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SOCIAL SEASON PREPARATION November 2021

The Lead-Up to Our Social Season: From Vacation-Mode to Second-Home Mode
For us, drifting from the Grand Canyon National Park through the San Jacinto mountains above Palm Springs to actually being in Palm Springs for the winter is akin to having been on holiday and then going home. The lead-up to being in the Grand Canyon area for 6 weeks is like that of preparing for a vacation: lots of hustle and bustle; lists of details to tend to; the sudden need to complete projects that had been languishing; packing bags; making reservations; cleaning out the refrigerator; getting the laundry caught-up; and then a sharp, decisive departure.

Going to Palm Springs for 3 months in our trailer after being in the Grand Canyon is more like going home. It is there that we see a dentist and sometimes get new glasses made because we can take the time to select frames and tolerate Costco’s slow turn-around time for cutting the lenses. I get blood drawn for a telemed appointment the first week in December because we are stationary. Bill will get an eye exam and I’ll get a hearing test.

A first in an RV park Ladies Room: a very subdued cat snoozing while Mama showered.

Unlike when on the road and at the Grand Canyon, our long stay in Palm Springs allows us to order online with abandon rather than be limited to a single, nerve-wracking delivery like we were with a replacement cooler at the Flagstaff KOA. We can pop-out to a store for forgotten items and have our choice of markets, products, and prices. We no longer must have a precise inventory of frozen and fresh foods to hit the sweet spot between what we need and what we can store like when at the Grand Canyon (hence the electric cooler). Life in Palm Springs has the most at-home-like tempo of anywhere we are in the year—often more routine than when we are actually at home!

At Flagstaff, Bill was doing “A List” maintenance chores for failing trailer parts, like the toilet valve and ceiling fan motor; in Palm Springs we hope to get to “C List” tasks like waxing the ends of the trailer where the surfaces are more heavily oxidized than elsewhere and washing the windows. I am again trying a find an excellent body worker in Palm Springs to support me. There, I’ll also be able to try on a pair of leggings that caught my eye on the trail in Arizona.

Our focus while at Palm Springs also shifts to being much more social than at any of our other venues for the year. Our little RV park with its tight, hedge-bounded spaces, is filled with snowbirds, many of whom will smile and nod and perhaps pause for a bit of chit chat when we are out. Someone may display free citrus fruit from the tree of a friend or relative in the area and several guests may inquire as to whether we saw any big horn sheep when we walk back onto the grounds from the nearby trail head.

In November, we post our usual 3 hikes on the desert hiking club calendar for December and emails from interested members start trickling in. Emails from the club leadership start appearing in our Inbox, seeking opinions on new business and budget matters. None of these activities are a part of our life in the Grand Canyon and Flagstaff or at home.

These 3 winter months, December, January, and February, in Palm Springs also have become the height of our social season for the year. The high society crowd has their way of preparing for their social season and we have ours. Not surprisingly, they bear no resemblance to each other. The preparation for our season begins in November though I can imagine that the other crowd prepares all year for theirs.

Apple AirPods Pro
In part, it was coincidence that Bill bought me Apple AirPods Pro hearing assist devices on our approach to Palm Springs, but not entirely. We begin shifting our focus towards our upcoming social season in November and finally having a way to tend to my hearing deficit was a perfect fit with that agenda.

Apple’s AirPods Pro aren’t technically hearing aids but are typical ear buds for listening to music and phone calls that have the additional features of noise cancelation and enhancing voices during face-to-face conversations. If they worked, they would be a welcome addition this winter to our ongoing strategy of aging exceptionally well.

Hearing tests over the last 5 years confirmed what we both knew, which was that I was suffering from hearing loss, but it was not in the correctable range. “It will drive you crazy if we give you hearing aids” was the technician’s comment about addressing my high frequency loss.

These Apple AirPods Pro ear buds look like all of the others but they are different.

