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Geocache your way to Wellness


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17 minutes ago, Max and 99 said:

I was on board until they suggested a streak. I love geocaching to de-stress but a streak would just cause me stress. 

Geocache your way to wellness blog post

 

I don't blame you one bit.  Nobody would want to see me streaking either...

Odd though, that at events the people we've noticed who brag the most of their finds, they weren't mmm...  in the best of shape.

All those low D/T hides in fast food parking lots I guess.    :)

Maybe this is the hobby pushing the hiking part of the hobby again.  Cool...

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27 minutes ago, Max and 99 said:

I was on board until they suggested a streak. I love geocaching to de-stress but a streak would just cause me stress. 

Geocache your way to wellness blog post

Yeah, I'm not sure my streak helped my wellness much. It did add a little stress (making sure that I got a find of some sort every single day). It did add a little exercise (getting out of my car to grab today's cache, and occasionally hiking a few hundred feet). Those two probably balanced each other out, more or less.

But mostly, it taught me not to clear out an area that I wanted to return to. I learned to find only one cache on today's hike, so I could find another cache next week, and another the week after that, and so on.

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My streak started as a way to improve my health, and I rode thousands of kilometers on my bike, rain or shine, to find a cache per day. Starting a streak, if you can do it like that, isn’t bad. And for me it continued to be that way for 2.5 years. 
 

It’s also important to know when it’s time to let go of a streak. Last half a year of maintaining my streak has been a net negative to my health, as I’ve essentially been driving a car around to increasingly far away caches, instead of doing some actual exercise.  

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For me, geocaching has never been about physical wellness, just mental wellness. Then, I had my heart attack. Now, I have to exercise, and geocaching in my area won't give me the year round exercise I need. Maybe during the summer months, but certainly not in winter. I've changed to other AR location based games to give my self a diversion while walking/riding to/from work.

 

I started a streak once. Then, one day, it's 10:00PM, raining cats and dogs, with thunder and lightning. Streak ended.

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1 hour ago, Wet Pancake Touring Club said:

 

I started a streak once. Then, one day, it's 10:00PM, raining cats and dogs, with thunder and lightning. Streak ended.

 

The only streak I've done was for the Streak Week promotion a few years back. Of the seven days, it rained heavily on three of them so I had to pick caches that were a quick dash from the car or a train station.

 

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The almost constant rain over the last couple of months has kept me house-bound a lot more than I want to be. So far this month I've had four caching days: two drives to Newcastle, a 50km drive around the Hornsby district for a new 11-cache P&G series there and a train trip down to Sydney for three new harbourside caches which at least involved a bit of walking from the train stations and ferry terminals. My last proper hiking cache was on the weekend away in the Blue Mountains in mid February, so I'm looking forward to some mythical future time when there's a long enough spell of dry weather to get back out in the bush for some decent exercise and mental uplift.

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One of my least enjoyable days was the day I decided to find 100 caches in a day on a power trail. 80ish of the finds on the trail plus a few others in the area and I did it solo. Talk about miserable, I was so exhausted getting in and out of the car. Yes I parked next to the cache but after 100 times it adds up. Even putting on the seat belt was a an effort. No plans of ever doing that again.

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Why do we keep having posts about the execrable Geocaching blog posts?  Do you think that there are people here who enjoy being talked down to as if they were five years old?  Or do you believe that these blog posts have some kind of content that everyone on the forums has not heard a thousand times?  I am truly curious.

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20 hours ago, Max and 99 said:

I was on board until they suggested a streak. I love geocaching to de-stress but a streak would just cause me stress. 

 

I kept a streak going for a couple weeks, but it soon became wasteful. I wasn't going to drive 30 minutes each way out of my way for a park-n-grab I would rather skip. Waste of time and gas.

 

If I lived somewhere else where the volume of geocaches was such that I could walk or bike to one a day for months then I might try a streak again.

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2 hours ago, fizzymagic said:

Why do we keep having posts about the execrable Geocaching blog posts?  Do you think that there are people here who enjoy being talked down to as if they were five years old?  Or do you believe that these blog posts have some kind of content that everyone on the forums has not heard a thousand times?  I am truly curious.

 

Groundspeak forums discussing content posted on the Groundspeak blog? Madness!

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On 3/30/2022 at 2:59 AM, tbbiker said:

I'm not sure driving up to a LPC, GR, or street sign then getting out of your car to find a cache would really constitute exercise.  I actually exercised way more often and consistently before I ever heard of geocaching. 

Have you considered that even doing such caches may help improve the mental health of people who have trouble just leaving the house? Such caches may be the first step in overcoming this and, hopefully, stir them on to greater achievement in perhaps walking 100 metres, or perhaps more, from the security of their home or vehicle.

I know people who are like this.

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6 hours ago, colleda said:

Have you considered that even doing such caches may help improve the mental health of people who have trouble just leaving the house? Such caches may be the first step in overcoming this and, hopefully, stir them on to greater achievement in perhaps walking 100 metres, or perhaps more, from the security of their home or vehicle.

I know people who are like this.

 

I am now working from home, love my commute upstairs to downstairs. Beats my old commute in Silicon Valley 10 miles ~1 hour each way.

 

Caching in the evening is something I love doing as it gets me out of the house and some fresh air and sometimes sunshine though in the winter more often liquid sunshine (rain). Lousy weather I hit the easy ones, nice weather short walk depending on how much day light is left. Usually don't have much time so do what I can. Definitely helps my mental health.

 

I know some folks poo poo boring caches. I love them all (well except the one cache where I got stung like 10+ times dog got hit al least 3 times, I got my exercise that day one bee followed me running .25 miles back to my car).

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I had almost stopped caching and after I had a serious accident I had to learn how to walk again.  One of the first things I asked my doctor was how the loss of some body parts would affect hiking or kayaking, so I started doing some caching again as a way to mark my progress.  
 

I still have not done some LPCs near my house and poking around for a container can be hard. But the game gave me a chance to record my first walk on a real trail.   First kayaking.   First 5 mile hike.   First hike with friends.   Balance remains an issue but caching marked my first time on a bicycle (only one little crash in a soft spot!).

 

I thought a few simple puzzle caches might help my brain recover from two small strokes associated with the accident but several I looked at seemed too complicated.  Writing logs and taking pictures can also be therapeutic so that is a benefit that might not often be recognized.
 

I was not interested in a streak before so I am not going to do it now.  I don’t expect to ever do a tree climb cache again.  But within those limits caching can help with rehab. 

 

 

 

Edited by geodarts
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For me, one of the big wellness aspects of caching is the social side of it. I've made a bunch of great new friends from all walks of life in the nine years since I started and it's been a huge boon for me in my retirement.

 

Since early February we've had a record number of rainy days and record amounts of rainfall with widespread flooding, making getting outdoors and doing anything caching-related pretty challenging, but today was not only a rare sunny day but also an excellent long-planned and four-times-postponed caching event at Pindar Cave, a 12km return hike from Wondabyne railway station (there's no road access at all). With a big attendance from Sydney, the Central Coast and Newcastle, it was an uplifting experience getting out for a decent hike while catching up with so many caching friends after a couple of months of cabin fever.

 

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