Outdoor recreation often slips into what I call an achievement-based relationship with nature. I’ve been guilty of it myself. Whether it’s “bagging peaks”, racing to finish the AT, or stamping the land with machines and monuments, the focus shifts from ecology to ego.
Being obsessed with Peak Bagging is not Solarpunk.
Nature is not your personal obstacle to challenge yourself against, it is a shared place of discovery you trample when you only see it as a place to endlessly, exhaustingly conquer.
There are many people who do not appear to experience ‘runners high’. I am one of those people, I have never experienced any noticeable pleasant side-effects from exercise itself, just a rather unpleasant burning sensation in my lungs. Regardless, I still ride my bike or jog to maintain my health, and I vastly prefer doing so amongst nature if I can.
Claiming the way an entire subset of other people experience nature is inferior and shallow compared to yours is kinda the definition of a sense of superiority, yeah.
I have no problem criticizing people who litter in nature, or destroy it in some way, but putting every jogger into the same box, with disregard to the variability of those people’s respect and appreciation of nature just due to the way they personally enjoy it? Yuck.
Have you tried exercising less intensely? I never got runner’s high until I started jogging in the low aerobic range, which is when you can speak in full sentences while running without getting out of breath (around 133 bpm for a 30 year old). If you’re getting a burning sensation in your lungs, you’re touching the anaerobic range (around 152 bmp for a 30 year old), which is too fast for a runner’s high AFAIK.
For me, coming out of competitive ameteur/high school sports, it felt unnaturally slow to learn jogging, even embarrassing at times, shuffling around at 8 km/h. Yet at the end there was regularly a runner’s high, and over time and mixing it up with higher-end aerobic exercises and anaerobic sprints, my aerobic running speed increased. I learned to be in conversation with my body rather than relying on external metrics, now I just run at a speed that feels natural and playful, varying from run to run based on how I feel in the moment.
I can’t say that I’ve done a purposefully slow jog. I tend to push myself to where I become out of breath and then need to walk to catch it (which is kinda easy for me to do, and may be related to having asthma as a kid, but not entirely sure), so that could be why. A friend gave me a fitness band a while back that can display bpm, I’ll try using it next time to see what happens if I maintain that 133bpm range. Thanks for the suggestion! :D
I prefer the “can you talk in full sentences” measure as a low tech thing that more directly measures what you want. The right bpm varies with age and cardiovascular health and other factors, but the goal is to keep your blood well-oxygenated and whether you have enough breath to spare on talking is a more direct measure of that.
I am arguing our cultural framing around outdoor culture is inferior and shallow compared to a deeper more thoughtful relationship with the natural world and and an awareness of the living history of colonialism as it bends and warps our perspective our relationship with nature.
If you do not allow me this without labelling me as attempting to claim I am superior than you simply do not allow any kind of criticism of your beliefs/actions in this area. How else am I supposed to interpet this?
My opinion is that painting with such a broad brush that anyone who simply jogs in the woods is performing a selfish act and unable to appreciate nature the correct way is an elitist claim, as it doesn’t allow for people who do deeply respect and appreciate nature, but who may also enjoy exercising among it, or for people who experience nature differently from the way you do.
You seem to have an absolute viewpoint that there is objectively only one correct way of experiencing nature. No one is stopping you from making that argument, but you are not entitled to everyone agreeing with that viewpoint and how it is presented.