We’d been watching the emergence of exciting, innovative hearing assist products from entrepreneurs for years that would make the news and then disappear before they made it to the market. Our hopes for ourselves and my mother rose and fell with every promising new product. In October of 2021, the FDA announced (see press release at bottom of this file) that in about a year, the hearing assist industry would be opened to include an over-the-counter market, which would allow these non-legacy companies onto the scene. I’d always assumed that the lack of competition had stifled the consumer options and perhaps had disincentivized innovation and price reductions by the legacy hearing aid companies and we were thrilled that the market would be opening.

Around the same time as the FDA announcement, Apple began marketing their AirPods Pro with a conversation mode added to their usual function specifically to enhance voices. They were too late to help my mother but we were in no mood to wait another year to hear better ourselves.

Bill bought the Pods and set them up for me, the eager guinea pig. It only took wearing them on our walks a few times for Bill to be impressed with the sounds I was hearing that he was missing and for him to be looking for another Black Friday sale to lower the list price of $250 to $160 for himself.

Even if the Pods were obsolete in a year, neither of us wanted to sacrifice hearing well for that much longer. It was so frustrating to miss words in conversations and it was a small amount of money to throw at the hope of living more fully engaged. We keep reminding ourselves that life is short and we shouldn’t be stingy with our wellbeing.

Unfortunately, the Pods were much harder to customize than advertised and it took hours, not the promised 5 minutes, for Bill to make them useful. He finally paid the $5 for an app that did nothing but speed the entry of my audio gram into the system because he couldn’t master the maze on my Apple phone software though he had always prevailed against their games in the past.

Nothing but smiles with Margaret on San Jacinto peak in mid-November.

I was up and running with my Pods for our first event of the pre-social season, which was with our hiking club friend, Margaret, who was joining us for the last pitch to the peak of San Jacinto towards the end of November. Walking single file as we usually must do on the trails, the wind, the crunching of grit under our shoes, and the clatter of pole tips always made conversation maddening. Amazingly, with the audio boost, I could hear Margaret, who was behind me, perfectly and Bill, who was behind her. Bill said my speech sounded garbled, though Margaret with her hearing aids, disagreed. Bill didn’t need more convincing to try a pair himself but he was even more motivated to get them as soon as he could.

Then, just after Thanksgiving, meeting friends from home who were temporarily working in nearby Riverside, provided the first restaurant setting challenge for my Pods. Bill positioned me to use the “live listen” mode on my phone with the Pods for the first time.

With my Apple phone set in the middle of the table, I heard every word of the 2 hour conversation, even with the background music and kitchen noise amplified by the Pods. Bill was stunned. He reported missing many words and noted that unlike him and his friend, I wasn’t leaning forward to hear, I could sit upright. It indeed had been a pleasure to have devoted all of my attention to the conversation content instead of diverting some of my processing capacity to piecing together what I had missed.

Unfortunately, Bill got his ear buds later that afternoon and at a higher price because of a delivery driver failure, but at least he had them in his ears 2 days before arriving in Palm Springs. The time crunch prevented him from customizing his for himself as well as he had done for with mine for me, but he was immediately thrilled with them. Reports of my speech shifted from him using words like “mumbling” and “garbled” to “crystal clear.” Yes! Good news for both of us.

The third social test situation for the devices would be an upcoming hiking club board meeting held in the president’s living room in the middle of December. I anticipated again using the “live listen” function though the dozen people would be spread farther apart. The upside of that situation would be the lack of loud background music like at the restaurant. Bill and I would both be using them at a club stand-up cocktail party-type situation hosted at a wine bar.

He only looks like he is rocking out; he is actually hearing conversations better than without the buds.

We were sold, using these audio assist devices would definitely enhance our social season by reducing the words we missed in difficult listening situations. I was also convinced that the high frequency warning sounds of rattlesnakes on the trails would be even more distinct, as was Bill. And I was looking forward to better understanding my second-language speaker MD on my telemed visit.

Performance Lag
My horribly depressing performance lag revealed on our November 8th, San Gorgonio Peak hike threw me into a 2-day funk but I clawed my way into the daylight and began crafting a recovery plan. My years-long, chronic buttock pain syndrome and perpetually ready-to-be-irritated right knee were just manageable at that moment, so I decided to push them to the edge, with massive support for both. I abruptly switched from the self-care routines of our of usual Maintenance Mode to what we call Project Mode, and would flirt with the edges of overdoing for weeks in hopes of upping my game.

