These may well be the last set of fall climbing pictures for the year. Ieva and I are heading up to the Adirondacks for Thanksgiving, with snow on the way. Hopefully we’ll get to do some ice climbing while we’re there, and then we’re on to Stratton for some snowboarding with a bunch of friends.
Here are the best pictures from yet another perfect day bouldering with Doug and Zach.
The leaves seem to have stayed on the trees much longer this year than usual. When the air’s crisp, the leaves are changing, and the skies are blue, I think that climbing in the northeast U.S. is about as good as it gets: the friction’s great, and the colors are unlike anything else in the world. Here are some pictures from a very cool day of bouldering yesterday with a great group of friends.
Ieva got invited out to Marmot’s offices for work, so I decided to meet her out there so that we could go to Yosemite. Of course, with getting the business going this year, I wouldn’t have much time, but we figured we could manage 10 days. Just enough time for a short wall and some good free climbing.
Basically, we had an awesome time. We did Skull Queen on Washington Column, had a great time, and had amazing luck with the weather. We got to see and meet lots of great old and new friends (one of my favorite parts about climbing in the valley, actually). We got to work on a new project and get new motivation for training when we get home. We fit in some super high-quality bouldering in Bishop, and I got to go see my sister in Fort Worth, TX on the way home.
That was about as good as we could have done with only 10 days! Here is the gallery of the best pictures and commentary from the trip.
A couple months ago, our good friend Jay Aument gave us a ring, and wanted to know if we wanted to join him and his girlfriend Diana in a 24-hour mountain bike race (the Ford 24-hour Champion Challenge at Seven Springs, PA). 
Jay assured us that there were no performance expectations (we hadn’t been on mountain bikes in years), and that we’d all just be out for a good time.
We were not disappointed. Diana’s friend Jean joined us on the team, making it five of us to split the 24 hours, which makes things much easier. Jean’s partner Kristen and friend Joyce came along too. Wow, what a group. These people are the bomb. We had an absolute blast the whole time. Basically, it seemed like a lot of partying and having as much fun as possible, interspersed with some rough mountain biking.
The course pretty tough for us! Really technical, but Jay, Diana, and Jean all had good advice and coaching for us that really helped out. I feel like I learned a ton in the process. No major injuries on our team, which was a big plus (although I did take some chunks out of my arm and got some road rash trying to make up for lost training time the week before).
We’ve got to figure some other event that we can do with this group. It was way too much fun not to put together something else with them. Here are some of the better pictures from the weekend.
Just wanted to post some nice pictures from bouldering during the month of June. We spent a lot of time climbing at Elk Town, and there’s also a few good climbing pictures from the long July 4th weekend. There’s definitely a lot of good bouldering in central Pennsylvania.
Well, after a whole lot of training and a lot of anticipation, I finally got to run the Mohican 100, a 100-mile trail run in central Ohio, and the first national 100-mile trail championships.
This whole thing started about two years ago, when I started doing long (30+ mile) day hikes with my friend Ray. We did the JFK 50 together. That led to the Laurel Highlands Ultra (70 miles) six months later. On Ieva’s and my last big road trip, I kept up my long runs. Finally, in December, I decided that I might as well give a 100-miler a shot, since I had such a good base, and had done so well during the last race.
You can read about a lot of the training in my previous posts in the running category. Basically, I felt fairly ready for this race, but I was acutely aware of the fact that there was a lot more that I could have done to prepare. In the end it came down to time — I was already spending 20 hours per week getting cardiovascular exercise, and neither my marriage nor my business would withstand much more. 
I did what I could, and hoped that it would be enough to get me to the finish line. If I happened to have a stellar day, and did everything right, maybe I’d get a good finish time, too. I figured that sub-24-hours would be great, but I’d be happy with 30 and an official finish.
The weather conditions turned out to be perfect. 70 degrees and partly cloudy, which is truly a blessing in Ohio in mid-June. The race took place practically on the summer solstice, so that would minimize the night running as well, which can be a little demoralizing.
I was fairly nervous for this race, which is pretty unusual for me. I haven’t gotten this uptight about something in a really long time. I think that I had so much effort invested already, and so many friends and family knew about it, that I felt quite a bit of pressure to pull it off. It would have been very difficult to go home empty-handed after such a long training cycle. I don’t know if I would have had another in me, since I’ve really been wanting to spend more time climbing.
