Health Running ( space ) Precisely how as a Low fat Imply Running Machine

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Yesterday, I was covering an “augmented reality floor”, that was really more of a floor that could replicate whatever texture you wanted to. Yes, I am serious. Read that one here if you don’t believe me.
Now, here is another unusual floor for those who need to have a room that I would like to describe as “versatile”. The Cyberwalk is actually more of a platform to work an omni-directional treadmill.
You might wonder why in the world anyone would want an omni-directional treadmill, but most of the reasons boil down to recreation.
Just imagine if you want to run inside, but you don’t want to run in place or in one direction, like on a regular treadmill. You are free to run anywhere.
I think there might be a limitation to this technology, though. Most pictures that I see of this show someone with some sort of support. I can see why. It looks like the Cyberwalk might be very difficult to maintain one’s balance on.
Another application is gaming. Just imagine a Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) game where the player does not move with the A, S, D, W or arrow keys, but by just moving his or her feet. Attach some motion controllers to the arms, and you’ve got yourself a very interactive gaming environment.
Sadly, this guy is just research at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tubingen, Germany. I’m guessing it would be expensive to set up in an ordinary home, but what a ride it would be to have this.
Source




Kara DioGuardi opened up to Women’s Health Magazine for their upcoming April issue. In it, the ‘American Idol’ judge discussed her battle with an eating disorder, her healthy eating habits, exercise routine and personal growth.
She battled an eating disorder in her early twenties: “I’d pretty much clean out the refrigerator. Food was my drug of choice. It anesthetized me so I wouldn’t have to feel whatever I was feeling. I’d stuff myself full of sugar and fall asleep.”
Healthy eating habits: “The more roughage you eat, the more it fills you up.”
She drinks lots of water: “Two huge bottles a day, minimum. I have them around – one upstairs, one in the car – to force me to remember.
Her exercise routine: “Two miles of running or 25 minutes of cardio – boxing, treadmill, step-ups, walking lunges, sprints. I mix it up. And weight training is important as you get older. You build muscle which burns fat when you’re at rest.”
Her loved ones are honest with her: “Someone [close to me] said, ‘You may want to work on your arms – they’re a little jiggly’…The people in my life have no qualms about telling me when I don’t look great.”
After getting her first job in the music industry: “I started to feel better about my life. I was answering phones and getting water but I also learned about the music business.”
On her plans to take some stuff off her plate when she has kids…“It’ll be a lot of pressure being in charge of a little soul who will someday judge me if I’m not there for the school play.”
She’s finally content…“For the first time in my life, I’m content. I don’t feel the need to prove myself anymore.”
Are you a fan of Kara? Do you enjoy her on ‘American Idol’?
Take Zillow.com, the real estate Web site, where people can hunt for prices and other details about houses. Zillow’s iPhone app adds GPS. People walking their dog through the neighborhood can snoop on the prices of their neighbors’ homes.
“It’s a way better experience in the field than on the PC,” said Rich Barton, Zillow’s chief executive. “When you’re walking or driving, you get estimates or homes recently sold — stuff you can’t see.”
Nine million people visit Zillow’s Web site each month, according to the company. In less than a year, its app has been downloaded by more than one million people, who view the details of two million individual homes on their phones each month.
Zillow is starting to sell mobile ads to local business and real estate agents, an opportunity that surprised the company. “We thought it would be an extension of our brand, not a money-making entity,” said Amy Bohutinsky, vice president of communications at Zillow.
A new version of the app released in February added rental listings and the ability to share Zillow’s home data, photos and property values on Facebook and Twitter.
Yelp’s mobile app is another example. Yelp’s Web site is useful for looking up reviews of the restaurant your date recommended or finding a good tailor near your home.
But on a cellphone, it gets a lot more useful. Yelp’s iPhone app uses GPS to search businesses near you and then gives you directions to get there, so you can find your way around in an unfamiliar city, for instance.
Earlier this week, I had five hours to kill between interviews in Silicon Valley. I needed to go somewhere nearby with wireless Internet, food and coffee. In two minutes, Yelp gave me the name of a cafe five minutes away, and I was armed with driving directions, recommendations on what to order and assurances from customers that there were electrical outlets and the proprietors did not mind people spending hours there.
Pandora is another example. As I wrote about on Monday, cellphone apps for the Internet radio site have brought 35,000 new listeners a month as people realize they can listen to music on their phones on the treadmill or in the car.
What other apps work best in their mobile form?


Have you ever thought how cool it would be if your treadmill could take you on a virtual jog through nature so you could watch something more scenic than the gym wall while you run? Well, your day is coming.
