when you start drawing on fat deposits which deliver ketones which can easily cross over into your brain. 

On a long hard hike, it's not hard to catch the ammonia scent of proteins being burnt or the musty or fruity smell of ketones.

For extreme exertion, the primary factors you need to monitor are blood glucose (trail mixes that gives fast release sugars and slow release fats and proteins are actually good sources), hydration, and electrolytes (sodium, chloride, potassium, and calcium are the most important) Clarity of mind, muscle tone, and your own smell are good indicators but you should have planned stops to replenish and concentrate on how you feel 

Unfortunately, there are two ways that homeostasis can go wrong. It's easy enough to overdrive it if you're not paying attention and push yourself outside your limits. Or your homeostatic machine can be defective.

An example....I know several people with diabetes 

Glucose is the fuel that living things oxidize to get energy. They can't directly burn the sugar, of course, so there are involved chains if chemical reactions that gradually break the simple sugar down and store the energy produced in compounds like ATP that can release the stored energy as needed. But the toxic level of glucose in the blood is fairly low so glucose levels must be kept fairly tightly between toxic and starvation levels.

Human bodies maintain blood glucose levels using two negative feedback loops. Three systems sense glucose levels. The primary organ in the loop is the pancreas. It has alpha cells that sense when blood glucose is too low and release glucagon which signals the body to break down glycogen stored in muscle and liver tissue to release glucose. There are a couple other mechanisms to control glucose levels. The brain itself can detect glucose in the blood and modify the hunger response. Also the gut can produce a hormone, insulin that tells the pancreas to produce insulin. 

The pancreas also has beta cells that sense high levels of glucose and cause other cells in the pancreas (called "the Isles of Langerhans") to secrete a polypeptide, insulin, which triggers the reactions that polymerizes glucose to form fats in adipose tissues and glycogen in liver and muscle cells.

There are two forms of diabetes (at least). In one, type 1 diabetes, the body's immune response attacks the pancreas and kills the cells that produce insulin. Without insulin, there is no quick response to too much glucose in the blood. In the other, the cells that store glucose develop a tolerance to Insulin and doesn't react to take glucose out of the blood. That's type 2 diabetes. (There's also a third form of diabetes associated with pregnancy, gestational diabetes. There may be other, rarer forms).

Homeostasis, control of blood glucose levels doesn't work in people with diabetes, so they have to use artificial means. One friend has a pump that responds to an attached glucose sensor to deliver  synthetic insulin by injection. The older way to deal with type 1 diabetes was to frequently measure blood glucose from finger sticks to adjust dietary intake of carbohydrates.

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Another example of homeostasis gone wrong is fever. It's part of the general inflammatory response. If you turn your ankle or have some other joint problem or if a wound gets infected, you might notice that the area becomes warner to the touch. Microscopic pathogens also have "normal" temperature range and your body will try to make them hotter than is good for them. Unfortunately, the response over does it and let's your internal temperature get too high. That's when the behavioral side of homeostasis comes into effect and you start taking medicine and wiping your forehead with cool cloths to get your temperature down.

Homeostasis has to work at all levels for life to happen.

For instance, for the chemical processes that make up life, the human body needs to maintain a pH range between 7.35 and 7.45. There are several buffer systems in the blood to achieve that but the primary one is the bicarbonate-carbonic acid system. The carbon dioxide formed as a waste product of metabolism in the body is carried to the lungs dissolved in blood to be removed into the air. Carbon dioxide dissolved in water is carbonic acid. Along with the sodium ions, sodium bicarbonate is also present. It just so happens that the carbonic acid (an acid that can neutralize bases) and sodium bicarbonate (a base that can neutralize acids) form a chemical system that maintains it's environment between a pH of 7.35 and 7.45.

You can actually throw this buffer system off by breathing fast and hard (hyperventilating) and loading the blood stream with too much carbon dioxide. That causes respiratory acidosis, a condition that can cause severe side effects 

On the cellular level, there are proteins in cell walls that can move glucose into and out of cells but you need to have a certain amount in the cell to fuel the cell. Once the sugar is in, you don't want it to escape, so the first thing a cell does when processing sugar is to attach a phosphate group so that it can't leave 

On the organism level, both hormones and autonomic nerves play a part in homeostasis and not just with negative feedback loops. Positive feedback is also used 

One of the "feel good" hormones, oxytocin, plays a big part in childbirth. When the child's head presses up against the mother's cervix, it stimulates the production of oxytocin by the brain which, in turn, causes uterine contractions. That causes more pressure on the cervix until the baby is born and the process is shut down.

