Years ago before we met them we would see Bill and Sharon Radke walking everywhere, and I mean everywhere in Soldotna Alaska. We were semi-running in the same circles so when we finally met them they were instantly our friends. They are wonderfully interesting and at 10 years older than us they are also incredibly physically fit....I was hard at the gym at the time and was pretty darn fit but I was always hurt, my shoulders, then my neck and always my back....soooo...being the guy that wants to learn from success we started walking like the Radke's and now all these years later me and MPeasy average 10,000 steps everyday of the year. So, some days its 10,000 , other days 4000 and then the make up days can be 20,000....When I hit my personal best of 25,000 I told Sharon and shouldn't have, her best was way longer than my best. Here's a screen shot of my Pacer App that highly recommend and traces my steps.
That average is about 5 miles and it generally takes 20 minutes to walk a mile which comes to about 1,825 miles per year and 580 hours of walking....So we walk, we chat , we notice and look for new things and we also try to do uphills a couple times a week for cardio exercise. When I walk on the treadmill in the gym I try to cycle my heart rate up and then recover usually by setting it steep until my heart rate reaches 90% which is about 120 beats for minute then I return to flat and within 3 minutes I'm back down to 92 beats per minute....all set at a fast walk.
We have several routes we walk. Around the Lake, Prickly Pear trails, Mount Ascension and all the interesting neighborhoods in Helena Mt....and oh boy do we see some stuff and occasionally have to dodge a car that doesn't look out for pedestrians. This morning at the lake we came across this excited young gal with a way above average rainbow trout.
Up on the side of the mountain off of Pine street we run into a guy who made a life's work out of adding Clay artworks to the outside of his house. The pics don't do it justice but my goodness , what an extreme coolness that we'd never noticed.
5.8 miles and you can circumnavigate Helena's irrigation Holding Reservoir. When I came back to Montana after the fishing accident Bert Madsen gave me a job working for the irrigation district as a ditch rider. I was their there daily to turn on the days water and I guess I was just a different person then as I never noticed the beauty and remoteness that's so close to town....I guess appreciation for some people takes a lifetime.
They opened a new trail and of course we were there for the ceremony. It runs along the creek right behind the site of the old ASARCO smelter that was the entire town of East Helena back in the day...and I also worked there, briefly. As walked the portion that abuts that slag pile you see I saw some metal by the trail and reached down and grabbed an instant flashback, so weird to remember that the slag clogged up all parts of the smelter and routinely had to be burned away with oxygen torches that we would run into the furnace or reverb. The torches were lit with magnesium sticks that looked and acted like 4th of July Sparklers. On night shift we'd play with them and throw them into the air etc....kids...doing real work. The smelter job was a motivator for me to move on, Alaska .
See ya'all on the trail.
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