I made a lot of mistakes in the first half of the race:
After paying a little for those mistakes, I had the incredibly good fortune to run into Paul Schmidt, a very cool guy who has more ultramarathon experience than anyone I’d ever met (56 or so completed 100-milers). He had a bad achilles tendon, and was considering whether it was worth it for him to continue the race. When he heard about how my race was going, he offered to run the rest with me. He’d gain a partner, and I’d gain a ton of experience.
It felt like a bit of a gamble for me to drop my strategy and start following someone new, but to be honest, the thing that I wanted most out of this whole experience was to gain an education, so I figured this was the best thing that I could do. Off we went.
Paul was just a fountain of good advice. He’d tell me what I was doing wrong, and what to do to fix it. I’d obey despite any of my own instincts, and he was always right. It only took a few iterations like that for me to just resign myself to following whatever he said. Ieva laughed when I described the previous 20 miles: “Sensei speaks, I obey.” It was pretty funny, because I was just hanging on behind him, absorbing everything that I could.
Some of his advice sounds kind of obvious, but it’s hard to emphasize how true it is when you follow it to the extent that he’s talking about. I’m probably not going to run ultras quite the same way ever again as a result. Here are some of the more important ones:
You have to run all the time if you don’t want to walk most of the time. Paul runs practically everything — up hills, down hills, flats. This was completely counter to a lot of what I’d read and trained for, and was one of the hardest points for me to accept. He’s right, though. You can run efficiently up hill if you need to, and it’s worth it to avoid breaking rhythm if you’re serious about making good time. Otherwise, you’ll just walk almost all of the second half of the race. It doesn’t really feel any worse to run than to walk, and you can tell yourself that you’ll get done sooner, too.I actually liked running all night. I was prepared for it mentally, and it had a cool seriousness to it — you knew that you weren’t doing something run of the mill. We really started reeling people in during this section. He had said to me earlier that the race only begins after 100km (63 miles). I thought he meant in terms of effort. Then I realized that he also meant in terms of competition. That’s when you really start racing.
Can I take this opportunity to mention how much my crew rocked? My Mom, Dad, and Ieva stayed up the whole time and provided support, warm food, gear, foot rubs, you name it. They were the absolute best. It’s hard to emphasize what a selfless thing it is to crew for someone running a 100-miler. They say that “crew” stands for “cranky runner, endless waiting.” Thank you, guys.
You get a big mental boost when the sun finally comes up. I probably should have pushed harder and kept the pace up, but I was running alone at that point, I had no close time goals left, and honestly I just got lazy. I trudged and jogged the final 10 miles.
It took a while for it to sink in that I was finally done. It was hard to believe that I was finally allowed to stop running. After all, I’d started running, then watched the sun come up, then watched the sun go down, then watched it come back up again. I felt pretty good. I sat in a chair, had a big breakfast and a beer, and hung out with everyone for a few hours before heading back to the hotel for a nap. My time was 28 hours 39 minutes. I came in 20th in the championships out of 28, and 62nd overall out of 135.
When I got to the finish line, I whispered to Ieva, “you know, that was a really good experience, and I’m very glad that I did it, but I don’t think I’m going to do one of these ever again.” OK, maybe that was a bit hasty, but I’m definitely not going to do another 100-miler for a while. Ieva and I had a talk a month or so ago, and it didn’t take much for me to realize that it would be a lot more fun to work at pushing my climbing as far as I can with my wife as my partner, rather than going out and running by myself.
I’m really looking forward to applying a lot of what I’ve learned from this experience to big walls and long climbing days. Maybe someday after a lot of good climbing years with my wife, I can come back to 100-milers and work on my times.
Ten of us met up in the Red River Gorge, KY over memorial day weekend (five rode down in the front of our truck to save on gas!). Ieva got home from Greenland, slept for a few hours, and then Eriks, Doug, Tess, Ieva and I piled into the truck and started driving.
We totally lucked out on weather — it rained like hell on the way down, and then it was blue skies for every day that we were there. Perfect temperatures, too; not too hot or humid.
When we showed up at Miguel’s Pizza on Saturday night, and it was loaded! I’ve never seen Miguel’s that busy, and after talking with him the next day, neither had he. The parking lot was jammed, with everyone double-, triple-, and quadruple-parked. Even all of the aisles were full. At least 20 cars couldn’t fit in at all, and were lined up along the side of the road. There was a new climbing film premier that night, followed by a pretty big raging party. I briefly woke up in the middle of the night as the truck cap filled with the light of a wax bomb (they seem to be turning into a Miguel’s tradition).