The process of blood clotting in a wound is also a positive feedback loop with the clotting factors increasing until bleeding stops.

Feedback loops operate to maintain balance on the ecosystem and even the global levels.

Predator-prey populations are classic. If there are too many predators, they eat too many prey. Then there's not enough food and some of the predators die until balance is restored. If there are too few predators, the prey overpopulate and reduce their food resources, which reduces the prey population and valance us restored.

Two major studies are the Isle Royale wolf-moose study

Wolves and Moose on Isle Royale

And the Yellowstone River wolf reintroduction study.

History of Wolves in Yellowstone

Do plants demonstrate homeostasis? Certainly.

An interesting demonstration tracks the state of stomata (leaf pores) in plant leaves.

Plants take in one of their primary nutrients, carbon dioxide, through these pores. They use carbon dioxide to build sugar via photosynthesis. Then they use the sugar the same way we do, as fuel. The process also needs water, which most plants take up through their roots. But evaporation of water through stomata produces a negative pressure that draws water up into the plant.

Stomata open and close to take up or conserve gases (carbon dioxide or waste oxygen) or water vapor (and keep in mind the cycle in which plants "breathe" in carbon dioxide and ",breathe" out oxygen while animals breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide...... it's important).

You can observe stomata by taking a cast of a leaf using clear nail polish  You need the nail polish, clear tape, and a microscope slide.

Lightly paint a strip of polish over the leaf. There is usually more stomata on the underside of leaves. Give if 15 minutes to dry. I used Sally Hansen's Diamond and waited 30 minutes once. The cast came out perfectly. Stick a piece of clear tape over the polish. When you peel the tape off, the polish will come with it. Stick the tape to the microscope slide. 

Keep in mind that you aren't looking at the leaf. You're examining an impression of the leaf surface. The reason for looking at the cast is that you can't see through the leaf with a light microscope 

Here are my subjects.

Right; pistachio (Pistacia vera, probably)

Left: ash (my guess velvet ash: Fraxinus velutina)

Pistachio leaf

Here's a cast I took during the hot part of the day

And one I took at 9:00 PM.

Notice that the pores seem to be more open at night. They are. The plant is trying to conserve water and carbon dioxide during the hot hours of the day, but it has to get rid of oxygen and extra water so it waits until night to do that.

Top level responses like behavior play a part in homeostasis. Abraham Maslow organized needs by order of urgency. We barely consider higher level needs if lower level needs aren't met. If you're hungry, you don't worry too much about social status  Here's his pyramid.

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs

From Wikipedia. Author: Factory Joe. (6/29/2009)

And not all of our behavior is choice. Part of our neuronal machine is the autonomic nervous system. It's "autonomic" because it's automatic. It takes care of things like breathing, sweating, digestion....things you don't want to tell your body to do everytime.

There are two parts to the autonomic system: the sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic system 

If you're surprised by something, whether it's dangerous or not, your body goes on alert by triggering the sympathetic system  It speeds up you're heart and lungs to get oxygen and fuel to your cells. It also slows down your digestion (this is no time for stomach issues!) and dilates your pupils to get more light to your eyes. It also stimulates your adrenal glands to release epinephrine which tells your metabolism to go into catabolic overdrive so that cells will break down stores of glucose for quick energy.

It's called "fight or flight response" because it's what it makes you want to do.

There's an opposite reaction governed by the parasympathetic system when things are nice and calm and you can conserve energy. Digestion ramps up to set up stores of fuel. Most other functions slow down and you get to "rest and digest" ( that's what the parasympathetic response is often called. Sometimes it's called "tend and befriend"). When things are going well, you might get a dose of oxytocin, the "feel good" hormone.

