Deutschland

This time next week I'll be packed up and ready to get on a plane to Munich.  I'm very excited about the trip for many reasons.  I'll be seeing Brett and Krista, which is exciting because they moved to Germany before I moved to Flagstaff so it's been awhile.  Also I'll get to go skiing in Austria again, which is where I learned to ski at the age of 3/4, and I will be able to eat and buy as many Smarties as my stomach and bags can hold.  And when I say smarties I don't mean those crappy American sugar wafer things, but the amazing ones of my childhood.  A colorful sugar-coated chocolate confectionery. 

When we moved from Germany to Maryland, age 7, one of the things I remember missing most other than my friends were the candies (favorite being Smarties) and my favorite ice cream flavor.  The stuff over here, especially the chocolate, just didn't compare and m&ms don't have anything on Smarties.  I thought the candy was gone from my life forever until a trip to Montreal in college where I saw them at the convenience store and in ice cream.  They aren't available in many places in the US and certainly not in bulk so it's always exciting for me when I can buy them or when people bring them back to me after being in Europe.  The bag below was courtesy of Nick last summer.

Currently the plan is to take the first few days of the trip to hit up some skiing, most likely Innsbruck and St.Anton/Rendl areas.  I went to St.Anton for spring break in college one year and it was good skiing followed by some amazing apres ski  at Mooserwirt and then in town, so I'm excited to try to get back there again.

After some skiing looks like we're going to be more touristy and probably do a day in Munich and a few days in Vienna.

Other than that the snow is melting nicely up here in Flagstaff so hopefully the trails will be clear soon.  The past few weekends I've been enjoying a day of biking/running in Sedona and a day of skiing on the mountain, a very nice combo.

Sedona Half Marathon

Well it’s been awhile, since the last post I got caught in the storm we had out here and was having a lot of fun skiing and sledding. I’m glad I haven’t had to shovel snow in the last week though because it got old pretty quickly.  I'm sure you people back east know what I'm talking about as it sounds like you have been digging out for awhile now as well.
This past weekend I ran the Sedona Half Marathon. I was using it to get back into doing long runs and to hopefully make my body hurt so I would be motivated to train. Mission accomplished my legs are still pretty sore. I knew the course was hilly (1100 ft elevation gain) but it was much more so than I expected. I was thinking being under 2:00 would be a good start to my season and I ended up running a 1:56:55 with a few walking breaks so I was pretty happy.  If you are looking for a challenging and scenic course this is one to do. If you took your eyes off the hills on the road in front of you, you see tons of beautiful red rock formations.

Let me say leading into this my legs were far from fresh as the week before I had 1 speed and 1 tempo workout and also 2 lifting sessions, arms and legs. So while my legs felt dead on the uphills they felt equally dead on the downhills. I still don’t think I’m 100% used to the elevation but certainly I’m handling it much better than when I did the Flagstaff Half Marathon in October (~2:18) and think with a bit more hill and speed training it should no longer be an issue.

Other reasons I was pleased with the race was it started at 8 and I got up at 5:30 ate and my stomach handled the effort much better than usual.  ( I used to get up at least 4 hours before a race to eat and usually work myself into an anxious state)  I also managed to stay calm up to the start of the race. And during the race when I noticed my legs were dead and I might not do as well as hoped I didn’t just give up I tried to focus on cresting the hill and running the downhills and looking at the gorgeous scenery.  In the end it worked and I ended up meeting my goal.  So while I may not be as fast as I was this time last year, I'm happy with the results and I'm excited to get in some more workouts as I think I'll be able to have some fast races with a few more months of training.
Post race I went with a few other runners to the Coffee Pot where they have 101 omlette’s to choose from, very tast. A perfect end to a race morning.

Snow Day! makes for a 3 day weekend

Upon getting to work today, a bit late, I had a wonderful email in my inbox.  The entire way in to work I kept saying that they would have to cancel work tomorrow because there was just to much snow.  Well the email said just that, that plants would close due to weather after first shift today and that they will be closed tomorrow.  And that we can use our own judgement in deciding to go home early today.  That was sent out about an hour ago and my guess is that in the next hour there won't be many people left here.

Reason for being late this morning was that I was finally able to get up and function early enough, 5:30 to get up to snowbowl and skin up the mountain for a run down.  I'm not sure how long it normally takes people to get up but I was well behind everyone else and wsa getting passed by people I didn't know on the way up.  Oh well with more practice hopefully that will change.

The way down was fun but it's the deepest snow I've ever skied in and I have got a lot of learning to do.  The deepest I probably ever was in before was probably a foot this was probably 2+ feet and when my skis sank in I came to a dead halt.  Hopefully by the end of this weekend I'll have figured out how to float a bit better.

Well that's it for now as there's skiing and snow play to be had.