Virtual Active, which lets you access a library of running, hiking, and biking workouts filmed live in beautiful outdoor locations, is releasing a free half hour sample of its virtual exercise experience for download on iTunes on March 1.
Virtual Active is also working with cardio equipment manufacturer Johnson Health Tech, the #4 manufacturer of cardio equipment, and The Indoorcycling Group, a leading European indoor cycling company. Johnson’s 7xe line of Matrix Cardio equipment will automatically adjust the treadmill incline to mimic the terrain in the video, adjust the speed of video playback based on the user’s running speed, and provide on-location nature audio (in the case of cardio-enabled downloads, the video would not be able to provide such interactivity). In addition, these manufacturers plan to introduce SyncStep, which will allow users to hear the sounds of their steps over the terrain as they run or walk. For example, when running on a wooded trail, the user might hear crunching leaves underfoot each time their foot hits the tread.
The company has perfected filming while running at 12-14 mph paces for smooth video playback, all shot in HD. Virtual Active will also be introducing its commercial equipment to health clubs on March 10 at the International Racquet and Sports Club Association (IHRSA) fitness trade show in San Diego.
Videos of the location-based workouts, which include Yellowstone, Yosemite, Niagara Falls, Mount Rushmore, and the Grand Tetons, will be sold on DVD for $19.95, as downloads for $9.95, on Blu-ray disc or as part of specially-equipped cardio equipment packages.
The company will be launching their full online store May 1, where users can downloads instructional videos by fitness professionals as well as upbeat workout tunes from music provider Rumblefish, which can be played on any iPod-compatible fitness equipment or can be burned to DVD and watched at home.
The company’s business model is a mix of software sales and manufacturing partnerships on which it is paid per unit of cardio equipment sold as well as the majority of the revenue from additional content downloads. It also has a Passport Player, a standalone web-connected media player that health clubs can install to conduct classes and would be based on a monthly subscription. In addition, it is exploring brand associations and partnerships, in which a billboard along a running route or the instructor’s fitness gear would be provided by a sponsor. I was able to view some mockups, and these opportunities are not at all intrusive to the user’s fitness experience but offer brands prominent product placement throughout the video.
Johnson Health Tech and The Indoorcycling Group also have a partnership with Livestrong that will include Virtual Active’s content for Livestrong-branded equipment.
Virtual Active was founded by John Ford, who is a runner and has also played competitive soccer, after he left his job in corporate accounting at Clorox, in 2006. The company is based in San Francisco and has 10 full-time employees. The privately held company has received $2.5 million in funding from friends and family to date. Most competitors, such as Trixter and Expresso, focus on cycling, whereas Virtual Active is focusing on the full range of cardio equipment, including mountain biking, running and hiking for treadmills and ellipticals, and steep hiking on step machines, said Ford. “By Fitting entertainment to a person’s favorite exercise and not making them change modalities,” Ford believes the market for Virtual Active is quadrupled.
While all the locations filmed are in the US, The company will be filming locations in Germany and Italy in April and Australia and New Zealand later this year. It hopes to film locations all over the world, said Ford. Ford said his goals for the company include acquiring some powerful brand partnerships, expanding the content library to cover the globe, and increasing Virtual Active’s distribution to every place screens exist in the fitness world.
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They say never to let your dog run on a treadmill as the experience will most probably drive your four-legged friend nuts. Well, we humans are different since we like to get busy and yet go nowhere - case in point, the treadmill. This free motion cycling roller project caters to those who prefer pedaling their way to health without ever leaving their home, but since this is a DIY project, don’t expect it to come with a wide range of LCD monitors that show off a false scenery while you cycle.
Source: Link | Add Comment | Tags: diy, free motion cycling, hack, mod,

Frank Reynolds was about to give up hope. He had been living in almost constant pain, his body bound in a knee-to-neck body cast, flat on his back in a small Philadelphia condominium. Before the car accident, nearly anything had seemed possible. He was planning his wedding and studying for a career as a hospital administrator. Then, on the morning of December 14, 1992, while he was driving to his job as a psychotherapist at the Philadelphia Psychiatric Center, another motorist slammed into the rear of his Oldsmobile Cutlass coupe. When he came to that night in the University of Pennsylvania hospital, Reynolds couldn’t move. Trauma-room surgeons had operated to stabilize a dislocated vertebra in the middle of his back, he learned. But the wayward bone had also pinched his spinal cord — an untreatable wound that left him unable to walk.
His world withered. Days consisted of long hours staring at the ceiling, punctuated by excruciating sessions of physical therapy. After three years, Reynolds could walk just 80 feet, and afterward he would be in agony. He was 30 years old, and some of the nation’s top spine doctors warned him that further improvement was unlikely, if not impossible.