When the sympathetic system goes on the fritz, it might result in a reaction called Generalized Anxiety Reaction. If you see someone in the middle of one, don't tell them to calm down, they can't. And it is often described as the feeling that you're going to die. Usually they don't (I've been there, by the way. I can vouch for it ) Just stay with them. Make sure they're in a safe space. Offer them cool water. Be supportive and remind them to breathe deeply and slowly. Ask them what they need 

An attack usually doesn't require hospitalization but if it lasts more than a few minutes, it might be something else so don't panic and call an emergency number.

There is another reaction called "homeostatic emotion". If you've ever been so hungry, thirsty, or oxygen deprived that urgently have to do something about it you've experienced it 

Every morning, your body ramps up for business. You may have notice when you were sick or injured that inflammations get worse later in the day. That's because the body dumps cortisols into the bloodstream early to get inflammations out of the way at the start of the day. Also, the reason you don't soil your bed in your sleep is that, when the parasympathetic nervous system puts you in rest mode, it clamps off exits from the body. Those open up when the day starts.

The sympathetic reaction perhaps should be called "fight, flight, or get busy". Exercise routines tell the body when to fire up the sympathetic system. When I was in college, I exercised religiously but I soon learned that if I exerted myself during an epidemic, I would catch whatever was going around.

I have an overactive immune system. As a consequence, I rarely ever have an infection and when I do, it lasts a few hours or maybe a day, but if it triggers an inflammation, I was in for it. Bronchitis, gastroenteritis, and iritis have been the babes of my existence all my life. As I've aged, joint problems have joined the trio 

But as I've aged, I've also learned ways to navigate my inflammatory problems. For instance, knowing that exertion reduces my body defenses, I use that to modulate them.

Homeostasis is a constant thread in biology from biochemistry to planetary ecology. It will appear over and over 

But if you don't become interested in biology as a long time study, you should learn how to balance your internal environment.

I haven't come close to completely covering the topic. I've just recounted my adventures. If you really want to learn about homeostasis, here are my sources:

Kahn Academy. They have whole sections on biology and if you just want to study homeostasis, they have a search bar that you can type "homeostasis" into. Lectures, articles, hands-on experiments, tests, they're all there 

CK12 Biology for High School. Multiple contributors

CK12 Biology for High School

Many healthcare providers have patient portals that allow patients to look at their own records. I use those a lot. 

And I look up normal ranges of medical tests in my copy of the Merck Manual. They're also on various websites.

 

--- Flatirons Crossing ---

2016

Flatirons Crossing is a shopping district in the town of Superior, Colorado. I have been there several times when I lived in nearby Broomfield and a House brother works in Superior so, planning for my endurance hike, and needing to get back in shape after the hot summer, which is my off season for hiking, I decided to take a long hike in the high plains between Superior and the Flatirons.

The Coalton Trail is a nice, broad, dirt trail. The most demanding part is the grade up Davidson Mesa. Once on top, it's pretty flat all the way to highway 128. The primary draw through most of the year is the view of the Flatirons, a steeply folded series of dark sedimentary rocks that loom over Boulder, Colorado. The flat, platelike shapes give them their name. In the spring, I'm told, this area is a great hike for looking at wildflowers. The Coalton Trail ends at the Boulder Alternative Energy Research station at Rocky Flats, the site of a controversial weapons grade fissionable materials factory in the last half of the 20th Century. I carried a dosimeter along but it didn't twitch. Evidently, they did a good job cleaning it up.

A short road walk brought me to the Flatirons Vista trailhead. It is similar to, but a little hillier than the Coalton Trail and it leads to a great overview of the southern end of the Flatirons and the Eldorado Canyon area.

On the way back, I decided to take an alternate path, instead of the road walk. That was a big mistake. The High Plains trail, in the first place, isn't a trail - it's a rut that winds crazily through cow pastures. It is very narrow, deep and has a curved bed that destroyed my hiking shoes. This same model of shoes lasted me for five years of regular walking and extreme hiking and a new pair is gone in less than half a year. The rocks in the rut were like gravel you might find in a terminal moraine of a glacier. About half way back to the Coalton trail, I gave up and took a farm road back to the less demanding, ankle pounding asphalt of highway 128.

A friendly biker evidently thought that I looked like I wouldn't make it back to Superior, so he gave me a lift back to the other end of the Coalton Trail. While I was recuperating, I had a conversation with a lady who was preparing for an Ironman Triathlon and I was gratified to note that she evaluated the High Plains Trail as "brutal". That made me feel much less like a whiner.

