5:45am, San Juan Traihead..Sean, Glen Redpath, iMichelle Barton, and Martin Brooks. Fresh as a daisy before running 18 miles and 4,000' of gain up and down the mountain.
Updates and photos to follow, but this epic training week has been a blast.
Long rides and runs with friends local and visiting from afar...Sharing the experience makes it so much more enjoyable and significant. Remember the time...?
I've spoken with the LovelyHotWheels much over the last month about the idea of happiness. She is on a 32 day business trip to Hong Kong, Bangkok, and Penang, Malaysia. She has had time to explore the cities, mountains and beaches but realized it was not as much fun alone, missing your loved ones. I recalled the quote from Into the Wild, on how "happiness is only real when shared". Of course, you don't need to move to the Alaskan wilderness and have an epiphany on your deathbed to realize this. Hopefully!
It's true. You can be satisfied with experiencing something fun or wonderful alone (insert inside Xian Burke joke/innuendo here) but compare that to sharing it with friends and loved ones. Personally I am convinced that the holy grail of happiness is sharing the richest experiences.
Stumbling on Happiness is a fantastic book on this topic, as is Dennis Prager's Happiness is a Serious Problem. Fascinating topic!
Absolutely BEAUTIFUL 18 mile run this morning on the San Juan Trail as the sun rose. I ran with Ultramarathon Studs Glen Redpath, Michelle Barton, and Martin Brooks. The San Juan Trail gains approximately 4,000' from the Hot Springs to Bluejay campgrounds. Luckily there is a fountain at BlueJay,so we were able to travel light, two bottles each. I easily could have slammed 4 bottles on the 1:49 to the top...or the 1:23 on the way down. The trail is not *THAT* technical or rocky as some make it out to be. It's my new favorite mountain run in Orange County.
The afternoon was a therapeutic but hard ocean swim with PEGGY aka Mark Matyazic (whose stress fracture is still healing...again), and a surfski paddle around Balboa Island from the Newport Aquatic Center.
Tomorrow morning is the dreaded HENSHAW LOOP ride, 110 miles of pain from Solana Beach inland to Lake Henshaw, past Mt. Palomar, and back. Riding with ubercyclists Loren Shaefer and Kurt Gensheimer. Good times.
Big training volume, big fun.
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