Then, one day in 1995, Reynolds’s wife brought home a VHS cassette of the movie Lorenzo’s Oil. The film is about a couple that defy the medical establishment to discover a cure for their son’s rare illness, and for Reynolds, it sparked an epiphany. “I thought, Jesus, I could do that,” he says. And so began what Reynolds calls a “crusade” to regain the ability to walk. He set about learning everything he could about spinal cord injury, or SCI. Using a glacial early Internet connection, from his bed he tapped into the databases of university libraries; through supporters at St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, where he had been studying for a master’s degree before his accident, he secured interlibrary loans of hard-to-find medical publications.
Somewhere in those pages, Reynolds came across a theory — a notion that has since gained credibility among many experts — that by intensifying his physical rehab routine, he could reactivate dormant neural connections and make his spine come alive again. Instead of 45-minute sessions with a therapist three times a week, he began daily workouts that combined hours of aquatic therapy in a YMCA pool with as much time as he could handle on a treadmill. Supporting himself with his upper body, he grimaced through the pain and simply forced his legs to move. After three months, he could walk a quarter of a mile a day; after a year, he could manage five. He was now able to drive himself, using both feet. He removed his body cast and got ready to go back to work.
“It’s kind of surreal: I spent years in bed dreaming about walking in the woods and walking on the beach and putting a golf ball, never believing it would happen,” Reynolds, now 45, says. “I spent five years staring at the ceiling saying, ‘God, give me another chance.’ “
Somehow, that opportunity materialized. But once it did, he found that a second chance just for himself was not enough. That’s when Frank Reynolds’s second crusade got under way. Some 12,000 Americans a year suffer traumatic spinal cord injuries. Two-thirds of those who are injured endure chronic, and often severe, pain, and only about a third are able to eventually hold a job. Reynolds wants them to have their second chance, too. And as co-founder and CEO of the Cambridge, Massachusetts–based biomedical start-up InVivo Therapeutics, he won’t stop moving until they get it.
The scar on Reynolds’s back starts between his buttocks and runs in a ragged line 14 inches to the middle of his back. It’s a constant reminder of what he is trying to accomplish. So is the pain. The stainless-steel screws that hold his spine together sit just beneath his skin; when they get cold, he says, “it feels like a little bomb in there.” In the area in which surgeons cut away bone to relieve pressure on his swelling spinal cord, he says, “The only thing between me and my spinal cord is muscle, fat, and skin. If you had a stick, you could actually paralyze me.” It could be a distraction — the hole in your back, the pain, the awareness that your own damaged spinal tissue is gradually degenerating. It’s what keeps Reynolds focused.
His goal is wildly ambitious — in large part because of how little is really understood about the central nervous system, which consists of the brain and spinal cord, and its healing mechanisms. “We’re just scratching the surface of what’s going on,” says Steve Williams, a specialist in spinal cord injury and rehabilitation at Boston Medical Center. “It’s like studying deep space — like a big black hole. How does it really work?”
The spinal cord may be best understood as a thick data cable that processes and transmits the constant stream of electrical impulses that fl ow between your brain and the rest of your body, enabling motion and sensation. Motor signals move downstream, from the brain, and sensory signals move from the rest of the body up. The center of the cord is gray matter — essentially an extension of the brain, like a tail — that is sheathed in fibrous white matter, with long, thin nerve fibers called axons shooting out at intervals to wire every part of the body.
Music videos are an art, and they, like many art forms, had a golden age — and it ended about ten years ago. That was when music videos for bands that were just breaking out (not just U2) could be big, lavish spectacles; these days we’ve got lots of inventive, lo-fi videos made on the cheap (think OK Go’s famous treadmill video) but so little that’s done on a grand scale.
Of those golden age directors, Jonathan Glazer is one of the most unique. He sets himself apart with a surreal style that employs lots of long takes — not something you see in many cut-a-second videos, then or now — and he’s been known to hire actors, and do all sorts of unconventional things like turn the song down in the middle of the video to have some dialogue happen. Some are more like mini-movies than music videos, which is why, I suppose, he made such a graceful transition to film with Sexy Beast and Birth. Anyway, let’s start by taking a look at his most recent video, for Jack White’s new side project, the Dead Weather. Bloodless but hyper-violent, set in a desert no-man’s-land behind a suburban housing tract, it’s hypnotic and hilarious and seems to be full of hidden meanings.
Another “long takes of people walking” video is for UNKLE’s song “Rabbit in Your Headlights,” featuring Thom Yorke on vocals. We never learn who this unidentified man is (he’s certainly not in the band) — is he insane? A superhero? A magical saint? It’s all so disturbing and wonderfully ambiguous.
