Fire in my belly re-ignited

It's been awhile since my last post, mostly because Elissa and I recently moved from Thousand Oaks down to Pasadena.  We were kind of living out of both places for a bit and didn't get the internet hooked up for awhile.  A lot has happened since my last post, good times were aplenty.

Mt. San Antonio w/ Doberteen & Wickland

Hit up 9 peaks on that run pictured above (W. Baldy, Mt. San Antonio, Thunder, Telegraph, Timber, Bighorn, Ontario, Cucamonga, Harwood), I was suffering but Eric was nice enough to take it easy so that I could keep up.  He's looking great for Wasatch 100 coming up.  Here's the profile of the 32mi/11.8k hike/run:

Shortly after that jaunt Elissa and I snuck up to the motherland, Northern California, to visit my parents, brother, aunt, uncles and friends for about a week.



Spanish Peak with Mom



End of August and Spanish Peak still has snow, Elissa can hardly believe it.



Even snuck in some fishing at Buck's Lake with a couple new friends.


Now that we're finally settled into our new place in Pasadena, I've been able to get into a routine with running:  hitting up the treadmill and stairmill before work on work days, and running around the San Gabriels on my days off.  I've started to up my mileage a bit, nothing crazy yet but some decent weeks and I'm stoked to race again.  While I only have two races offically scheduled, Noble Canyon 50k and Los Pinos 50k, I'm also eyeing the Santa Monica Mountains 50k, Ray Miller 50/50, Leona Divide 50M and I kind of feel AC100 calling me.  Seems like yesterday I ran my first hundred and loved not having ANY races on the horizon.  Now that I've seen some closely contested races go down at Mt. D and the Bulldog, I want to get in on that.

Living closer to work makes life less stressful and gives me at least an hour of more free time everywork day.  Work itself has been trying lately, emotionally draining and the frustrations from moving into the new hospital building continue, but I'm working to fix the things that can be fixed and trying to accept the things I can not, but it is getting better and I'm determined to help fix things so that I can be more like my old self at work and less like the grumpy guy I frequently am.

Seems like everyone ends their blog posting with some silly music video.  So here's what was hot in Australia about 15 years ago when I was lucky enough to be a Rotary Exchange Student for a summer:

Finally a decent week... but poison oak returns

75 miles last week, which isn't anything to write home about, but it's more than I've run for awhile, and I had 2 good climbing runs this week.  The first, Eaton to Mt. Wilson and back:

I really like running down in the San Gabriels because you can run long uphills and long down hills, really lets me lock into a rhythm and hone my climbing and descending.

Saturday I ran with Dom and Tom, and Tom's dog Cormac, from Chantry up to shortcut, then to some other aid station of the Mt.D course, and back down to Chantry:

Absolutely loved watching all of the Mt. Dissapointment 50k runners pushing hard in the heat.  Saw a ton of familiar faces racing and helping out at aid stations.  Glad I wasn't racing it though, not quite ready yet.  I'm ready to run that far, but I want to seriously compete at my next race and it'll be a few weeks until I feel ready.  That next race will be Noble Canyon 50k, can't wait to go camp out and run a competitive race.

Got some poison oak running around with Dom again, hopefully it'll subside quickly.