Fit to travel

Ed. note: as with any exercise, talk to your doctor before you start an exercise regimen. If you have mobility challenges, talk with your specialist to design a fitness plan that works for you. You can change "walk" to whatever method you use to get around.

Here's an unpopular truth. You need to be somewhat fit to travel.

The U.S. struggles with this reality. Is it our high-fructose corn syrup? The availability and affordability of (awful for you) fast food? The heavy use of personal automobiles?

I don't know.

But when you travel, you're likely to walk at least 10 miles a day. In the same shoes. All day. On cobblestones and across hills and maybe even up mountains or in sand.

There's only one way to prepare for this: walk at home.

Is it boring? Yes.

Is it useful? Also yes.

The alternative is to pay no attention to your fitness and accept that you'll see less. That's a pretty expensive excuse to make, and it just about guarantees that when you do venture into the world, you'll develop blisters.

Some "fun facts" about blisters: you can get blisters on top of blisters. Your toenails can split and even fall off from the pressure of surrounding blisters. Your skin can yellow and slough off. It can split open and leave your feet as tattered clumps on the ends of your legs.

That's the bad news. The good news is that you don't need to spend hours at the gym every week to get ready to travel. In my experience, gym workouts are very little use anyhow; 45 sweaty minutes on a treadmill is night-and-day different from a steady 12-hour walk.

Skip the gym; go outside and walk. Walk a lot. Jog if the boredom of walking numbs your eyeballs, but come back to walking. Walk and walk and walk.

Look for your nearest park or nature preserve. Search out your closest Rails to Trails segment. Find places that are aesthetically pleasing with different surfaces: pavement, gravel, sand. Walking outside is the first choice because of its variability: wind, sun, shade, high humidity, low humidity, cold, heat, hills with no handholds. You get the idea.

If you can't walk outside because of seasonal weather, lower your standards and walk in malls, big-box stores or markets (music helps). Something is better than nothing - by a huge margin.

Besides travel long-distance walking has lots of benefits. You'll improve your fitness level. You'll relax your worried human brain. You might even lower your blood pressure, blood sugar, cholesterol and other boring things that adults and MDs talk about.

You don't need to walk fast. You don't need to warm up. You don't need to cool down.

Just walk.

You might lose a few pounds this way, but more likely the difference won't show on the scale. Where will it show? On your vacation, when you're able to see more and do more, for a longer time and more comfortably than people who didn't get as fit as you did.