The next day, we somehow managed to avoid the crowds. We wound up at Funk Rock City on Sunday, and there was hardly anyone else there. What a fantastic crag — there are great sport and trad routes there — and we practically had it all to ourselves!
This was a really cool crowd to go climbing with. We also had Bowers, Michael and Sharmishtha, and Lauren and Nate (who I hadn’t met before that weekend). Lots of hanging out, goofing around.
I was also pretty psyched to finally land my first small jumps while on a slackline. I had worked on them last season without any success. Miguel’s has a really good “trick” line that’s doubled 1-inch webbing, sewn together, set low, and pulled super tight. I’m going to have to set up a second line like it in the backyard.
A lot of people got to push themselves on this trip — there were a few first leads and first falls, all of which went really well. We had a really good atmosphere going that was pretty condusive to progress (and fun). Ieva, Eriks and I got to stay until Wednesday. It’s only been a few months since our last long road trip, and I’m already dying for another one. Hopefully it won’t be too far off. At any rate, I only have two more weeks until the race, and then it’s back to devoting all my free time to climbing again!
Our two fantastic friends Michael and Sharmishtha got married this weekend. It was one of the best weddings I’ve ever been to. It was a great location, laid back, and so many of our climbing friends were there. The party basically lasted from Friday night until Sunday night. We also got to hang out with Sharmishtha’s family, who came over from India and England. They were a blast.
I can’t believe how much activity got packed into those few days. I feel like I fit in more quality time with my friends than I’ve gotten all year. This was actually Michael and Sharmishtha’s second wedding — they’ve already had one in India. By popular demand, they had the U.S. version too.
Congratulations, lovebirds! Here are some of the pictures that I took. Sharmishtha’s cousin Amlan took a lot of really nice pictures of the whole event. I’ll probably be able to get a copy of his shots later and post some of them here as well.
Two weeks ago Ieva got an out-of-the-blue offer to go to Greenland for a week. Eric Post, a professor at Penn State, does research up there and needed someone to go along on this trip to, well, basically just carry heavy loads.
She left on Saturday, the day of Michael and Sharmishtha’s wedding. She was really bummed that she had to miss the ceremony itself (and the partying!), but she did get to hang out quite a bit for the rest of the day.
She doesn’t really know a whole lot more about the trip, since it was such short notice. She probably only talked with the members of the other group for about an hour total before leaving. In any case, we bought a new digital camera for the occasion, and I’m sure she’ll have lots to tell when she gets back. I got an email from her this morning that said that she’s tired, but doing great. She got to ride in the cockpit for a while, which is really nice considering that the flight is on a C-130 (military cargo plane), so the atmosphere everywhere else in the plane is less than stellar, so I’m told.
In any case, here are some interesting links that I found while I was trying to dig up any information beforehand that I could:
I’ll let you know when I hear more from her, but I suspect that we won’t hear much until she gets back!
I was riding my bike to Rothrock for a run this afternoon, when I realized that there was a big black bear right at the next turn! Then I saw that there were two tiny cubs with her! After a brief moment, they went into a small stream’s gully and I was forced to consider, “do I really want to start stalking a mother bear and her cubs?”
So after dumping my bike and carefully trotting over to the gully, I couldn’t see any sign of them. I wasn’t really looking too hard, since I couldn’t see very well into the gully despite being right on the edge of it. I didn’t want to surprise them. After a while, I began to think that they were probably gone. When I turned around to look back towards the bike, they were coming out of the gully just 100 feet away. 
After the mother spent some time looking back and forth at me and the cubs, they started walking across the field, and then broke out into a full run. I took as many pictures as my little camera could (it’s slow), while still admiring the scene outside the camera. The mother bear was gorgeous — she had a nice shiny black coat that shimmered in the sunlight. She waited at the edge of the woods for the little fuzzy cubs to catch up to her, and then they disappeared into the brush.
I was really excited, since I’ve been running in Rothrock for years, waiting to see a bear. What luck! It’s totally paid off to always carry a small camera on runs. Great, now I’m probably going to feel like I should start carrying the SLR…
Be sure to check out all of the pictures here.