Seattle

Without skiing and climbing trips to report I find my life is fairly bland... in relative terms. I've been missing the backcountry and have been scheming up some plans to get out as soon as it gets slightly nice. I had the idea of biking about 60 miles into the Cascades with a bivy sack, some clothes, a lot of food, and a stove; park the bike and start on a solo hiking trip for a night. Get out there and push myself as hard as I can for 48 hours. I want to seek some of the adventure that I lost since last year. Who knows if I'll get around to it, but it's on my mind. 

On another note, I keep trying to post some of my training on here but find it's quite boring. I get outside for runs here and there and have even managed a couple of cold bikes, but for the most part it's all inside on the trainer, in the pool, or at the gym. And let's face it... me telling you that I ran 8 miles on the treadmill constantly gets boring. So while things are slow now, I'll get on top of it when I'm outside more and getting out to races. Races start at the end of April and will run through August for sure, and hopefully through October. 

I've also been trying to post about Fritz coming out the other weekend. It's been a while since we were drinking beers together in grad school. Fritz now has his dream job over in Minneapolis being something weird like an economist. He got a trip together to come over here and hang out for the weekend. As it just so happens... it was rainy in Seattle. Weird, I know. 

We spent our first night drinking as much good beer as possible and sitting outside by a fire eating pizza. Who can beat that? Too good. We basically spent the entire weekend catching up and playing tourist: checking out the Space Needle, going downtown to PIke Place Market, drinking a ton of coffee, nursing a hangover, riding the ferries out to the peninsula, and eating sushi. All of that pretty much summarizes Seattle.