I was in a multi-pronged panic. I was totally demoralized by the loss of my fitness edge and knew that once we arrived in Palm Springs, it would no longer be a private matter but it would be exposed for all to see. Bill and I entered the desert hiking club in the top tier of its hikers, not with the super-elite mountain men, but the next tier down, which was occupied by powerful club hikers. That had become our identity in the club, our social circle, and retaining informal membership in that circle was dependent upon current performance, not past performance or loyalty.

She’s cold but smiling at the peak of San Gorgonio, the first time to the summit since 2017.

If I couldn’t keep up, I couldn’t hike with what had been my peers, and I would be expected to excuse myself from the subgroup like I’d seen others do. Unfortunately, there was a huge gap between the difficulty and distances of the hikes undertaken by our group and the next tier down. It would be like being relegated to hiking on the flat, paved Rim Trail that we used for rehab instead of taking the S Kaibab Trail to the Colorado River and Phantom Ranch, the route we used to challenge ourselves at the Grand Canyon.

I proposed to Bill that, since the snows were still not in the forecast, we summit one of the 2 peaks readily available to us in the Southern California mountains once a week for a month. At close to 20 miles each, I’d collect my additional 20 miles for the week over the remaining 6 days like they were relative rest days. There would be no big gain, no difficult hikes on those days, only recovery walking to counter the once a week, maximal effort.

Unlike our fixed routine of doing a day’s mileage in a single outing, I’d split my lower mileage days in to smaller morning and afternoon events. We always avoided doing that—it seemed so inefficient and disruptive to our desk work time—but I was on a training mission. I assumed that less exertion at a time would be more beneficial for my body’s recovery than the usual all-or-nothing approach. In addition, doubling my outings would increase the circulation of nutrients to healing tissues each day, like cartilage, that lack their own blood supply. I’d mix up the distances depending upon how weary I felt or how achy my muscles were, like 3 miles in the morning and 2 miles in the afternoon, or 2 miles and 1 mile. In addition, on the 3 days before our next peak hike, I’d minimize my total hiking mileage to maximize my recovery.

Our new shuffle was faster than walking but easier on the knees than jogging.

On the trail, with my now even greater quest for speed, I quickly developed a knee-sparing shuffle. My shuffle, in which my shoes skimmed the trail on relatively level and smooth stretches of terrain, significantly boosted my speed—by as much as 4 minutes per mile—over my fast walk speed that was often 22 minutes per mile. Shuffling wasn’t as a fast as jogging, but the much lower impact on my knee joints made the motion more sustainable that day and then next, compared with the pounding involved with higher impact jogging.

I added limited strength work to my routine in the form of lunges, squats, and the core strength dynamo, Superman. These couldn’t be done the 2 days before the next peak outing because they would deplete my available power and stability for the big hike, but any use of them in the week would help stabilize my knees. I had totally abandoned these good-for-me exercises the previous 2 months because they added too much frustration to being in our literally-compressed trailer space while waiting for our slide-out mechanism repair, but there were no excuses now after the repairs were made on November 9th and 10th.

I also added 20 to 30 minutes of dance video workouts to my daily routine 5 to 6 days a week. For me, these weren’t for strength or cardio training but for coordination and footwork speed. I knew from doing them a year ago when Bill bought the program for me when I was struggling then, that the routines were incredibly frustrating but I also knew that frustration was good for the brain. I’d endured endless brain fog for over 3 years on antihypertensive medications and wondered if residue from the brain dulling was degrading my athletic performance. It was a leap of faith that even attempting to follow the videos would significantly stimulate my brain and my speed on the trail, but it was worth a try.

Designing a DIY quiver for poles when scrambling solved an old problem.