Speaking of disturbing and ambiguous, there’s Glazer’s underappreciated masterpiece, Birth, a film about a widow who is approached by a young boy who claims to be the reincarnation of her dead husband. He’s very persistent, and seems to know all sorts of intimate things about the dead man and Kidman’s character, and at first she pushes him away, unable to accept it (and prodded by her jealous and freaked out new husband, played by my favorite character actor, Danny Huston) — that’s the first scene you’ll see. (Sorry about the subtitles.) It’s followed by a long, wordless scene that’s shot all in one take, in slight slo-mo, that consists mainly of an unbroken close-up of Kidman’s face as something within her changes. It’s subtle and gets under your skin, and with nothing but a few blinks and slight facial movements, she communicates more than pages of dialogue could have.
“Song for the Lovers” breaks just about every music video rule imaginable. It features the singer just hanging around his fancy hotel room, looking not particularly glamorous, and getting room service — all in long, unbroken takes. At one point the song itself fades away. And somehow it seems to generate this bizarre suspense, like something terrible could happen at any second.
Glazer’s also done a lot of notable commercial work, including this great spot for Sony.
Glazer did several early videos for Radiohead, like this deceptively simple one for “Street Spirit,” which is full of little tricks and lots of great slo-mo (another Glazer hallmark).
Big music labels won’t allow embedding of their videos, which is endlessly annoying and pretty much ensures that they won’t go viral — but if you feel like looking up Glazer’s video for “Karma Police” on YouTube, it’s definitely worth a look.
Another unusual concept for a video — people crying. Really crying, in such an honest way that it’s a little uncomfortable to watch.
Wish I could include some clips from Sexy Beast here — it’s great — but I can’t think of a single scene that doesn’t include a paint-peeling amount of swearing. But do yourself a favor and check it out. It includes some of the best performances ever given by both Ben Kingsley and Ray Winstone, which is really saying something.

Shake Weight
You’ve seen the infomercial.
Svelte young women and now massively buff men groaning and grunting and rapidly jiggling the shaft of a dumbbell between
two clasped hands. (There’s no other way to describe this. We tried.) The Shake Weight works like a piston—jerk it and
the spring-loaded weights on each end fire and recoil, letting you
“shake your way to firm, fabulous shoulders in just six minutes a
day.” The Shake Weight claims to use a new workout technology called
“dynamic inertia.” Other examples of dynamic inertia? Try ChatRoulette.
Home Gym Office by Philippe Starck
Walkstation
Steelcase’s integrated workstation—basically a treadmill shoved
underneath a height-adjustable desk—is meant to encourage better
posture, movement, and Working
Girl attire among
cubicle drones whose main source of exercise involves leisurely
excursions to Blimpie’s. They say: “The Walkstation lets you walk
comfortably, burn calories, feel healthier and more energized…all while
accomplishing the work you’d normally do while seated.” We say: Heavy
breathing at work is not cool.
iGallop The iGallop was developed by Osim, an Asian manufacturer whose primary export is massage chairs. It’s meant to simulate riding a horse—or a mechanical bull if that’s the way you roll—and therefore tone the abs, back, and thighs. If the iGallop doesn’t strike your fancy, try Joba’s similarly styled Core Muscle Trainer—complete with stirrups—or just give it to your cat:
It was a sleepless night, and I found myself rolling around in my sheets, as restless as I’d been in a long time, experiencing that uniquely displeasing kind of anxiety that you actually feel in your heart as the pressure builds. Could I really be considering this? Hell yeah, I could, and was—my turbulent bed thoughts were being disrupted by a 19,340 foot behemoth that was pulling me to it like an inescapable black hole. Sir Edmund Hillary, the New Zealander who first reached Mount Everest’s peak with Tenzing Norgay in 1953, once responded tersely to a question posed to him by a reporter as to why he climbed mountains. “Because its there” Sir Edmund said.
Luckily I find myself having more of a reason to climb Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania January 7th, 2010. My friend Kenna, a talented singer and musician, has spent the last year and a half organizing a benefit climb called Summit On The Summit, the ultimate goal of which is to bring awareness and relief to the world’s clean water crisis. Kenna has assembled a group of musicians, actors, and even a couple of water experts, as well as a documentary crew from Radical Media, to all climb Kilimanjaro and shoot a documentary while doing so. The goal of which is to create a hybrid of an educational class on the clean water crisis, and an odyssey to the roof of Africa—Kilimanjaro, the tallest free standing (not surrounded by other mountains) mountain in the world.
