Back Home, Briefly

Well here I am back from my trip to Maine and in the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex for approximately 28 hours before I fly out to Colorado Springs. The Maine trip was an awesome experience. It was a mixture of training camp + outdoor adventure trip and I had a lot of fun getting to do some activities I've never done, or hadn't done in a while. The trip included:

-a 3 day canoeing trip on the St. Croix river. I have quite a bit of canoeing experience but this was little different because we were on a river with quite a few small rapids. This broke up the paddling and made it a lot of fun. We were officially "camping" but it was the laziest camping I've ever done. The guides did everything for us including building fires, cooking meals, clean up, setting up rainfly's, and hauling our gear from camp to camp. About the only thing I did was paddle the canoe and spoon the food into my mouth. We did run everymorning on the trip and I had some fun swimming upstream in the river. It was cool how you could be moving up and then shift over slightly into a stronger current and all of a sudden you were getting pushed downstream. Very cool.

-Sea kayaking and kayak relay races. These were on 2 seperate days but were both a lot of fun.

-Whale watching. This was a little lame but we did see a whale!

-6 mile hike. It was nice not having 60lbs on my back for once during a hike!

-Lighthouse tour and standing at most easternly point of the U.S.

-Lobster boat cruise.

We did some other stuff too but those were the main events. Training was pretty solid as well and I enjoyed getting to run with the team. I hung in there pretty well for a triathlete! 5 other guys had their bikes with them so we did quite a few rides as well including a brutal 4hr, 70+ ride that left me pretty wiped for days. This was the 2nd longest ride of my life and did I mention that Maine has HILLS?! Nice, big rolling hills. Great for training and suffering.

Another memorable ride was on Sunday where me and another guy did a mountain climb in the fog. Visibility was about 20ft the whole 30min up and we were talking about how careful we were going to have to be on the way down. What do you know but as soon as we turn around at the top it starts to rain!! So we got to descend a mountain in pouring, freezing, stinging rain, and fog. We cut that ride short at about 2 hrs.

Swimming was good though not as consistent as I would have liked. Oh well. The temperatures were beautiful. Generally mid 60's was the high and early mornings were much cooler. The large, black moose fly's were probably the most annoying part of the trip.

This Saturday at 4pm E.T. I'll be racing my last race as a junior at the National Championships in Colorado Springs. I feel like I'm in great shape but I haven't raced or even done workouts to confirm that in about a month. I'm trying to go with the mindset just to have fun and race as hard and as smart as I can. I'm going to try to enjoy the experience as much as possible then get back to the miserable Texas heat were I can focus on Cross Country for the fall. Sub 27min 8k is the goal!!