This may very well be my last journal entry ever… unless I can somehow ftp from the netherworld. Tomorrow Josh and I leave for Yosemite. Actually, it’s not a very dangerous trip at all, I just wanted to be dramatic. I can’t afford risking my life right now, there’s something important I need to do first…
Archive for January, 2004
I wrote all that about being so good at doing things alone and then I bailed on myself today. I had planned to go biking again at Chutes but didn’t for various reasons… or excuses… mainly a mix between the cold (and my fear of getting sick before my trip) and the pain in my right leg that has yet to even subside, let alone go away. I am really anxious to go on the snowshoeing trip this weekend. It’s definitely something different… looks like we may go to Yosemite, but we aren’t quite sure yet. I have only been to Yosemite once, back in ‘95 (no, not ‘97 this time, Josh) and it was great… though I don’t think I really appreciated it back then at the wee age of 17. I have some pics and very precious few memories (9 years is like a few millenia as far as my feeble brain is concerned) but I remember mostly just enjoying being somewhere different and being with my friends.
This time, I will likely be with only one friend, Josh, and though I will enjoy the feeling of being away from the usual (home, work, work…) I think I will mostly enjoy being there. It’ll be like White Mountain last summer… immense contentment. I also hope to do some great photography… though that is somehow secondary to the trip itself. Let’s see how quick those Canon batteries die in the cold…
I biked Chutes today… alone… and it kicked my ass… and that is sad. I used to do the 3 bs like they were nothing… ok… that’s not true… but they were nothing to my legs, just my lungs and head, especially in the heat. Oh well, I’ll get back there again, but it looks like it’s going to take a bit of time.
The thing I may be most happy about right now is the fact that I actually get up off my ass and work out alone. I run alone, bike alone, hike alone… and that is something I have never had the motivation to do. It’s not as though I like being alone now opposed to having company, it’s just that it is now worth it to me to go alone, whereas before I just thought it would be too boring… and of course, I was pretty lazy. Well, we’ll see if Nick really wants to bike tomorrow. If so, I will have to pay another visit to the 3 bs.
Lan and I took our bikes up to Silverado Canyon to ride up the trail I hiked yesterday, but we only got a mile up it and Lan wasn’t feeling to good so we decided to turn back. It was a decent hike, but a really tough uphill ride. I left my bike in the car though, so I’ll be biking every day until my knees feel good enough to run again.
Tomorrow will be a week after I did my 15 mile hike to Santiago Peak, and I have still not fully healed from it. That didn’t stop me, though, from attempting to hike to Bedford Peak today, which at a mere 3,600′ pales in comparison to last weeks hike, but was still lots of fun because I went with Tony, Leslie, Bonny and Jarr. Unfortunately, Bonny started feeling sick about a mile and a half into the hike, after about 1000′ of gain, so I walked her back to the car, which she took home, then I turned around and hauled ass on up to try and catch up. I left the parking lot an hour and ten minutes behind them, but caught up 15 minutes after they turned around before finding the peak to head back to the car before dark, an hour and fifteen minutes later. No matter, I can always try this one again, maybe I’ll look at a map or something next time.
Today I learned that trekking poles are awesome. I picked up a pair of Leki Super Makalu COR-TEC poles, and they are pretty damn cool. It’s amazing how much stress they can take off of your knees, and that is what I really need. My recently injured knee is doing pretty good, but my childhood injured knee is doing very bad….
This coming weekend I will be snowshoeing with Josh… dunno where yet. Maybe I’ll get to go back to White Mountain, but it doesn’t matter to me. I just want to get out and do something, especially since I won’t be able to take off any Saturdays for a while now that I have this big project at work. Friday leave work, pick up shoes then leave direct from REI. Good plan.
I guess it’s time to post some new photography to the site. I will undoubtedly take some great pics while snowshoeing… snow is good. Maybe I even got a few decent shots today, though I doubt it. I think I may have only taken 10 shots or so… how pathetic.
Wow… I actually made it to a peak today. It was quite the formidable task, too, and I did it solo, which is also new. I took Holy Jim Trail to Main Divide to Santiago Peak. That’s about 15 miles round trip, with 4,000 ft of gain. Needless to say, but I’ll say it anyway… I’m tired. I cannot remember my legs ever having been in this kind of pain. It hurts in muscles that have never even been sore before. The hike up took 3 1/2 hours, plus a 15 minute break for snacks. The way down was about 2 1/2 hours of moving, plus a half hour of talking to people and giving moleskin to some dude with really bad blisters. That’s about all I’ll say about the trip until I do a write up on it except that it was great to finally make it to a summit goal. The writeup will be short, with just a few pics, but hey, I gotta write up my first successful peak hike. It doesn’t make up for the 2 failures at White Mountain, or the 2 failures at San Jacinto, but it’s a good start.
If my legs work at all tomorrow, I will run again. It feels really good to be active again. And this time I’m actually using the workout tracker Excel chart that Josh made. I’ve worked out for 8 of the past 15 days… and that doesn’t include gym workouts at Tony’s, every M-W-F, well, at least it’s supposed to be. I took over 2 months off and just started again a week ago. Let’s hope I can keep up all this activity… if I do, I’ll be in the best shape of my life before summer.