Anyway, I got my money's worth. The hike was great, except for the terminal moraine and I feel ready to stand up to a hike out to Waterton Canyon.

--- Field trips, hikes, and endurance hikes ---

2016

I made the decision to let go of my van back in 2014 and I haven't really regretted the decision. There are some down sides. If I leave the house, I do so on foot (unless it's a group activity, and those are fairly rare) and I'm limited to how far I can walk in a day or two or how many bus tickets I can afford, and the money has been rather scarce since I moved to south Denver.

But, on the whole, I prefer walking to driving for reasons I've mentioned. Most importantly, I miss too much when I'm driving.

There are three kinds of walking I regularly do.

Field trips have an end goal. I walk to get somewhere and do something at the farthest point of the walk. That might be a museum, a point of interest, or an activity, like a street festival or market. I guess my regular grocery runs could be called field trips.

For a hike, the walk is the goal. I regularly walk Bear Creek Trail, looking for particular things along the way. I rarely walk to Morrison to see something in Morrison. Morrison is only part of the reason for the walk.

Once or twice a year, I take endurance hikes - particularly long or grueling hikes. I joke that it's my annual stress test. I have a heart condition and I'm not sure how much it really effects me. The only thing I can say for sure is that working in a horizontal position or on an upside-down incline doesn't work too well for me. I figure that, if I can survive one of these endurance hikes, my heart must be in pretty good condition.

But, to be honest, I just like pushing myself occasionally. I've been doing this for some time. I met my long-time hiking friend, Paul Holm, in the early 70s in a biology class at Auburn University. Our first distance hike was a walk from the West Point exit of I85 at the Alabama-Georgia state line, across Pine Mountain, to Warm Springs, Georgia, a distance of over 27 miles. That was the longest day hike we took. The Dreaded Mid-Summer Death Hike became a tradition.

Our last long hike together, before I moved to Colorado was from the southern terminus of the Pinhoti Trail in Alabama about seven miles up and across Rebecca Mountain. It was a hot, dry day that improved when a line of thunderstorms moved in. When we were almost back to the cars, we found a patch of particularly juicy blackberries. That, by itself, made the pain worthwhile.

At the end of the hike, he went back home and I drove up to Mount Cheaha to camp over night. I ate at the restaurant on top of the mountain (one of my favorites), and the next morning, I checked out the Kymulga Covered Bridge, between Sylacauga and Talledega, and went to First Baptist Church in Sylacauga for Sunday School and the preaching service. After that, I drove back to Auburn and spent the rest of the day hiking and dining out with Paul.

Since moving to the Denver area, I've kept the tradition every year. In 2014, I walked from home in Broomfield to Flatirons Junction and then up the Coalton Trail, almost to the Flatirons before returning home. It was almost exactly a 12 hour walk with few short stops, so it was between 38.6 kilometers (24 miles) and 58 kilometers (36 miles). That hike was all high plains.

After moving to South Denver in 2015, I walked from home to Kipling Trail and from there up to Jewell Avenue; then I headed west to Green Mountain and across Dinosaur Ridge to Red Rocks park. A short road walk brought me to Morrison and Bear Creek Trail, which brought me back home.

After it snows a couple of times, I plan to walk to Waterton Canyon, which is south of the Denver area. One of my packmates works at River Point Shopping area, at the head of the trail system that leads to Waterton so I can start very early and cut off the Bear Creek portion of the hike. Still, it'll be well after dark before I get back home.

--- 2017 endurance hike ---

Socrates advised, "Know thyself."

That's what endurance hikes are about.

In the early days of computers, when they were huge assemblages of vacuum tubes, the U.S. security system ran two systems in parallel. If one went down the other came up. If one needed maintenance, the other was on line.

The way they kept them running was by doing scheduled stress tests. They would shoot a high voltage through one of the systems and any vacuum tube getting ready to fail would blow out and, then, the technicians would replace all the blown out tube.

That's sorta an endurance hike for old computers.

Not that I'm looking to metaphorically blow out any tubes, but the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual stresses that I expose myself to allow me to recognize any "weak spots". If my hip starts aching, I look for ways to change my gait so that it stops and I incorporate that into my regular hiking gait.

