What John's Adventures Says About Hiking and Hip Arthritis

John's Adventures (johnsad.ventures), the personal website of John Conners, describes one person's experience of hiking with hip arthritis: years of worsening hip pain, a diagnosis of hip arthritis, a long and often discouraging course of strength training, and a return to hiking that he credits with leaving his hip feeling "pretty much normal with literally zero pain" for days afterwards. This is a first-person account, not medical guidance — it is useful for understanding what the site covers and how the author frames his own recovery, not as a treatment plan.

The story the site tells

The account appears mainly in the post "A Road Trip To The Alps and Dolomites," with earlier context in "Returning To Mountain Biking After 20 Years." The sequence the author describes:

• Onset: Hip pain he had lived with for years got worse until walking more than about a hundred yards caused "really bad pain." He describes feeling "like a broken old man."
• Diagnosis: He eventually learned the pain was hip arthritis.
• Motivation: About three years before the post, a YouTube video of trail runners on the Alta Via 2 in the Dolomites convinced him he had to hike those mountains — not run the route, but hike. He had previously snowboarded in Cortina and wanted to see the area in summer rather than as a winter-sports destination.
• The work: He combined mountain biking, which he found "really good" for his hip, with strength training to build the muscles around the hip. He says his physio and his own research pointed to strength training as the best thing for arthritis, so he "went all in."
• The hard part: The strength work was "tedious and painful" — he is explicit that this was not muscle fatigue but "knife sticking into your groin pain" — and for a long time he felt no improvement. Good days repeatedly turned out to be "false dawns," and he would lose hope.
• Turning point: After a few months, good days began to add up into good weeks. Biking helped greatly, and he was able to return to jiu jitsu "without ill effect."

What he says about hiking specifically

Hiking turned out to be "fantastic" for his hip, in his telling. The pattern he describes:

That post-hike relief is what made the Dolomites trip look realistic, and he notes he could "stop researching hip resurfacing, at least for now." A mid-August weekend in Scotland with old friends, including a 15-mile hike, is described as part of the build-up.

How to read this if you're researching the same problem

The site is a personal blog, and the author is clear that his path involved professional input (his physio) alongside his own research. Two things follow for readers:

• What the account is good for: seeing how one person structured his own recovery — biking plus strength work, patience through a long plateau, a concrete goal as motivation — and what he says the day-to-day experience felt like.
• What it isn't: a protocol. The specific exercises, loads, and progression aren't laid out as instructions, and one person's response to arthritis says nothing definitive about another's. If hip pain is limiting your walking, the relevant next step is an assessment by a clinician, not copying a stranger's routine.

If you want the full narrative rather than this summary, the Dolomites post and "Returning To Mountain Biking After 20 Years" are the two entries to read on the site.