Sunday, January 22, 2012

Some snow sliding, running, and climbing. A solid week 3.

After the holiday on Monday it was an average day at work on Tuesday with a hearty lunch run of 7.7 miles with Tom before more on-going email migrations at work Tuesday night. Migrations were OK despite some network issues that caused us to restart ~50 migrations (out of ~300). Still, I was home by 8pm. Wednesday I skipped running for lunch and instead went to check out the new snow from Tuesday's storm up at Pajarito Mountain with Amy. We were pleasantly surprised by the 6 to 8 inches of new snow on the Townsight run and vowed to return the next day for lunch too. Wednesday night I got my plastic climbing on down at the Santa Fe Climbing Center. Allison is taking a 10-week training-for-climbing class down there on Monday and Wednesday nights so I've been trying to get down there once a week with her. I'm not a fan of the roped climbing there but the bouldering is really quite fun and a good workout so I've been enjoying doing that. Thursday morning I was motivated enough by the snow at Pajarito to get up early and head up for a Dawn Patrol lap with Tom and Sarah. It's always a bit difficult to roll out of bed early but once I'm up there, I'm always very happy I motivated. Thursday's reward was great with an incredible sunrise as we neared the top of our 1,000' ascent.
Tom at sunrise during Dawn Patrol Thursday. From BlogPhotos

Amy carving a lunch lap turn. From BlogPhotos
Friday I went on a solo run to try to run Santa Fe Baldy. I've done this run the past two Januarys and wanted to keep the streak going. However, I was a week late for ideal running conditions and only made it ~4 miles to the meadow called Puerto Nambe before being stymied by loads of new snow from Monday/Tuesday. I tried to push on but the post-holing was just too frustrating and slow. I even tried some crawling on the snow surface to avoid post-holing but doing that in minimal running clothing wasn't very pleasant nor efficient. Nonetheless, it was a beautiful day and I still ended up with 8 miles and ~2,000' vertical of activity out of it.
My crawling tracks in Puerto Nambe. From BlogPhotos
The shortened trip up SF Baldy afforded me more shopping time in Santa Fe so I finally purchased a new Cal King mattress to replace our aging, sagging mattress. It was pretty ballsy to purchase a mattress without Allison giving it some test laying but that's how I roll. I'm pretty confident I know what she likes in a mattress and I hate burning up time shopping for things like this so I just went in, negotiated a bit and got 'er done. It gets delivered next Saturday. Ironically I had the best night of sleep I've had in a long time that night on our current mattress. Man I slept well; it was awesome. Friday night I ended up bouldering at the Santa Fe Climbing Center again for a few hours with a great, fun group of people while Allison had her "Monday makeup session" (since Monday was a holiday). Allison, Nat and I went climbing down at Diablo Canyon outside of Santa Fe on Saturday meeting up with Amy, Aaron, Claudia and Hagen. The day started out beautiful and warm and slowly got colder as the clouds and wind picked up. Still, it was a very productive and enjoyable day of climbing with Allison, Nat and I all sending routes we hadn't sent before in the Solar Cave. Allison and I both sent Lucy (5.12a) while Nat sent the super fun Clovis Hunter (5.12b). Amy and Aaron finished establishing a new two-pitch 5.12a route called Icarus and both of them then promptly sent the route. It looks very cool and I'm excited to try to climb it the next time we can get down there. And I managed to get a few pretty good photos thanks to the decent cloud cover.
Nat on Clovis Hunter at Diablo. From BlogPhotos
Sunday was crazy windy in Los Alamos for much of the morning so we did some chores around the house until around noon when Allison took Bill's dogs for a walk around the neighborhood and I went for a saucy 11 mile run that felt fast by my standards. I was encouraged by running a decent-for-me pace and still feeling quite good even though it was only 11 miles. I'm hoping to get out for a run of twice that length this coming weekend to see how my legs are feeling in anticipation for the Moab Red Hot 55k race in a month. We wrapped up the weekend with a pizza and beer session at Bill's while watching the NFL NFC Championship Conference Playoff game between the 49ers and the Giants. I was pulling for the 49ers and they lost. But now I'm pulling for the Giants in the Superbowl because I'm damn tired of the Patriots. I'll sign off on this post with a badass time-lapse movie of Yosemite scenes. This is really impressive and inspires me to try to do more time lapse movies despite not owning a motorized dolly or decent video editing software. Until next week!

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