02 August 2010 - Hiking Does the Body Good!

This past weekend was spent in Garmisch, Germany, camping, hiking and taking a lot of photos.  For the most part, my body held up quite nicely, even during some of the tougher hikes.  I had planned on taking it easy to start things off, but our first hike ended up being quite a bit more robust than I originally thought it would be.  A description of the Hollentalklamm (Hells Valley Gorge) that I found on the internets described it as a mellow, one kilometer walk through the woods.  Yes, this is true for the most part, but this description turned out to be for the approach to the gorge, not for the actual hike through the gorge itself (German, heck, European websites, are notoriously bad at providing accurate information for a lot of things I'm interested in).  The hike through the actual klamm was pretty intense, but also cool as hell.  My knees and achilles were screaming at me for the first 45 minutes or so, but quickly loosened up.  That loosness actually remained for the rest of the weekend and I didn't experience much pain in either my knees or achilles on the hikes the following days.

It was about 11 months ago, in the Garmisch area, when my world came crumbling down around me and I realized that my body was truly broken.  At the time, I was hurting so badly, but was still being so pig-headed about it that I was attempting very difficult hikes in the Alps.  I almost didn't make it down the Jagersteig, a very steep, switchback-laden trail that descends down from the base of the Alpspitze to the Garmisch valley below.  It was after this hike that I had to stop all physical activity and that my battle with dealing with my gout began.  This was the start of really bad time for me, one where I became very depressed, a time when I began dealing with constant off-the-chart pain from gout attacks in different joints.  I never thought I would be able to hike, ski, bike or even walk normally again.  I thought my life was over.

Although I'm not back to being 100 percent healed, it was amazing to get back up in to those mountains under my own power and to be relatively pain-free.  I've still got a long way to go, but thinking back to what my thought process was almost a year ago compared to what it is now is amazing to me.  I've gone from thinking I'd be in a wheel chair to planning even more hikes and adventures in the mountains I love.  At this rate of improvement, I'm fairly certain that I'll even be able to do some downhill skiing this coming winter.  I've still got a few months of training to go to get my body back in decent skiing shape, but if I can remain gout-free, this shouldn't be too hard to accomplish. 

I really have to attribute most of my recovery to my wife, Dawn.  She has stuck by me through this whole ordeal, been supportive when I needed support, and has encouraged me when I needed encouraging.  The Gout-Pal website has also been huge in my recovery, providing a platform to talk with other gout sufferers and gleen information and knowledge from them when I've needed it.  It has been, and still is, an immensely valuable resource.  Thank you, Keith, for creating the Gout-Pal site!