Running sucked today. I tried to cut my time a little bit, and I ended up getting too much of a stitch and doing only one lap. I read somewhere online some steps to prevent or at least minimize stitches, but they basically mean going slow and slumping over. Oh well, I guess I will get better over time, but it really sucks to be held back by stupid stitches, rather than by my legs or my lungs. I can’t push myself at all yet, becuase I will get the stitch on the right, then the left, until it is unbearable. You can’t run through them… I’ve tried. They only get worse. From what I’ve read, they are actually caused by a cramping of the muscles that hold your organs up to your diaphragm. Taking long deep breaths while running is supposed to help, and if you start to feel a stitch you need to slow down, bend over a little, and apply pressure with your hand to the area that is stitching. It’s very uncomfortable. The alternative is to run slow enough so you don’t get them, but for me, that is really damn slow. Right now I’m averaging just over 5 mph, that’s about as fast as I can go (on average, because I go faster, then when I stitch I go really slow, then repeat) without needing to stop altogether. Let’s see how I do in 2 weeks…
Oops, guess it’s not tomorrow. Guess I lied. Guess I’m stating the obvious. Guess I’m not really guessing at all, am I?
I have started becoming more active again. With 2 biking and 3 running days in the past week and a day, I feel pretty good. I even worked out at Tony’s twice in the past week. I really do need to get back to the shape I was in a few months ago, then get into the shape I was working towards back then. Maybe it will really happen this time if I don’t do something stupid like jump over a fence and jack up my knee… which seems to finally be healing nicely. The running and biking haven’t hurt it just yet, though an attempted flying spin kick at Lan did pull a little in a painful area, but only very briefly.
I watched a bunch of videos I downloaded of mountain bikers and “urban mountain bikers” doing some crazy trails and tricks, and the feelings I got reminded me of when I tried to start skating 2 years ago and watched all those skateboard videos. They give you a bit of a feeling of invincibility, and they seem to instill some dangerously large amounts of false confidence. I will say, though, that I benefited from the false confidence yesterday on Chutes, because I became much better at dropping off of little tiny things, which I used to just roll down, and now I kind of hop off a bit. What a difference. I really want to ride Mathis, and finally try Rock-It. We’ll see, gotta get a little more into it again first. Strangely enough both times at Santiago Oaks this past week I have been able to ride both b1 and b2. At the peak of my riding (all 4 months of it) I could do 2 and 3, but not 1. Strange, huh? I expect to be able to do all three by the beginning of February. I hope to also be able to climb Mathis again, non-stop, in February. Then I want to be able to do laps up Mathis and down Cholla and Rock-It. Ah… to dream… but who knows, if I stick with it, it shouldn’t be all that hard. I was making lots of progress all summer, even towards the end there before I got hurt. Hadn’t seen a plateau yet.
Running is going well, I ran 30 minutes today, I think I did 2.75 miles. I could be wrong, I’ll have to measure it with the bike one of these days. The plan is to run with Asminda Monday through Thursday, but with the new baby I don’t know how possible that will be. She couldn’t run today for some reason unbeknownst to me, and tomorrow she and her baby have a doctor’s appt. We should be able to run on Wednesday and Thursday then, but we’ll have to see about that. The big problem is that I am right now at a higher level than her, and if I continue to run more than her the gap between us will likely only widen, which means I will not be getting all that much of a workout when I run with her. No bother, though, it will still be enjoyable, and if she gets in much better shape because of it, it will be worth it. Josh spent lots of time waiting around for me while biking, time for me to do the same for someone… at least until I become so damn awesome that I will have to wait for everyone, including Josh. Actually, now that he will soon be a daddy, that may even be possible… ha ha ha ha haaaaa! My master plan has worked! In order to slow Josh down I slipped him a concoction of Viagra, some fertility drugs and ginseng so that he would become a daddy. It worked! It was so much easier than breaking his legs, too…
I’m a bit pissed off. I bought buistudios.com a few years ago, but this time, when it came time to renew, I somehow didn’t get the email. Maybe it was Yahoo!’s spam filter. Anyhow, basically I didn’t know until the name was expired. Lan found out because his email stopped working. Kinda sucked. Anyhow, I decided it wasn’t worth it to pay $20 to register.com to continue with them, so I had to wait the 45 day holding period until the name would become available to be purchased through another registrar. I figured this would be ok, how many people out there want the web name buistudios.com? I guess there was at least one. On day 46 I went to buy the name back, and found that it had already been registered by “Domain Reg LLC”. A brief search for this name led me to sites of other people who had also lost their domains to Domain Reg LLC because for whatever reason they didn’t renew in time. You can read about others’ experiences here and here. While I know they didn’t “steal” anything from me and they seem to be perfectly within legal right to do what they are doing, it is still a shitty thing and it pisses me off. Oh well…
I have more to write but I just got off the phone after a long conversation and now it’s past time for bed. More to follow… tomorrow.
It was great to go biking again, even if it was just a single Chutes ride. Gotta start somewhere… Actually, though, I did better than I expected, but bad enough to be upset about the 4 months of downtime. I was really getting somewhere, and now I have to almost start over again. I was surprised that I was able to make it up b1 and b3 though, first of all because I had never made it up b1 before (it was more hardpacked this time) but also because when I first started biking I couldn’t do any of them. It’s nice to know I’m not all the way back where I was a year ago, that would really suck. Hopefully I’ll do Whiting Ranch after work 3 or 4 times a week, and once I get some shoes I will be running again, too. That just leaves swimming, but I really hate swimming and am not looking forward to it at all.
I have started a little side project that hopefully I will be able to launch in a month or less… we’ll see. Just in case it doesn’t happen, though, I’m not going to bother going into any details or descriptions of what I plan to do. What would be the point?
I actually have an itch to try my hand at some creative writing, something I haven’t done in almost 9 years… damn. The funny thing is that it’s hard to find the time to sit and write for long periods of time without interruption. It’s hard to find long periods of time period. If I do, though, I am going to try and start writing again, and of course I’ll post the crap on the site, so that hopefully someone will come along and read it and send me an email about it. Doesn’t matter if it’s bad or good, it would just be nice to be read.
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