Have you ever watched a film named Forrest Gump? I’ve watched it several times, and I love it very much except the extra-big beard on Forrest’s face when he jogs on the high way. Indeed, every time I see such a fluffy, entangled, big beard, I would involuntarily rub my chin arduously. A beard itches, a big beard itches badly, and you don’t have the breath to shave it when you are jogging. But, you can shave easily when you are hiking because hiking is leisurable enough for you to enjoy life. I love hiking. What makes me love hiking more is it does bring me health, whereas jogging or running is really not as healthy as most exercisers expect.

Any person who works hard like me absolutely needs leisure to relax his/her stress and refresh his/her creativity, and hiking is the most accessible exercise that can satisfy such requirement. The broad, extensive, clean sidewalks and soft, breezy, genial trails in Metro-Vancouver provide a very friendly environment for all hikers and joggers. And, we hikers have better advantages in utilizing these fantastic utilities than joggers. This is because we can walk our lovely dogs, enjoy picking blackberries and huckleberries in the summer, and watching gorgeous, variant, colorful falling leaves in the autumn—but joggers can’t. If you are jogging, you are moving so hurriedly, perspiring so massively and expiring so busily that you don’t have an eye for the beauty of the sceneries around you and a joy for the sweetness of free delicious fresh fruits on the trails; not to mention that you can’t spare a hand to walk your beloved Maltese. Furthermore, because of the leisure, I always experience the delight of inspiring my creativities while hiking. I don’t think a jogger’s brain has much opportunity to be productive when he is hurrying and careful not to topple on the way. My classmate Ming argues that hiking wastes too much time. Well, it is utilitarian to take an exercise as a job instead of a life, and when you digitize your exercise and count the number of minutes you spend on exercising, you are twisting yourself into a possibility to consulting a psychiatrist, which takes your time as well. It is unhealthy to be picky about the time for hiking; indeed, hiking is even healthier than jogging based on medical knowledge.

Anatomically, jogging is harmful to humans’ leg joints while hiking can be helpful in reducing the risk of joint damage if we use walking sticks. We humans were originally designed to walk with four but not two legs. Walking or standing erectly might look graceful, but it agonizes our knees and vertebra with our whole bodies’ weight. The cartilage tissue, which is the soft cushion between two adjacent hard bones, in our knees and vertebra is thus squeezed when we stand, and hammered because of gravity acceleration on each step when we move. Talking of gravity acceleration, which means higher speed makes heavier bumping, you are at a much higher risk of colliding and cracking your knee cartilage and distorting and slipping your intervertebral cartilage discs by jogging. I did heard one of my friends, who teased me for being a snail exerciser, cry for slipped disc. But, I’ve never heard a dog or a lion, which runs on four legs, groan for that. So, don’t jog, just hike, and that abrades your joints much slowlier. Moreover, when you are hiking, you are the only one entitled to hold one or two walking sticks in your hands. With walking sticks, you can do exercise with at least three legs without crawling, and that reduces your knees’ burden and, through leverage, more or less helps stretching your vertebra so to prevent discs from slipping. That’s what I mean hiking makes us healthier.

Hiking is definitely better than jogging for our lives. Hiking is humans’ nature, but jogging isn’t. Did you ever see a person always heavily sweat like just creeping out of a lake, widely open his/her mouth with tongue stretching loosely like a flap, and painfully line his/her eyes like all of the cartilage is gone and bones clog together? If you did, he/she must be jogging or running, both of which are not good for health unless that can make them much money. On the other hand, hiking is absolutely leisurable and healthy. So, why don’t you pick a walking stick and come with me to go hiking in Stanley Park?