3 Years
Red River, New Mexico
Last week I passed the three-year mark. I've now been active outside every single day for over 3 years straight, without a break, without respite, without succumbing to excuses.
3 years.
After 3 years of embodying Outside 365, moving my body every single day has become a simple habit, a lifestyle. Yet it's not nearly as simple as it might sound.
3 years in, I notice the importance of this daily habit more by its relative absence than anything. (By absence, I mean if I only hit my minimum 1-mile walk for several days in a row.)
I don't necessarily feel the same sort of release and relief that I once did when I go on a big mountain bike ride, because I'm now back up to mountain biking about 5 days per week on average. But if I go 3 or 4 days in a row and only walk one mile per day, I can feel the visceral negative downward spiral of my emotions, my mental health, and even my physical mobility. My optimism and outlook on life dims, and my fuse feels short, my emotions raw. Physically, when I stop moving I begin to feel stiff and sore.
Ironically, I used to think that exercising too hard, spending too much time in motion, was what caused most of my physical pain and the wear and tear on my body. And while that can be the case when you overtrain, I now find that when I go several weeks with minimal time spent sitting behind the computer and instead replace that computer time with hours and hours of mountain biking, hiking, paddleboarding, and more, I feel physically capable and able to fully enjoy life. When I park myself behind the computer for a couple of weeks, the more my joints ache, the more my back hurts, and the harder it is to move.
Movement is medicine.
Continuing to live the Outside 365 lifestyle is a massive stabilizer to my psychological and physical well-being. Keeping my body in motion, living in nature, and seeking out the world's most beautiful natural places is the medicine that my soul craves. More than that, it's required for both health and sanity.
When I give my body what it needs through Outside 365, I'm healthy, confident, energetic, pain-free, focused, creative, inspired, and so much more. But when I skimp on the amount of exercise and nature exposure that I need, then I begin to suffer the negative side effects of not getting my necessary dosage.
Why go back?
After living this way for three years, no part of me has any intention of going back to whatever life used to be like before. Instead, I'm now constantly seeking and implementing new methods in my everyday life to increase this exposure to nature, to increase the amount of time I can spend outside in the mountains. Instead of going backward, I'm only pressing onward.
Plunging into van life is one such method, but there are several others that I have in progress and that I hope to talk about on this blog soon.
Moving my body through nature every single day was the first step, the first short-term gain to be implemented. But living connected with nature through a more elemental existence is a deep well of lifestyle change, a vast expanse that can be explored and experienced.
I'm so stoked to continue enacting this life transformation for years to come!
