Sunday, March 25, 2007

Back-Country Skiing in Tahoe


Fully recovered from our 26.2 miles of running along Napa vineyards, we ended up climbing up 1800 feets to the top of Mount Tamarack on our backcountry skis, with Wei and Mike (our faithfull travelling companions).
The effort (2.5 miles in more than 2 hours ;-) was well rewarded by the 10 minutes ski down hill.
The weather was great, the views amazing and the snow still pretty good for a 65 degrees fahrenheit (18 degrees celsius) day.
Enjoy the pictures here and here.
Maureen

Sunday, March 18, 2007

Mendocino

We discovered Mendocino this last week-end with Mike and Wei. We did some hiking, biking, food tasting, hot-tubbing, and whale watching. Pictures here.

Sunday, March 04, 2007

Napa Valley marathoning

If you hung out with Maureen lately, you probably remember her mentioning preparing for her first marathon (if you don't you must have only been paying attention to the remaining 20% of conversation topics). Well Sunday was the big day. Needless to say, our whole weekend was dedicated to the event. Misha, Maureen and I headed up to Napa on Saturday to pick up our bibs and other random schwag at the marathon expo. Maureen made us sit through the first 30 min of a discussion panel on "tips and trick to handle the Napa course" which included useful advice such as "uphill will feel harder than downhill" and "don't go too fast or you will hurt", after which we went on to discussing the optimal GU shot intake schedule (a topic near to Misha's heart) and had some medical fun with body mass measurements (lots of joke opportunities there). At 5h30PM, we had a special dinner prepared at the hotel where Marisa and Steve joined us (I forgot to mention that Steve, probably intrigued by Maureen's description of her learnings from the panels, had decided to join the fun and registered on the spot). For Dr. Zatsmans tips on making sure to ensure adequate calorie intake click here.
A marathon starts in the evening: you prepare your gear, pin your bib to your top, set redundant alarm clocks (Misha had trouble with that specific task, as it turned out the next morning), and try to fall asleep as early as possible.


Wake up is at 4AM to start fueling up: oatmeal with blueberries and bananas worked for us. As you can tell from the picture, Maureen is enjoying her breakfast in bed. 4h35AM noticing that the room next door is awfully quiet, give wake up call to Misha who encountered technical difficulties setting his alarm. 4h55AM leave for the finish line, where a fleet of school busses is waiting to shuttle us to the start. 6h10AM reach the starting line, it's pretty chilly (~40F) but there is no wind, so conditions look optimal. After a jolly good time in the port-a-potty lines and meeting up with Mr. Baker, it's finally time: 7AM h-hour of d-day! After this point, I can't report much of our virgin marathonians adventure since I did not run with them. But judging from their times, they all had a great day and, most importantly, met their goal of a 4h run (Steve 3h44, Misha 3h55 and Maureen 4h00). If you were ever involved in something like this, you know that is REALLY fast for your first try. For my part of the story I thought the conditions were great and the course was very fast, although it got a little lonely at times. I went a little too fast given that this was supposed to be a training run for Arizona, but I guess I was overexcited to feel that this old body still has some juice left in it. After getting mad at myself for running the first half in 1h21, I slowed down to 1h29 for the next 13.1 miles.
Award ceremony, hottub at the hotel, and back to San Francisco. They don't know it yet, but they'll want to do it again!