Blue Skies and Gorgeous Sunsets

This past weekend turned out to be pretty amazing.  Saturday was my first day of backcountry skiing since college and it was great to be able to do it again and with much better gear.  Then I followed is up Sunday with my first road ride of the year.

Saturday: We were fortunate enough to get a lift ride up to the top of snowbowl which saved us probably 1.5 -2 hours of skinning up the ski slopes.  From the top of the lift it was about an hour of hiking in ski boots with skis strapped to out backs to reach the top of what would be our first run for the day.

Digging a snow pit and me skiing.

After the first run down we skinned back up to the top again where we took a lunch break on a pile of rocks.  I was very excited to sit down and enjoy the warm temperatures as I ate my almond butter, cheese, goldfish sandwich.

 Run 2 : Not me skiing but you get the idea.  The picture to the right shows the turns we took on run 2.

The last run of the day was through an aspen glade like the one shown here.  Tree skiing is one of my favorite types of skiing and it was challenging for me Saturday because by this point my legs were about done and weren't responding as well as I would have liked. 

After this it was a long ski back to the car, I spent a lot of time on the ski out telling myself to just get to the bottom and that it couldn't possibly be that much further.  At the end of the day I think we covered around 10 miles and I was exhausted.

Sunday:  The ride in Sedona was pretty uneventful but I realized that it was not as flat as I was hoping it would be.  It turns out that the first half of my ride there was a net loss in elevation so as I was tired and wanting to get back to the car I had a fair amount of climbing to do.  I'm excited to explore more of the roads down there this spring while I wait for Flagstaff to thaw out.  The best part of that trip was the sunset on the way out of town.  In general the sunsets out here are pretty amazing as since Sunday I've seen 2 more gorgeous sunsets.

 

Crested Butte

I hope everyone had a happy new year.  Here are some pics and a brief recap of the trip.  I can't take credit for any of the pictures because while I brought a camera I didn't use it with my reasoning being that everyone else was taking pictures.

View from outside the front door onto the mountain at night.

All in all I had a great new years.  My only complaint being that once the sun went down it got really cold really fast and I just don't like being outside in 8 degrees. The first day of skiing was lots of groomers as they hadn't gotten any fresh snow.  I left the mountain about an hour before the lifts closed so I could do an easy run around town in the last bit of daylight.  Friday night a couple inches of snow fell and during Saturday a few more inches came down making the trails a bit softer which was nice because I was trying to learn how to Telemark.  Then Sunday was another long day in the car but very scenic as we went back through Ouray, Colorado and stopped to watch some Ice Climbers.

Some of the skiing crew from the first day.

Lift Picture

 Picture Down Main Street

I don't have anything too big planned for this weekend, I'm glad to be in town and not traveling as next weekend it looks like I'll be headed to Vegas for a bit.

Skiing for New Years!

Well Christmas is over, huge sigh of relief so it's time to get ready to bring in the new year.   All in all I would say 2009 was a year full of changes, looking back it was a pretty good year even though there were some rough patches.  I'm interested to see what 2010 holds for me but so far it's looking like it should be a great year, I'll be starting it off right by hitting the slopes of Crested Butte in Colorado.

I head out tomorrow for a long weekend where I'll get in a couple days of skiing, some hot tubbing, and hopefully some running.  I'm very excited because it looks like my new skis will be mounted up by tomorrow morning (just dropped them off during lunch) and I have some telemark boots so I can start learning how to do that as well.  It's been awhile since I last went telemarking, ~ 2 years and I only went twice but I really enjoyed it so I'm excited to go again even though it means I'll spend a lot of time falling.

Also the stress of Christmas and being home with my family has given me the motivation I needed to start running again.  Since JFK I haven't been doing much and definetly have avoided running but since last Thursday I've actually wanted to run and have managed to get in a decent amount of miles which excites me because now I feel I can start to think about training for some early season races.

Well that's about it for now.  It's a bit early but since I'll be gone, Happy New Year!

Puffy Coats and Skiing

Thanksgiving to Christmas usually serves as a nice running break as the big fall races are done and the spring races still seem a ways off.  After running JFK this year I needed a break from running more than ever.  Luckily I think I have found some good winter substitutes to running that should challenge me and keep me in shape.  To go with all these winter sports I finally got a down coat, it makes the cold much more bareable and it's fun to press on it and watch it puff back up.

First is downhill skiing which while not always a great workout does cause the legs to burn when you get into the steep and bumpy.  I have some great skiing weekends planned for the near future which I'm really looking forward to.  The more I think about skiing the more I realize how much I missed it while living in Baltimore.  This weekend I'll be headed to Silverton (http://www.silvertonmountain.com/page/home ), I've wanted to ski here ever since I heard about it in the winter of '03-04.  Hopefully it will live up to the hype.

