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The cardiologist’s parting words were, “No more extreme exercise.”

“What about backpacking?” I asked.

She didn’t say anything but looked at me as if she was thinking, “This is not going to be easy.”

In his usual unassuming way, my husband didn’t say anything either. He’d been in the hospital for 10 days after he had almost died, maybe he had died when his heart stopped on mile 40 of a hilly 44-mile road bike ride. Whatever. I had kept his heart beating doing CPR on the side of the road, coached by the guy at 911. That was traumatic enough that I got that 40+ mile long bike rides fell into the “extreme exercise” category.

On the drive home, we talked about what that is. I thought out loud about the risks of backpacking, concluding that “it would take the EMTs a lot longer to get up into the high Sierra than it would to get to a paved road in Sonoma County.”

What could we do for adventure and exercise? He had no ideas. He was exhausted, had lost ten pounds lying in that hospital bed, couldn’t remember anything that had happened from couple days before his heart stopped through the ten days he had spent in the hospital. All he could think of was getting home to his own bed.

Poor guy. He had married someone who did not take no for an answer. As a 7-year-old, I had back surgery to prevent me from becoming a hunchback, paid for by the March of Dimes because my father was in college and my parents had no money. It was a long stay in the hospital and on the day they let me out, I was in a body cast that went from my neck to my hips. The doctor told my mother, “Find things that she can do, like reading, crocheting, still things. Even when she gets out of this cast, she won’t be able to do much else.” To my mother’s distress, I didn’t stay still. Became a runner, an equestrian, a skier, a long-distance cyclist, a filmmaker. Physically speaking, way beyond crocheting.

When I was fifty, the neurosurgeon told me, “You are losing your ability to walk and must have spinal cord surgery. You have no choice.”

My response, “What will I be able to do when I recover from that?”

“I won’t guarantee that you’ll climb Mt. Shasta, but you should be fine.”

Two years later, I sent him a photo of me on a backpacking trip in the high Sierra, Evolution Valley, 12,000 elevation.

Over time, my husband got better and stronger. We realized that we know all kinds of interesting people that we didn’t see very often because they were afraid to exercise with us. We started going for walks with those people – like the free monthly full moon walk out at the Point Reyes National Seashore. Or the walk to Tennessee Valley Beach with our friend Judy’s swimming group, who dove into the unruly Pacific and swam, some for a good long time.

That “extreme exercise” life won’t resume. But it doesn’t mean we are willing to sell our plastic cans that keep bears from eating our food and toothpaste when we are backpacking, we take them out of the storage shed, hold them and tell each other, “Let’s go car camping.”