Fitness at young age?

Its really amazing, how at young age, so many american kids are into outdoor activities. Whenever I have gone to the lake sammamish, near to our office, I have seen so many kids hanging out running around in the water, fishing or plain just swimming in the water.

How many young kids in India have you seen just enjoy nature at its best?

Last weekend, we went out on a hike to West Tiger mountain, a drive of around half an hour from our place of stay. Now tiger mountain is a favorite amongst the localites for hiking purposes. There are a number of interesting trails, some of them very steep a climb of 2948 ft in around 2.5 miles to some of around 6 miles which take you to a height of 1500 ft. Anyway inspite of this being my first hike out here, I was convinced into taking the cable trail, (a trail that is not maintained, but was meant originally for laying cables upto the top of the hill).

Well, after the first 20 minutes or so, when I was the last person in the 4 man squad, huffing and puffing with my legs really hurting, I sat on a rock to take a break, near an intersection with the other trails. I look up and see a lady with her two sons, no more than 8 years old, coming down my way. I look at them with total amazement, at how these kids are handling this. Even though it was a normal trail, it is longer that ours (almost twice). This was not the only case where I saw kids, on my way up the trail, I noticed atleast 3 more families complete with kids ranging from 4- 12 years old or so.

No wonder, americans are fit. If you start of at such an early age, and enjoy the nature, you are bound to be like that. In addition to their love for the nature,given that there is only close to 3 months of actual sun out here, its not really surprising that they try to make the most of it during that period.

Well in short, I was happy to reach the top, and just stood there, chatting with another couple, and looked around me and it was such a beautiful sight. Well it was worth it. The image here, i just borrowed from images.google.com.







Anyway we are planning to make this a weekly thing and start timing ourselves. lets see how it goes