Well, That Was Fast

It seems like just last month I was running 12 miles on New Year's Day with a big group of friends to celebrate the start of 2012. 1171 running miles and 352 days later here it is a week from Christmas 2012 already. 2012 went fast. And it was awesome. I didn't run as many races this year as normal but managed to run a number of new-to-me races including the Moab Red Hot 55k, the Grand Mesa 50 miler, the Mount Taylor 50k and the Deadman Peaks 53 miler. As usual, I didn't crush it in any of the races but ran well (with the exception of Deadmans!) and had a great time seeing new courses and meeting new people.
I also was fortunate enough to make two bigger trips. The first one was to Spain with Allison in April for a couple weeks where we did some sightseeing, hiking and a fair bit of climbing. That trip was a wonderful experience. Then in June I was again fortunate to make a trip to Alaska with five great friends to try to climb and ski Denali (Mount McKinley). The weather didn't treat us well on the trip and our summit attempt was thwarted at the 17,200' camp but with poor climbing weather came great powder and lots of fabulous skiing. I just finished putting together the video from that trip, six months later!

Denali 2012 from Jason Halladay on Vimeo.

With a poor start to the winter of 2012-2013, things have been dry and warm around New Mexico allowing Allison and I ample opportunities to rock climb. My last blog post detailed my hardest sport climbing route to date, Meltdown. From that post, and a late-summer story in the Albuquerque Journal about the Los Alamos Mountaineers Club, a writer for the ABQ Journal interviewed me in October for a story in the paper's GO section last month. That was a fun experience and the story turned out well despite a misplaced quote and a small error every now and then. In that story I referred to Allison as my wife. A few friends caught this and asked about that. Well, the story came out a bit sooner than I thought it might as we didn't actually get married until December 12th. But yes, that's right, after being together for 12 years and being engaged for 5.5 years, we are now married. Yahoo! We took advantage of the cool date, 12/12/12, and invited a few friends as witnesses to a brief, easy ceremony at the local courthouse with Magistrate Judge Pat Casados. Andy and Sarah were my witnesses and Allison's friend Stephanie was her witness. And that was it. No photographer, cake, best men, bride's maids or funky chicken dancing. Total wedding cost: $20.00. We saved a bundle that we'll be able to use on a two or three week trip to Europe in 2013.
So yeah, the year started great and ended even greater. Here's to 2013!