The final component of my compressed, self-prescribed, Project Mode rehabilitation program was spending 1 to 2 hours most days using my hefty massage gun purchased a year ago, primarily on the quads and hamstrings of my right leg. Those muscles were in cahoots, over-tensioning my right knee joint and causing knee pain. Several weeks of less intense work on them while in the Grand Canyon revealed that the percussion treatment on those big muscles helped my knee joint, but it was still vulnerable, especially on the downhills.

What I was learning about treating my knee was a familiar story—the muscles and fascia were so tight in my right upper leg that they seemed fine—there was no pain, there were no hot spots in the tissues when I worked on them. That finding can either mean the tissues are indeed clean and healthy or they are so tight, so armored, that they are nearly impenetrable to treatment and remain pain-free during such interventions. I learned that mine were in the latter, the severely, overly tight category, which made sense with the knee joint pain I experienced. I knew from the past that, at least in my body, knee pain was from the muscles, not the rough and misaligned bones in the joint itself.

Since I was mounting an aggressive intervention campaign, I decided I’d strive for long sessions with the massage gun twice a day for 2 weeks. When dealing with my poor lumbar vertebral mobility in February, we learned that Bill could apply the aggressive, CPR-like ballistic motion prescribed by my PT to free the vertebrae in the morning and they’d be stuck again by evening. He vigorously worked to free those vertebrae twice a day. After about 2 weeks, they stopped getting ‘re-stuck.’

I was told once that scar tissue can form in a day and our assumption was that old scar tissue had glued my vertebrae together and that every time Bill broke-up the scar tissue, the necessary tissue damage he caused by doing so triggered the release of new scar tissue to glue the joints back together. For whatever reason, it seemed like after 2 weeks, that process slowed; maybe it was a slow decrease in the amount of inflammation stimulated by each treatment. He gradually decreased his robust intervention and after a few months of monitoring and ‘touch-ups’, his work was no longer needed to sustain my vertebral mobility.

Since the issue with my knees was decades old, I decided to apply the same model to them as we’d developed for my vertebrae with the twice a day treatment for at least 2 weeks. The improved health and function of my knee joints in the first 10 days of applying this prescription was amazing; it marked the beginning of another new chapter in cajoling my knees to support me in living the life I wanted to live.

It was a gamble to go ‘full steam ahead’ with my intense rehab program and I’d need to be very attentive to prevent injury but I also knew that I know how to monitor myself. I was clear that I’d never again hike toe-to-toe with Bill; our identical maintenance routine had given him a platform from which to excel but it hadn’t prevented me from backsliding. My goal instead was to restore my previous athleticism from 4 years ago, before going on antihypertensive medications. I didn’t know if it was possible or how long it might take, but I was motivated to try.

A different problem solved: using a jack to support the trailer slide-out for longer stays.

I hoped that my Project Mode intervention would allow me to participate in the hard club hikes in the desert this season, that I would enjoy my usual social season with friends on the trail, but I would have to wait and see. The huge gap in the performance standards between the hikes classified as “Strenuous” and those noted as “Moderate” kept me motivated.

Finessing
My boot-camp strategy for improving my trail performance created an excellent opportunity for us to streamline our approach to now weekly, all-day, pre-dawn-start hikes. Usually, the Grand Canyon is our only venue for which such meticulous preparation matters but our weekly, 5,000’ gain hikes demanded the same attentiveness. We made a number of changes to our routines to decrease the disruption of these exhausting days to our lifestyle, including:
..increasing the amount of food prep we completed the day before the hike to reduce our time from wake-up to out-the-door by 30 minutes, down to an hour and 45 minutes
..pre-cooking our dinner vegetable course the night before for a heat-and-serve bowl within minutes of returning to our trailer
..Bill decoding the sources of reflux and indigestion that he was triggering by the end of each of these big hikes
..switching to eating our newly discovered, Old Santa Fe Trail jerky for our dinner protein late on our descents rather than waiting to eat fresh food until we reached our trailer
..refining our gear selection for minimal pack weights (12-15 lbs) and maximum utility
..stashing water part way up these out-and-back trails to shave the weight for part of the hike
..increasing safety gear by carrying our walkie-talkies, Garmin satellite devices, bivvy sacks & a water filtration system when there were water sources on the trail

Success!
On November 27th, we made our 2nd trip to San Gorgonio Peak in less than 3 weeks, with the first assault having been on November 8th. On the 8th, I was crestfallen to have been 3 hours slower than on our first effort in December of 2017. It felt like the 3 and a half years of being ill on 10 different antihypertensives had eroded something deep in my athletic capacity, but I didn’t know what.