Much of my learning isn't conscious. Many think that we learn only with our brains. I suppose that, since most of our communication equipment is concentrated in our heads, there's a temptation to think that the "real us" resides in our heads. That's quite wrong. We live, think, and learn in our bodies. A lot of data processing goes on outside our brains - in our spinal cord, various nerve bundles called "plexuses" throughout our bodies, and even in individual nerve cells. When organisms invade our bodies, chemical changes happen that allow us to recognize the invaders and deal with them, After that, we "have their number" and we keep it - be become immune to the specific organism.

When I moved to Denver, my body had to adapt to the lower humidity and oxygen lean air. It has learned to conserve water and more efficiently take oxygen from the air around me.

When I began my job offshore as a welder helper, I went two weeks unable to grasp things. I had to hold a drinking glass with two hands. The heavy buffing and grinding tools I had to use really worked on my hands.

I did develop muscles in my arms, but mostly, my body, quite unconsciously, learned economies of motion that allowed me to handle my tools without overburdening myself.

So I decided to walk out to Waterton Canyon as my 2017 endurance hike. I'm glad I pulled the date back to January 26, because I noticed that Denver Water, who manages the canyon, was planning to close the lands during the week starting early February for some months.

I was still working out glitches in my use of duct tape to prevent plantar blisters and a hike a couple of days before had left me with blisters along the tops of my big and little toes. Those are not nearly as debilitating as the plantar blisters used to be, but I still needed to work on it. The tape would literally pull strips of skin off my foot at the edges.

So I planned to wake up at 4:00 the morning of January 26, get ready, and walk down to the local Steak and Shake for breakfast before hitting the trail. I also decided to take the train most of the way down to the canyon - to Mineral Station. I wanted to spend most of the day in the canyon and maybe take in some of the Colorado Trail at the top before walking the South Platte River Trail back. Forecasts looked great - cold and a little overcast.

(Mineral Station)

Mineral Station was quite a lot further from the Canyon that I expected. In fact, it was a 14.5 kilometer (9 mile) hike. Chatfield State Park is bigger than Bear Creek Lakes park and much more grueling. Once you get over Mount Carbon in Bear Creek Lake Park, the rest of the trail is easy, Chatfield is all up and down. And Chatfield Dam is a 147 foot rise that you have to address.

(Chatfield Reservoir dam)

I was pretty well worn down before I reached the canyon so I decided not to hike the whole thing and I only took about a third of the trail. It was till spectacular and well worth the pain. I walked about 3 kilometers (1.9 miles) into the canyon, up to the Highline Canal diversion dam. Here are some pictures.

(pictures of Waterton Canyon)

Denver was built on the banks of the South Platte River and it is the major waterway. Also, the HIghline Canal zigzags all over the Denver region. A National Landmark Trail, the Highline was completed in 1883 as an irrigation canal. Today, the major use is the trail that parallels the waterway.

Both the river and the canal run out of the Rockies through Waterton Canyon. The canal is feed by the river at a diversion dam before running through a tunnel in the mountain to the other side, then there are feedpipes that catch other waters in the canyon and run them into the canal.

(pictures of the Highline)

I was already exhausted and in pain when I turned around and headed out of the canyon - another 22.5 kilometers (14 miles) and a train ride back home. And what did I get out of it?

Well, Waterton Canyon was spectacular and it was the first time I had seen bighorn sheep. Through it all, the bane of my hiking life was gone - no plantar blisters! I had figured out how to keep the duct tape that was wrapped aound the balls of my feet preventing the plantar blisters from literally ripping off strips of flesh from the sides of my feet. I had placed bandaids under the tape at the base of my big and little toes. The toe bandages on all my big and little toes kept them safe from how my boots broke over my toes somy busted left foot came through the ordeal very well. I managed my knee and hip joints and spine with precision. I had to focus on my pacing and breathing, especially during the trip back. On the 45 kilometer (28 mile) hike, I fine tuned my body and learned just about everything I needed to know about how to keep going after most of my reserves had expired. I think it was worth it all.

But, that said, this was probably my last endurance hike. I want to shift my focus to the rest of the world, the one outside myself, so I will be doing more technical hikes in he future, but many of those will be as grueling as the endurance hikes.