Little Rock Travel

When I have been travelling lately I have been thinking to myself is this a place I could live?  For some it is immediately a definite nope.  For others it is a maybe. And for some it is a almost no brainer. 

It is not that I want to move somewhere but that I need something to do while I am stuck on the plane to my real home and have finished my book or my climbing magazine or my two free drinks if I am lucky enough. 

Also because Steph and I have been looking for houses for two years and we are at that exhausted time where things just never seem to be the right one or the right price or location. It must be easier for me to compromise on a location in other states when you are only there for a day and the day turns out good. 

With little rock it had the good qualifications.  Cheaper housing that was in good condition.  Cheap cost of living in general.  A climbing gym that was 6.25$ to drop in on for an evening of bouldering and also my personal highlight of the trip.  The bike path leading to "Big Dam Bridge".  

My real motivation to go to Little Rock, AR was a work trip to a paper mill south of there that makes paperboard going into packaging. Without mentioning manufacturer names I will say that anyone who eats a tub of ice cream will appreciate their paperboard mill in AR as this is the board typically compromising of a bottom or side layer to this container. 

In my 4 hours of daylight left after the audit I got to run on the bike trails around little rock which are being greatly expanded and get a few hours of bouldering in before heading back to the hotel.  This lead me to the realization that travel can be OK if you get 2-4 hours to do what you want at the end of the day before going back to the angry company or on to the next mill on day two of the audit trip.  For me part two of this trip was exactly that.  But at least for this trip I was able to go running the day before and clear my head between days one and two.


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...

So I ended up getting in 8 miles of a trail run with about a thousand feet of vertical gain right out of the foothills of SLC.  It was a great run.  That teamed with a really friendly Mormon company contact that I was auditing made for a good day. After that as I was driving out I got to stop at this college student house and walk a slackline.  It made me feel really good to walk the line and get limber again after the run.  Now I am back in the airport waiting for the plane to leave.   I hope that I get some good rest this time for the red eye. If all of my audits were like that with the free time in a location that worked afterwords I feel like I would be a sponsored athlete by now...

Getting the best workout in that you can in a busy schedule!

This week I am taking the shortest trip to Salt Lake City Ever.  I will be there for one night before I jump back on a plane and take a red eye.    

The secret to sleeping on a red eye for me is getting in plenty of exercise and getting a seat next to someone that does not snore and as far away from the engines as possible.  I have taken a total of nine red eye flights in the last forty months as I think about all the travel I have done for auditing forest products companies.  It is not something I am proud of, nor is it something that I would wish upon anyone, but it is a necessary evil for my current job.  When company contacts ask me if I want earplugs to tour their mill I often find that I follow the age old adage that I learned from Ray Berthiume  “take two for safety”.  One for the mill and one for the red eye home.

My dad once told me this story of the time that he used to take the bus from Boston College to Maine for summers when he was a student and the strategy that he had was to always get on the bus after it was half full.  His reasoning to me was this:  "If I get on the bus when it is half full I am able to choose who I want to sit next to and minimize sitting next to the passenger that takes up a lot of space or doesn’t smell nice." 

I find myself thinking of this as I take flights and what type of strategy I have to avoid exactly that.  I have some fond memories of the time that I was in Hawaii but I do also greatly remember that my seat got upgraded to first class and I gave it to Steph while I took her seat next to the crying baby that lasted for 3 of the 6 hours.   I feel like it is a crap shoot and there is nothing you can do except for pray that you get a good luck of the draw. Part of me also wonders if it is possible to get an exit row seat and then say I am not willing to help if there is a really smelly b.o. ridden passenger in the seat next to me.

As I am in Salt Lake City today my stratagem is to run 7 miles or as much as possible at altitude as training and do as much physical activity as possible in after my audit and before I drive to the airport.  I have flown enough that this flight I also have the deck stacked in my favor by getting an upgrade to first class.  I hope that it all works out to me sleeping on the plane.  Looking at SLC if I have a few extra minutes I am going to go to the Black Diamond store and headquarters as I think it would be neat. 

The hardest part of this job is that auditing can be draining on the mental side and travelling is draining on the energy side of things so you combine them together and you get a bad combo where you find yourself ina neat place that you should be enjoying and have no energy. I find that going some place and not actually seeing it in your way at least for me is more frusterating then just staying home. I try to combat all of this travel with nightly exercise and an extra hour here and there.

I guess we will see what gets done.  I am hoping that the audit contacts at the mill are friendly and non-argumentative.