Scenes from the Teva Mountain Games - Vail, Co

Annie flashing a smile at the camera on her way out on the TT.

Typical view of the garage/hotel condo in Vail. That pink foam roller is the amateur age group racers version of an on staff masseuse. It can hurt me almost as bad as the real thing.

Other half of the garage.

Me wrapping up day 1's races with the mountain bike XC race.

Typical view of Vail Village during the games.

Annie hitting a tight downhill switchback.

Me starting my TT hill climb. Will touch on the guy working on his bike in the race report post later....

Scenes from the Salt Lake Marathon and Bike Tour

Annie braved her first mass start road ride of the year Saturday morning. She and her friend Marco joined the roadies to ride the marathon route before the runners started pounding the pavement. Here they are post ride at the gateway.

Props to Steve, who wins crew/husband of the day for getting up at 4:00 am to drive them to the start, and then wait the couple of hours for them to come in. Steve's also a helluva bike rider - have spent some time hurting while chasing him around the local crits. Steve and I were laughing about the genious behind this bike ride - pretty good idea for any running race organizer I would think, you've already got the cleared roads/route, may as well offer it up to the bikers an hour before you send off the runners, and try to get them to pay $40 bucks to ride it. It was not short on participants.

I keep a list of thoughts/ideas of stuff that might be fun when I retire from banking, and have some ideas towards founding a race/event promotions organization that I may venture to put together someday. Have seen some fantastic outfits and seen some sorry ones - can assure you there's still plenty of room in this space.

Anyway, Annie and Marco had a great ride, got whistled at, got invited into a paceline, got through the merger with the 5k runners unscathed, and rolled into the gateway safely. Here's one suggestion to the Marathon organizers - you guys have got to run the bikes down the middle of gateway to finish under the official race finish line, here's why. Steve and I sat and laughed to each other at the closing effort some of these citizen ride riders why closing out with at the end of the ride, which was routed around the back of Gateway vs. down the middle of it where the run finishes. We saw some good sprints, and Steve had seen a bunch previously when the early finishers were coming in. This was a big moment of glory for some folks, and I'm not kidding, you run these cats down the middle of gateway, with those crowds lining the streets yelling - your going to multiply those glory sprints fivefold, and by default, the entertainment value for your crowds tenfold. We saw it happen plenty of times with the runners - some get juiced from the energy from the crowds and it doesn't matter if they'd walked the whole race to that point, or had hit it hard and were about to kill over, they come around that corner and it's on, it turns into 45 seconds to capture olympic glory. No doubt you'd get plenty of the same from the bikes, which is maybe the reason behind sending them around back. Regardless - Steve and I had some good chuckles about the glory sprints among other things while watching runners come in.

We split from Steve and Marco and met up with some family - Tom who rode that morning and was there to watch Laurie finish her first half marathon, and Amy and Aaron (who also rode that morning) were there to watch Courtney finish her first half marathon. Congrats to both - they did awesome!

Kylie was so fired up after watching all the racing that she came home, threw on her race gear, which consists of an xterra jersey, filled the pockets with 3 1/2 days of food, and was off. The kids are digging spring, they love being outside.

Suncrest is Fierce

We weren't looking to buy a new place when we drove up to Suncrest the first time - but being the outdoorsy type folks, kind of got stopped in our tracks with what we saw and how it felt like being in some little mountain town. So, we more or less bought it on impulse.

Had no idea we were getting a place that came with it's very own weather system. Here's what we didn't bargain for - or at least underestimated:

Pretty typical look at the front yard in the winter
Figuring out where to put the latest 12 inches of fresh snow is not an uncommon problem
There is an entrance to the house on the level below where Annie and the kids are standing - it's perfectly functional come March or April, but fairly worthless and impassable around the time this photo was taken.
This is what a Super Bowl tailgate party looks like in Suncrest - veggie tray on the back of an ATV. Served during a break from shoveling after church and before the big game.
Not unlikely that this is the 2nd or 3rd round of plowing in a day.

And here's what we did bargain for, but also underestimated. It ain't a bad thing to wake up and go to sleep looking at this kind of stuff out the back windows/deck.

I think it will be 4 years this year, and as pretty as it is to look at, it's even better as a playground if you dig the outdoors. Can't think of many places I'd rather live....

