Holy crap, I'm out of shape.

I've got the GPS tracking aspect of this geocaching business nailed. Traveling from infinity to under a mile I can do, no sweat. It's that last part where I'm on foot that almost killed me.

I picked the two caches closest to me according to the listings, programmed the first one into my GPS dealie, and set off in search of adventure and concealed Tupperware(tm). My reasoning was that if the first one was a bust, I'd have the second to fall back on. Or, under ideal circumstances, I'd find two caches my first day. Quite the coup.

Anyway, the first cache turns out to be at the far end of the road that runs behind my apartment complex. Convenient. I drive up and discover a park capping the road, with a little baseball field, some playground equipment, and some woods. Despite feeling slightly self-conscious walking into the woods by myself staring at a box strapped around my neck, I venture into the forest.

The thing about GPS is, it's great at determining distance and direction when the two points being compared are hundreds of feet or more apart. Try it at a scale of 75 feet or less, and you may as well guess at random. I thought I was doing well. The device claimed an error between 20 and 50 feet most of the time. However, I come up empty on the cache-discovering front. After about 20 minutes of poking around in the underbrush, I decide to try the second location instead.

So, I reprogram the destination waypoint to point to the other cache I had selected. It turns out to be a couple miles north of the first one. I can't go that direction from where I am, so I head out to a main thoroughfare and start watching the arrow to see when I should turn. I wind up in a neighborhood so ritzy I can't even afford to look at the houses. My car, rattling its valves to remind me it's way past time for its tune-up, drags itself up hill after hill.

Finally, I reach a place with a few cars parked on the side of the road and a huge oil tank on the top of the hill. I decide this must be the place and get out of the car. Behind a row of sub-mansions, someone has carved out a nature trail. I've got an hour and a half of sunlight left, and the GPS says I'm 0.15 miles from my destination. My engineer brain thinks, "That's more than an eighth of a mile. Can I walk that far?" I decide I came this far, so I might as well give it a shot.

I really should have marked the location of my car as a waypoint, but I figured I was on a well-worn trail and it would be easy enough to backtrack when the time came. So, I start heading down the trail. And I mean down. The head of the trail is at the top of the hill, with only one way to go. Before I thought about it, it wasn't bad. Going down hill is pretty easy. I ought to be able to cover the distance, no problem.

I get to a point where the Thataway arrow is telling me to leave the trail and frolic among the boulders. I didn't feel like frolicking three hundred feet over unblazed, uneven terrain with my brand new, fragile, electronic thingy swinging from my neck. So, I decide to try again another day. This is when I realize two important facts. One, I don't know if I have gone more than halfway around the trail. Two, it was uphill whichever way I went.

Better the delta-z you know, I decide. I turn back and start up the hill. Maybe half a dozen vertical traverses of well over 10 inches each later, I'm moving air like a blacksmith's bellows. Huff, puff, wheeze. My legs threaten to go all rubbery on me on multiple occasions. At one point, I met a family coming the opposite way with their dog. The dog could sense I wasn't able to run away, and growls at me, restrained from coming after me only by the calls of his owners.

Weak-kneed and sweating, I finally make it back to my car and collapse in the seat, determined to start taking the stairs at work once in a while.

Caches sought: 2
Caches found: 0
Nature trails kicking my butt: 1

And yet, oddly enough, I had a good time.