Upon agreeing to do the climb, and jumping through the necessary hoops of paperwork, immunizations, and assembling my gear, the sole focus of my universe and existence becomes training. Being the last one to join the team of 45 people to go for the summit (including our film crew) I have to do in three weeks what everyone has been (hopefully) hard at work at doing for the last eight months: getting buns you could crack a walnut on. My physician, Robert Huizenga, is the guy who quickly dashes any hopes I have of coasting on my natural physical abilities. Judging by the look in his eyes though, he’s thinking ‘what natural abilities?’ So I’m going to have to go hard, with at least 90 minutes a day of hiking, treadmill, or stairs—and all with at least 15lbs of weight on my back. Driven partly by fear and madcap dreams of summit glory, I hit the Gold’s Gym across the street from where I live like I haven’t ever done. Through sore calves taffy pulled hamstrings, twitchy tendons, and steep waves of nausea, I slowly yet inexorably begin to feel my muscles gain in strength and size, and my favorite part—get to eat whatever I want three meals a day now, rapidly gaining eight pounds.
Technology is indeed changing the way we operate—on my downtime I find myself sitting rigidly at the computer, sipping a Banana Cream Muscle Milk, my eyes piercing the screen, sharp slits with endless You Tube videos of Kilimanjaro reflecting off my fried corneas late into the night. Home made tourist videos, travel diaries, clips of specials on the mountain, and website after website, I get so inundated with Kilimanjaro and mountaineering, I feel like I’ve already been there. Not quite, little Hirsch, I chastise myself—my days of being an armchair adventurist are about to end abruptly. One You Tube video stays with me though and grows to haunt my dreams—a 20 second clip of two Porters (the native mountain workers) taking a man, face covered in a ski mask, briskly down a steep hill, holding onto his arms as his head drunkenly lopes and bandies about, his brain short circuited by the malignant affect of altitude sickness.
Saying last goodbye’s to my friends and family before I depart is a sticky situation—no one want to downplay the gravity of the risk, because there’s always the possibility something unforeseen could happen, yet at the same time the more gravity given to a goodbye could in itself make one less confident of one’s potential success. Either way you cut it, better to tell ones to you that you love them while they’re in your embrace, and never feel a pang of regret. Both of my parents support the climb, as does my girlfriend Brianna. There’s not a lot of the histrionic “what the hell are you doing?” arguments bouncing around.
At night, now that I’ve given myself over to the climb, ear buds fill my head with the voices of Jon Krakauer and Ed Viesturs as the audio books I’ve downloaded onto my ipod weave far off worlds of wonder. Krakauer’s books “Into Thin Air” and “Eiger Dreams” I find simultaneously sobering to the realities and risks of mountaineering, yet inspiring to the personal challenges and spirit of adventure in the sport. Viesturs “No Shortcuts To The Top” and “K2: Life and Death On The World’s Most Dangerous Mountain” leave my jaw agape in bed as I feel myself transported to the bottleneck of K2 in the Himalaya’s, with Fritz Veesner on the epic 1939 expedition, or the summit of Annapurna, the world’s deadliest mountain, as Viesturs proudly radioed down to Jimmy Chin (a high altitude climber and photographer joining us in our climb) that he’d finally made it to the summit, completing his lifelong dream of being the first American to climb all fourteen 8,000 meter peaks in the world. Call me naïve, young, or just plain monkey hear monkey do, I’m frothing at the mouth with so many tales of adventure I find myself continuously dreaming I’m above the clouds, putting one exhausted foot in front of the other.
After meeting Kenna and several members of our team at LAX airport including actress’ Jessica Biel and Isabel Lucas, musician Santi White and rapper Lupe Fiasco, as well as photographers Jimmy Chin and Michael Muller, and many other amazing individuals I would be grateful to be able to soon call my friends, we managed to hopscotch to Amsterdam for a quick stopover, then hightail it South to Tanzania. Everyone in the groups are totally gung ho, and despite dizzy constitutions following 30 hours of flying, our collective excitement is thick enough one could cut it with a knife.
At the Arusha Hotel, after being introduced to our guides and divided into four groups—one and two for the influencers and educators, three and four for the film crew, and getting the rest of our gear from the guide company Thompson Safari’s—trekking poles, sleeping bags, and an informative lecture on medical safety to everyone by Melissa Arnot, the beautiful, blonde and brown eyed 27 year old mountain climbing wonder extraordinaire, were all pumped up with adrenaline as we struggle to sleep the night before the climb.