Scenes from a west desert weekend

Friday night we loaded up the Honda Pilot and made the three hour trek to Garrison, Utah - home of my dad, Leslie (step mom), some cows, horses, and a few other folks. It's one of my favorite places to go for some unwind time - and it sounded like a nice place to go to celebrate my 33rd birthday and watch the Superbowl. Two dangers in driving across the west desert at night:

1 - breaking down, you may spend a night before potential help arrives via another vehicle coming by.

2 - Hitting a cow or antelope at night

We managed to dodge the black cow standing in the road about 20 miles outside of Delta - were fortunate enough to be watching and saw it with some room to make a Nascar pass around it. But as we pulled into my dad's driveway, we noticed right away that someone else hadn't been as lucky - and they were sitting at the kitchen table when we pulled in. My dad is the local constable so his place was where these locals came after hitting a bovine at about 55 mph. Yep - cows will leave a mark.

In the country you make do with the cards you've got in hand - so instead of calling AAA or a tow truck, the wife, who was sitting in the passenger seat (these folks must have been late 60's/early 70's) does her best to pick the glass off of her face after getting decked by the airbag, grabs the quilt she was knitting when the accident happened, and uses it to hold up the windshield as best she can while her husband, who was also rattled and had been decked by an airbag, drives the 40 miles to get to the next village - Garrison - where my dad lives. While desert climates can get toasty when the sun is up - they get brutal cold within a few minutes of the sun going down. I know my kids last about 5 seconds when I yell freeze out and row down the windows in high teen/low 20's temps - and their young with good circulation. Not sure what it might feel like to go 40 miles in said freezeout, i.e. no windshield, but am pretty sure it could not have been much better than miserable. Maybe the adreneline from the wreck helped, but probably not enough. This all happened Friday night - the photo was taken the following morning. A short follow up to this in a moment.

Annie and I took the road bikes down - so that I'd have something to distract myself from the homemade bread and other goodies in Leslie's kitchen - on the topic of cows, I tend to eat like one when I go to Garrison. Grazing begins just after hello hugs, and doesn't end until just prior to goodbye hugs. We got out Saturday morning for a couple of hours and rode up into Great Basin National Park until ice/snow on the road turned us back. All in all it was about 30 miles with about 2500 ft of steady climbing between miles 8 and 15. A solid workout where your burning up on the climb up, and bone cold on the decent. Am thinking this may be one of my best little training destinations this year as I try to get in shape for leadville - once the snow melts and the roads are clear all the way up, that mountain will be a stout ride.

One of the cons of being out in Utah's west desert - if you hit a cow, your not going to have much traffic come by to help. One of the pros of being out in Utah's west desert - if you feel like riding your road bike, for the most part, you've got two full lanes of prime road/highway pretty much to yourself - with some really fantastic climbing if you want it. Just don't hit the cow.


As we're descending from the park, the van pictured above that had been run over by the cow, comes cruising by with our new friend from the night before driving at about 35 mph - apparently taking his trusty steed home to be put out to pasture.

As much as I love a weekend in Garrison - the rats of the rug get even more excited about a trip to Grandma and Grandpa's. Horse riding, chores (feeding the animals), climbing haystacks, chasing cats, the nearby playground, the novelty of different toys, etc... and adoring grandparents all are things that they look forward to a lot.
Annie riding "Chief" - the girls favorite horse.
Queens of the haystack
Evening bull riding contest before bed. Chesney won this night.

Heck of a game Sunday night to cap it all off.

Scene from the Kindergarten Halloween Party

We're at Kylie's Halloween Party yesterday, the kids are all sitting politely on the rug in their costumes, with the teachers leading them in their Halloween songs that they're all singing pretty enthusiastically. They finish one song, and the teachers are in the process of picking new little helpers for the next song when we hear the following dialogue...

5 year old boy -
"Mrs. Jensen, he said a mean word"
No response, so he followed with the graphic details...
"He said bitch"

To his credit, it worked.

Mrs. Jenson - cool as a cat and not drawing any additional attention to the culprit or the tattle tale..
"Please use nice words" and on she went into the next song, handled like a true master.

Except - every adult in the room got the giggles, the kind that got me and my buddies kicked out of sex ed class everytime they tried to talk about sensitive material in middle school. One adult would get it under control, only to lose it again when they made eye contact with another.

Oh yeah, the kids looked cute in their costumes too...