On Hiking
The GTT of Fitness
My experience with hiking had been approximately zero until last year. I had done a total of one-point-something hikes in my life. That too was 25 years back, when I was a student at IIT Bombay. It’s sad I never took an interest in exploring the amazing mountaineering club in IIT.
When the gentle folks at EIE summoned, I decided to add hiking to my bucket list this year. Typically, people add a specific goal or thing to their bucket list, like climbing Mount Everest. But life is more than just a checklist of items to cross off. Life is in the living.
The way we spend our days is the way we spend our lives, reminds us the famous writer Annie Dillard.
So, I want to argue that the bucket metaphor is more useful when you think of it as a bag of practices that you aspire to make a part of your life.
Taking up hiking wasn’t difficult in Bangalore. There are a few dozen accessible spots within 2-3 hours drive. Many of them are day hikes, i.e, you can start early morning and be back at home by evening.
So I started the second innings of my hiking life with Gudibande Fort in November last year. It’s a beginner friendly one and you can scale this summit in about 45 mins. Here’s a drone footage my friend Saurabh shot from the top.
Then, in January this year, I discovered a wonderful community of hikers, thanks to my friend Abhisek Datta. I did three treks with them this year. I plan to do at least one more before 2025 ends.
The most unexpected outcome of taking up hiking was signing up for the Phulara Ridge trek in Uttarakhand in May this year. Quite ambitious of me. Though the organisers cancelled the trip because of the India-Pakistan conflict, the fitness requirements for the trek got me started with a fitness routine which has continued.
The GTT of Fitness
Hiking is the glucose tolerance test (GTT) of fitness. GTT is a test where they give you a large dose of sugar (typically 75 gm) and then watch how your body handles it. It reveals diabetes years before regular tests like HbA1c catch it because HbA1c is a lagging indicator — it shows damage that’s already happened. GTT is a leading indicator of insulin resistance, i.e., it shows problems that are just beginning.
Hiking is to your body’s functional weakness what GTT is to insulin resistance.
When you’re young, you don’t think about the small muscles, the joints, the tiny mechanics that handle turning, balancing, bending etc. But as we age, these invisible workers start failing. Suddenly, normal activities become hard.
Hiking reveals which ones will fail first.
I discovered this myself. Running on flat ground — no problem at all. But when I started hiking and came down a steep trail, my knees screamed. Not because of the knees themselves, but because I had weak glutes and a weak core.
I would’ve never known this from my regular routine.
That’s the beauty of hiking. Like GTT, it applies unusual stress and exposes your weak points before they become real problems. It’s a leading indicator of your future limitations.
During our Channarayana Durga hike, the trek leader said something interesting — the first hiker to reach the top runs on lungs but the last hiker runs on the muscles. It’s not how fast you can run up a hill. It’s how long you can keep trudging up without injury or exhaustion.
The modern sedentary life unfortunately fights our evolutionary hardwiring. The human body is optimized for a hunter gatherer routine — a life full of hiking, climbing trees, chasing small animals, squatting and digging roots, and running at a low pace for very long distances.
Hiking is a great excuse to reclaim some of that life.