After Melissa speaks, I take her aside and ask her to come with me to my room quickly—I want to show her something that’s been worrying me. A day before I got on the plane, I noticed a hard, painful peanut M&M sized ball on my pelvic bone—a classic little ingrown hair. Only the pain since getting on the plane has now tripled. This begins now my official relationship with Melissa—she lathers me down with iodine and removes the culprit hair mercilessly with tweezers. All she gets out of me is one quick girlish yelp followed by a wolfish grin, and a relief that that problem has been so quickly done away with.
I luckily manage to get good nights sleep despite the packing chaos the rest of our group seems engulfed in. Ever the hyperactive personality, I keep checking my pulse with one of the electronic instruments one of the techies Nick has. My pulse never wants to dip below 110 beats per minute, and dark visions of having sudden death cardiac arrest at 19,000 feet caress me to sleep.
On our drive out of Arusha in our train of beat up four by four Safari vehicles, Lupe and I trade jokes with a fast pitter patter of a couple of homegrown class clowns, with topics centering on our odds of making it to the top of the mountain, religion, and the potential perils a mountain man could face for fornicating with a two headed sheep with a sheepskin condom. Lupe is hilarious, as is Simon Isaacs, a Vermont born cause marketing expert who regularly adds to our blob‐like conversation of absurdity, although I think after a while we start to get on UN Humanitarian worker Elizabeth Gore’s nerves, despite occasionally wringing an involuntary smile from the corners of her lips. However, our mouths are quickly given a rest when our driver points ahead. There’s Kilimanjaro, he says. After having been looking at pictures and You Tube videos for weeks, part of me thought I already kind of knew Kilimanjaro, that it almost wouldn’t be a big deal when I saw it. Good thing assumption is not a mother virtue—the peak claws into the sky above us, dark and violent, capped with a majestic solid white glacial cap, like some kind of high altitude crown. I know it’s beautiful, but at first glance, it has about as much “beauty” as the beautiful designs of a Pit Viper waiting under a toilet seat.
After passing through the main gate at 7,000 feet and signing into an unending beauracratic mess of a public record book, jotting down names and passport numbers, we go up another 3,500 feet and park the vehicles. There’s about 200 porters waiting for us—all bearing bags jam packed with the tents, food, water, and supplies for the days ahead—so, for example, when we finish a day of hiking the tents are waiting for us—a definite luxury for us on this climb. Porters are all strong men, some wearing as little as shorts and sandals, and all possessing a ruggedness of spirit and soul that shames most of us with their sheer strength— many of the men are carrying sixty pounds on top of their heads while scrambling through rock clusters with ease that most of us are using every drop of adrenaline we can muster just to hang on.
To start out here were only going for two hours today—but even at an energetic snails pace, I still feel my heart do the thumpty thump as my throat sucks the dry air, ravenous for oxygen. Our groups are split now into four, and our group, two, we quickly name “Dos Locos,” given our tendency towards the delightfully absurd. I draw our group logo on Michael Muller’s blue rain poncho—a bearded man resembling Michael, with his eyes practically blowing out of their sockets in different directions, and of course—brain exploding out of the top of his head, equipped with requisite hands to the sides of his face ala Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone.
Out in the middle of nature like this with none of the mixed blessing technology like cell phones and blackberries so many of us find ourselves chained to, the jokes, conversation, exchange of ideas flows so freely and is so intellectually engaging that I wonder if this is what college would have been like if I had gone. I’m happy on the trail, beaming as I climb up every sloping hill, and looking at the landscape, which at present reminds me visually of the Southwest, like Santa Fe New Mexico, where I was partially raised. With no trees around on this first day walk, there’s lots of bushy type plants and dwarf shrubs, and the trail is wet and muddy, gushing under our feet due to a recent rain. There’s also some borderline sketchy rock maneuvers we do, ascending and descending a series of steep forty foot gullies and crossing the creeks below, all of us carefully hopping on the rocks and employing our long dormant rock hopping instincts and avoiding potential freezing water visits. Pole, pole, the famous slogan we keep hearing from all the guides that has become like gospel on the mountain to all who desire the summit: slowly, slowly, that is.
At our first camp we get organized into our tents, and they’ve generously given me my own, while some of our groups will share with two people per tent. I was considering briefly not writing about this part—but fuck it—by this time now my ingrown hair—the one about an inch up and left of my manhood, has become more than just an unwanted houseguest, shooting from its walnut sized mass a stabbing pain whenever I move at all. Even bending down to tie my shoes has become an exercise in sadism for me now. Melissa’s had enough of my limping around, and she calls me to her tent. She puts a pair of blue rubber gloves on, and removes a tiny syringe and some pads from a plastic bag filled with medical supplies. Melissa says she’s going to drain it out, because its now infected and filled with pus. This may hurt a little, she says. She delicately plunges the thin needle directly onto my little red walnut, and I’m gripped with pain. She takes her thumbs now, and slowly squeezes the walnut, and pink and blubbery white pus begins to erupt out, as my pain quickly turns into fire and brimstone agony—I literally cannot believe how hell one little ingrown hair is raising. And then, as if possessed by The Joker in The Dark Knight, I compulsively start laughing, uncontrollably. This is like popping the deepest pimple of your life times fifty. After she drains it, despite still reeling from the squeezing, which went on for at least two minutes, I still feel immensely relieved the pressure is gone—the dreaded pus now wrapped in a dispensable plastic bio bag. If there was a single experience in my life that equaled the pain I felt in those moments with Melissa, I don’t know what they are.