For 18 days, I pushed as hard as I dared, from as many directions as I could conceive, hoping to make a significant improvement in my performance and I succeeded. I narrowed my performance shortfall between 2017 and earlier in November from 3 hours to an hour and 20 minutes. It required taking my knees to their limit by shuffling or jogging ever step of the descent that I dared—thank goodness for the stability provided by poles! I doubt that I’ll ever match our 2017 time, but I was relieved by what I had accomplished. Better yet, we started by headlamp for about 30 minutes, as planned, and were back at the trailhead parking lot well before sundown, which had been my biggest goal.

At 5 months since discontinuing antihypertensive medications for good and over 8 months since developing a do-it-yourself treatment for my sleep apnea (that doesn’t meet the criteria for diagnosis or treatment of apnea) my overall health was returning. At last, the footsteps of the Grim Reaper behind me didn’t sound so close, especially after speeding down San Gorgonio.

Kick-Off
The Flag Dropped
Just like I knew it would, but I didn’t know when, 4 days before we relocated our trailer from Banning to nearby Palm Springs, minutes after the 5 am alarm rang, I was busy organizing my calendar.

In a matter of days, the scenery & trail companions would abruptly look very different.

I checked Google maps for the biking time from our Palm Springs trailer park to the visitors center where we could buy passes for the Indian Gardens hiking and biking venue near us—luckily, it was short enough to squeeze-in to move day so we could have an easy ride after 4 months off of the bikes. Then there was noting ‘FASTING’ on the calendar for my blood draw the next day. I made a quick check of the temperatures to plan our attire for the lunch with friends, the bike ride, and the all-day hike at the end of the week. There was the mental note to hang my clothes to release the wrinkles for lunch at an actual restaurant a few hours after the blood draw.

Looking at the puzzle pieces on our usually-empty calendar, I announced to groggy Bill that he needed to decide if he wanted to do laundry today or in 4 days—the only openings for the week. I made note that I hadn’t heard back from my new massage guy to firm-up my appointment time a few days after we arrived. Today was the day we each needed to do some batch cooking to position us for the next few days and all of that needed to be done early rather than later so as to have quiet time before taking my blood pressure readings for an upcoming telemed appointment. And also, open hours for restricted hiking venues needed to be verified in advance.

It was unmistakable, the flag had dropped and the race to March 1 was on. For the next 3 months, there would be commitments noted on our calendar for most days of the week. No longer could the details of our daily routine of “exercise/eat, exercise/eat, exercise/eat” be entrusted to our memories. This quarter of the year required a higher level of accountability, of planning, than any other time of the year unless we were flying internationally.

Once actually out of bed, I noted that it was time to order Christmas presents for my grand nieces and to post club hikes for January…. Like Santa, it was time for me to be making lists.

And, since our online ordering had increased in anticipation of being in Palm Springs, the incidence of shipment problems had gone up. Now, time needed to be devoted to cleaning-up messes that weren’t ours.

Ready to Go!
We had done well. We arrived on the doorstep of our social season with our most important pre-work done: I had successfully improved my performance on the hard trails and Bill had enhanced our hearing with the Apple AirPods Pro ear buds. Time would tell if both upgrades were enough.

With these most daunting preparations behind us, we made our unobserved desert debut with more mundane issues on our minds, like dealing with temperatures in the high 80’s, another round of fierce Santa Ana winds, and recalling names of the maintenance men and our new-last-year trailer park neighbors. After that, we’d only need to follow the lead set by our calendar.

October 19, 2021 FDA Press Release:
https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-issues-landmark-proposal-improve-access-hearing-aid-technology-millions-americans