A Quick Pause.  Time outdoors provides our minds and bodies with benefits that aren’t often quantifiable but are perhaps more important than we realize. Simonson Photo.

By Nick Simonson

The uphill slant of the final mile of the half marathon bore a similar feel to the steep climb up and over the grassy rise to the truck at the end of my grouse hunt the day before, but somehow it came a bit easier than a few previous runs this summer. My pace dropped by only a couple of seconds on the rising pavement as I made the turn toward the finish line and slapped the outstretched hands of my family waiting for me in the final few hundred feet and savored the welcome relief that always comes with the beep of the final pace tracker.  In the breezes of the day before, I gently took similar encouraging high-fives of the waving bluestem and other field grasses as my brother and I wrapped up our morning adventure in which my lab put a handful of sharptails in the air for us.

With more time spent outdoors, be it walking the dogs, checking miles off a training program, or exploring the bush and berry clad draws of grouse country, the more I begin to realize the importance of movement – and being able to move – not only in the pursuits that I enjoy, like hunting, but those I feel I need such as exercise, and those I know I require, such as just being able to get up and around every day for as long as I can.  With each step, and each completed trip whether the green numbers on my fitness tracking watch record them or not, I keep coming back to the realization that our bodies were made to move, and that movement in turn gives us benefits beyond a set of three digital rings or a scale reading.

There’s a study on the internet of birds’ brains (as opposed to bird brains, such as myself) which I read many years ago, and while likely lost to the backwaters of the web, it is most certainly still searchable.  In that article, scientists determined that the neurological health of the subject finches in the wild and their counterparts in captivity was vastly different, simply because the wild birds were able to roam, find food, store it, build nests, expand territories, and generally go where they wanted.  The caged birds’ brains were predictably smaller, less active and ultimately, they became weaker cognitively over a shorter period of time because they had less to see and less to remember in their daily lives due to their truncated movement.

While this weekly column, and hopefully your reading of it, expands your mind and encourages you to get out there each week – whether pursuing fish, or birds or big game – it serves as a memory aid for me like a signpost tree to a songbird, recording the bigger adventures and larger accomplishments outdoors. In the process, I know the movement required of me to make it happen does something similar.  I take in a world of stream bends and rising hills, of brushy deer trails and lake shore running paths, and through that process, often in stride, I come up with a turn of phrase or a depiction of what I’m seeing in the moment which most weeks forms the core of this column. Through that, as I look back on it now, I expand my memory in ways that pay off in future seasons not only in remembering the pools and runs holding trout visited on a hike along a creek in the hills and the out-of-the-wind rills of grassy cover that hold grouse in just about any gale, but also in keeping myself fit both physically and mentally for the next season or the next visit that may take me to the same place, whether a week or a year from now.  My movements provide the pattern and an expectation of what’s to come, whether it’s a pair of flushing rooster pheasants from a dry and crackling end of a late October slough or the familiar rise and fall of seven miles of rolling hills I lace up and face a couple times a week. While the trails may change and the locations might shift, through the motions required of me, I begin to find the signs that suggest success is just ahead and note it accordingly on each adventure.

I encourage you to make the most of each step this season, and in all that are to come.  Whether you write the results down in a training log, plug them into a fishing app, or type them up into a quick story about your hunt each weekend, make sure to note the movement required, the places your series of steps and strides took you, and perhaps the joy you found over each rise in the terrain and at the finish line set for you or the one you make for yourself…in our outdoors.