After our guide Wilfred, a tall and intelligent Tanzanian man, finishes going over plans for tomorrow while we chomp on a spaghetti and soup dinner, and listening to a heartfelt speech from Kenna about his pride in being able to help people that are less fortunate than others, and realization that Kenna could easily be suffering from a water related illness. Born in Ethiopia, he came to the US when he was young, but things could easily have been very different for him. As Kenna’s voice becomes a soft whisper and his eyes grow deeper and moist, I’m glad the spiritual leader of our climb is so honest with his feelings.
A small group of us including Isabel and Jimmy, Los Angeles physical trainer Jason Walsh, and water expert Alexandra Cousteau all sneak off after dark with our headlamps on, and steal a few minutes to see the enveloping view of stars, so bright and clear they beg to be picked from the sky.
I’m in my tent right now at 13,600 feet the next day at camp three—my body tired and pulse is racing, partly due to the altitude sickness medication I’m on called Diamox, but now also due to the antibiotic cephalexin and the anti inflammatory steroid dexamethasone I’ve immediately been put on, as my infection has tripled in size and quadrupled in pain after today’s six and a half hour climb. Almost every step for me today has been excruciating, and people on the trail keep stopping me and asking if I’m okay as I stop and lean on my trekking poles, wincing and trying to catch my breath.
Just to make the last hundred feet to the camp takes just about everything I’ve got. As I stagger into my tent and collapse onto my sleeping bag, painful tears stream down my eyes and an angry lump weighs in my throat—I know my body well, and I know that there is no possible way I’m going to be able to continue this climb. There’s no way I’m going to be able to join Kenna and the others on their quest to the summit to raise awareness for clean water. My heart swells with empathy now for every sick or dying man, woman and child—all I have is a stupid ingrown hair that has freakishly spiraled now, as Melissa tells me, into a potentially serious infection.
And the damndest part is, at base camp three where we are now, I can see the peak I’ve been dreaming about every night for the last month. It taunts me, and for brief moments waves of scornful rage bites onto me like unleashed little attack dogs. Altitude sickness my ass, I was breathing the air up here, and it felt so fresh to me it was like it was scented with roses. Tired legs were the last of my worries; I’m in the best shape I’ve been in since Sean Penn took me to my physical limits. But this is an unworthy opponent‐‐ the smallest thing, a trivial, measly hair, boring its way into my body and somehow releasing Pandora’s box on my ass. Not like this, I tell myself, as I’m wracked now in my sleeping bag with the chills and shivers—not like this. But an honest and pure epiphany hits me—how many of my fellow human beings last thoughts were ‘Not like this?’ How many good people’s lives have been tragically cut short, given the short end of the stick in a cruel and merciless world. I don’t feel a shred of regret now, sinking my head deep into my hands—I feel humble.
After having a conversation with Kenna in my tent about what to do, we both agree for now to treat my situation as a general health problem—and make plans for me to head back down the mountain tomorrow and get picked up and driven back to Arusha—there, I’ll call my parents and loves ones and let them know what is going on with me. But for now, I can’t think clearly, as the stabbing pain in my groin pierces through me like a rusty nail, just beyond the fabric of my tent the great Mountain, quicksilver slipping through my grasp.
Or maybe not. That night, a particular stinging sensation wakes me from my foggy dreams and has me reaching for my headlamp—I shove it down my sleeping bag and see my large bump has been slowly frothing up bloody pus in my sleep. Acting on what I’m almost sure is basic human instincts of taking care of ones own body, I grab a clean sock and begin milking the thing like a large cow teat, the pus readily barfing out. I hop over to Melissa’s tent in the dark, and let her know what’s happening, and also because I know however my clean my sock is, I need to properly sanitize this immediately with iodine. Exhaling deeply once I lie back down in my tent, I feel renewed hope—maybe the antibiotics will start working soon.