Second I've started skate skiing.  I've been three times now my fourth will probably be after work today.  My initial thoughts were that it's fun and will be a great running alternative.  My third time I spent a lot of time being frustrated as I couldn't get into a rythym and felt like I was just flailing.  Hopefully with more practice and pointers I'll be able to go for 5 mintes without wanting to chuck my skis into the woods.

I've also started swimming and once I get my car back I hope to start doing some spinning as well which I'm hoping will help me out a lot with my tri's next year.  I was surprised to find that swimming up at elevation isn't as hard as I thought it would be.

Lastly the nordic center also has snowshoeing which I think I'll get into a bit more in the next bit as running on snowshoes really makes your legs burn.  And hopefully at some point I'll be able to hike up and ski down snow bowl before work but that will probably require another storm to motivate me to get up at 5:30 when it's only single digits out.  With all these alternative I'm hoping that I can push back getting burnt out on running from some time in mid march to hopefully late april.  That's about it for now, hopefully I'll remember to take some pictures at Silverton this weekend.

On another note I'll be going to my rents house (DC/Baltimore area) the 24-27, if you are in the area let me know so I can make plans to see you.

Arches for Thanksgiving ... Moab not McDonalds

I had a great Thanksgiving minus the stomach bug Sunday night.  We headed to Moab after work Wednesday and stayed there till Friday.  Thursday we went into Arches National Park to see the largest collection of arches in the world.  It was a good time and we even went on some"primitive" and "rugged" trails ... The brochure emphasized bringing liters of water and allowing 10-15 mintues to walk 200m a good read but times were geared for the morbidly obese.  Below are some pictures from the park.  If you are ever in that area you should check it out.  Friday morning I did a short hike with Dee where I was amazed and how awesome the traction on those rocks really were.  After that we packed up and headed to Durango for the night.

Sat was my first ski day this year at wolfcreek.  The trails were all open but the tree skiing was a bit rough. Sat night we hot tubbed with snow falling on us which was great.  Sunday there were a couple inches of new snow making it another great day on the slopes at Wolfcreek.  It was great to be on skis again and those two days have me really excited for all the skiing I have ahead of me this winter.

How is that staying up there

 A hole in a rock...pretty cool.

 North and South Windows

  The primitive trail was to much so I decided to take a nap.

 

 

Delicate Arch ... the one on the UT license plate

A view of the "rugged" trail

 

Breakfast after a very cold night of camping, I was very glad I had my toasty 0° down bag as it was prob around 20°.  No pictures of dinner from the night before but we roasted potatoes, sweet potatoes, & veggies in the fire along with steak for meat eaters and veggie burgers for me.  Followed with an amazing chocolate cupcake with melted peanut butter cup for dessert, yummy.  Prob my favorite turkey day meals to date.

Well that's it for now.  Maybe in a bit I'll have some more snow pictures to post as there is a chance of more snow this weekend.  If not soon I should be able to post about my first attempt at learning how to skate ski.

Great scenery pictures from Waterline (Inner Basin)

Well I'm sitting here watching Return to Oz and sipping on a White Russian.  My computer is finally operational so I thought I would take a few minutes to get some pictures up.

This past week I have been dealing with leg pain so I took it pretty easy over the weekend, barely running at all. I managed to go for a road ride one day and then a nice hike on Sunday.  I'll post a bit more about the hike later this week along with some pics but first I thought I'd share some pictures from the waterline ride I did about a month ago that I wrote about.

Picnic Location at Inner Basin

Note the cooler trailer

Mountains, even a tiny bit of snow

Inner Basin

Now back to the movie, so far it's about as strange as everyone said it would be.

From Fall to Winter and back, First Snow

Well it seems I last posted about the leaves changing color so imagine my surprise when I'm eating lunch in the cafeteria last Wed and there is snow falling from the sky, isn't it Fall? By the time I left work I was glad that I had a scrapper in my car as there was enough on the windshield that the wipers just weren't going to be able to cut it. Some good news is that people out here are a lot better about snow than those in maryland as in they are decent at driving in it. But more so they don't go to the store the night before to buy all the milk, bread, and tp they can get their hands on.

After work I headed to some trails where there was a bit more snow so I got to enjoy running through the trees on freshly fallen snow. Unfortunately no pics of this as I started late and by the end I was running with the use of a headlamp. It was a great run and very peaceful.

I've also included a pic of the pumpkin I carved Fri night. I'm not artsy at all but I think it works as a type of witch, medusa something or other.

After 3 days of being ~19 degrees in the morning the weekend was phenomenal. I woke up saturday and it was sunny and in the 50's. A perfect day for my last super long trail run before JFK and halloween.

Once I track down Halloween pics I'll be sure to put them up as it was a great night and there were some great costumes.