Learning to Jump Rope

Yesterday I was learning or relearning to jump rope for the first time in my life again and I had to laugh.  I forgot how hard and uncoordinated I always felt with this.  There was also always a little of a thing where I was afraid that other kids would laugh at me.  Now as an adult I was with 15 other adults trying to jump rope and it is clear that once you have it, it is like riding  a bike.  My wife got it right off the bat.  I think she had done about a hundred jumps before I could do twenty.  Every time the rope hit my sneakers I just had to laugh.

This weekend is raining so no outdoor climbing for me :(

Multi-Sport Day

This past Saturday was really good.  At 7am Steph and I were up and quickly packing to make it out the door.  We were headed to Franconia Notch in NH.  The goal was another mountain Steph had never climbed and another tic for our list of summits together. 
Ever since our honeymoon I have been scheming to get us as a married couple to the top of all the 48 peaks.  The honeymoon was about 30 miles of the AT from hut to hut so it got us a good sampling of the whites and now slowly we have been getting ones here and there.  For April I was really happy that we could have an objective as hard and with as little snow that was a 4000 footer. 

We ended up in the parking lot to start hiking at 10am and quickly geared up and got going. The weather was great and the skies were blue. It was impressive how dry the first two miles of trail were.  After about three thousand feet in elevation it was snow the rest of the way. We had no extra gear.  No spikes, no snowshoes, no extra warm clothes and we were going almost light and fast alpine style was what was going on in the back of my head.  We passed one guy that seemed to think we were under prepared but we made it just fine.  When I told him my strategy was to let the group of 15 that had spikes and packed down the trail get us a highway to the summit I think he realized that there are lots of ways to get to Rome.  Whether or not you are doing what the Romans do.  Another one of the blogs that I have been following is the Committed blog.  It has a couple that really wants to do North America's 50 classic climbs and they have taken a video on each one.  One of the glacier climbs to the base of a Teton has them putting full on crampons onto a sneaker to just get by with what they have.  that 15 seconds of YouTube video tells it how I want it to be for me if I am going for that kind of objective.  So no, I do not think that we are to that caliber but "to each their own".
At the top I again became infatuated with Cannon and its cliff.  I took a picture because I thought it was a neat picture and we spent some time on the summit because it was a clear day and the weather was great.  Hopefully Steph's second alpine climb of length will be on cannon.  We have been thinking of doing Lakeview for a couple years and I think it is almost time.
The hike down was what we were un-used to. Slippery and steep for 3 miles down.  When we were back to the car I went and fished my victory beer out of the stream where it was being kept cold and we drove up to Echo Crag for a couple pitches before dark.  I ended up leading one climb that was about 55 feet to top rope the 4 climbs on either side of it.  In about an hour I got 5 climbs in and we were ready to drive home.

12 summits down as a couple and 5 pitches of training!

The Red Green Show

In Richmond they have completed half of a project repainting their bridge and they are supposed to resume after the winter and since seems to be over I have been waiting for the bridge to be completed.

I find myself thinking of when I was a kid and I used to watch the red green show where they make things out of duct aped together rusted cr@p and laugh about it. It reminds me that things can be creative and do not have to fit inside the norm. I am trying to just let myself run and be happy with my pace and distance whatever it is since I am just happy that I am getting out. The trails have gone from mud/snow to now snow/ice and they are much firmer than the soft fall and now we are entering both a drought and fire hazard and things are going to be dry.

At work we signed up for a relay for the burlington marathon so I have some extra training partners in the afternoons sometimes.  It is giving me a good goal to train for.  I am hoping that my almost 7 mile section I can do less than 8 minute miles over the course of things or less.  We are going to be making shirts for our teams with the Rainforest Alliance Seal on them  and hopefully the wording "sustainagility"  or maybe follow the frog as a little business thing.  I found out the other day that HR will pay for them which I am happy about. 

One thing that I keep revisiting is my rock climbing rack of gear.  By getting rid of certain gear you shave pounds of weight and hopefully help yourself for the final send.  I took my full rack of 20 plus cams and 20 plus draws and got it down to 7 cams and 12 combined draws and 6 nuts that will be pretty light in terms of weight this year.  I am excited to see if it is going to work. 

Today I spent at Rumney again and we did 4x5.10 climbs and 5x5.9s.  The day was really good and it was good to flash some 10s.  I wish I was able to push myself a little more training wise though.  None the less it was a good time.

Proactive Customer Service = Proactive training for climbing!

So in my current job customer service comes up almost every day.  Call clients more.  Educate them more. Work with clients outside of our normal services more.  Travel to meet customers more.  Each one of these things is great but they all require more work from one person... ME.   

I find all of these things stress full on my life and time and needs as a person, husband, and climber yet at the same time I feel like it mimics my training.  I am running and reading up on things and building bouldering gyms and partner relationships and working outside of my norm to try and perform.  All of these things are too close work.

The solution is to just go climbing...