In the morning I wake up with a renewed sense of purpose after my first good night’s sleep—and when Melissa comes into my tent to check on me, we both agree that I’ll continue on slowly today, and see how it goes—if at lunch I’m in unbearable pain, or it looks like the infection spreading out of control, we’ll evacuate. Sometimes I can be a pessimist, but part of me feels like this could turn around for me in the next 48 hours or so—but only time will tell.
During the hike today we peaked out at 15,000 feet, and set up our lunch tent where a massive dark and monolithic rock crag has been called Lava Tower. It’s a much steeper gradient we’re going up today, but the nice slow pace and pressure breathing—a technique of rapidly exhaling with your lips in the whistling position, ensure that the altitude is pleasant. Lupe and Simon debate foreign policy, and Jessica works her camera getting various shots, and Elizabeth takes a little spill on a slippery boulder and bruises her shin and hip.
When we descend down to camp three its pouring rain and everyone is tired and wet. Slinking into my tent I’m crestfallen to see that the infection now looks even worse—more swollen, and spreading. Melissa takes note of this, and starts me on a course of a different antibiotic—clindamyacin—just to be absolutely sure we’ve covered our bases. She reckons it to knocking a guy out, then kicking him in the face while he’s down, and I couldn’t be more onboard, eagerly popping the new blue pills down into my mouth. But fuck though, I ask myself—maybe I have some freak Tanzanian bacteria they haven’t discovered yet, that is immune to antibiotics, and once it hits my lower pelvic lymph node will immediately go straight to my heart and leave me dead in 48 hours? I’ve never been accused of lacking an active imagination.
By now, passing pussing my wound in the early mornings has become old hat for me, and luckily I can feel myself rapidly recovering with each drop drained. I try and stave off weird hallucinations probably due to antibiotics mixing with my anti malarial medicine Malarone, wrapped up in my sleeping bag completely covered like a deep coal miner.
It’s the early afternoon now at 16,000 feet. It’s a brief day for us, because tonight we make our bid to the summit around 2am. Even looking at the handwriting in my journal as I write this, it’s become sloppy and slightly sophomoric, with misshaped letters and over sized commas. I find myself emotionally highly on edge too—I had a little back and forth earlier with someone from the group back at 15,000 feet, and my blood is still boiling—a normal spat of bickering wouldn’t rattle a normally thick skinned dude such as myself. Better do some pressure breathing and calm myself down.
Our plan is to wake up at midnight, and begin our seven‐hour hike to the summit in the dark of night, planned so that as we reach the top the sun will be rising. Everyone in the group is tense at breakfast, eyes suspiciously darting around to make sure nobody is cracking up yet. Few people have appetites, but Muller and I force down some oatmeal and bread with peanut butter slathered on it.
Outside we all get into a line, fit our headlamps on correctly, and begin the hike up the rest of the mountain. Several other groups on the mountain had already left before us, and we can see their little tiny headlamp lights stretching up and up the mountain like an infinite glowing snake. Shaking off the fatalism of looking up takes me more than a few minutes each time, so I try to keep my head down and focused on what’s in front of me. There’s also a strange creeping claustrophobia that I can feel breathing down my neck; there’s nowhere to go right now, your at 18,000 feet in the dark, keep it together son.
Several of the people in our group are already starting to get violent headaches and nausea, and Melissa hikes up and down the mountain between our two groups making sure nobody’s health is in jeopardy. Muller and I packed two extra packages of beef jerky, and I gnaw into it with the zeal of starved rat at one of our brief breaks. Perfect snowflakes begin landing on my glove in front of me, and for a second I wonder if this is remotely what it feels like to visit another planet.
After a good eight hours of trekking up, we finally reach Stella Point at 18,701 feet. Here it basically flattens out for the next forty‐five minutes of walking, only raising an additional 639 feet to Uhuru peak, the summit. At Stella Point everybody gives each other big hugs and congratulations, but the job isn’t done yet—and the last forty‐five minutes, as the weather clears just enough to get a glimpse of an ancient gigantic glacier, are hardly Childs play.
When the group finally gets to the summit, a palpable relief overtakes our group, followed by a wave of emotion that breaks in many tears from most everyone. I can see how much pressure each person has put on themselves, not just because of ego, but because they felt like they were really climbing for something they knew was greater than themselves. Our group holds up a banner together, and a million thoughts are flying through my head—how in the world are we going to get back down when I can see several of our group already have altitude sickness? How deep is tonight’s sleep going to be, after scaling these walls? How can our group do everything it can to help the global clean water crisis now? Across the globe at that very moment, the Haiti earthquake is just hitting, creating a living nightmare for thousands upon thousands of people. We are all unaware at this moment—and all hold up a big plastic banner that says simply: SEND WATER!