More Peaks! More Waterfalls!

2014 is more than halfway gone! 

Crazy!

This is also crazy. Crazy AMAZING!

This has been a great year!

One thing I'm obsessed with for the rest of the summer is Peaks. I mean, yeah, I also have a little race to prepare in 6 weeks, but it's only ONE HUNDRED MILES!?!?!

But summitting a mountain... THAT's awesome!

There are SO MANY I haven't yet reached or even attempted the summit!

THAT WILL CHANGE!!!

But this year has been awesome for peak bagging - and I've hit quite a few.

Of course lots of pictures were taken - so here are some of those, starting from the most recent... and there are a bunch missing because I don't want this to be THAT big of an entry.

Hidden Peak: (The ski-warming hut at the top of the peak looks like a nice Doctors office, eh?)

Pfiefferhorn: SO amazing - I want to do all the peaks along this ridge they are amazing!

Sunset Peak:

Grandview Peak:

Lone Peak: The beast of the Wasatch Front Range - I was nearing the summit when I got a text from my beautiful wife Kakes who BROKE HER ANKLE!!!

Gold Ridge: This gorgeous little peak is tucked right behind Bountiful Peak and overlooks Morgan and has a great view of the bowl behind Bountiful Peak!

Timpanogos: The Annual Wasatch Mountain Wranglers Timpependence Day Night run! Awesome to be up there with 60ish of my favorite trail runners!!

Ed's Peak:

Raymond:

Also like always I still love Waterfalls probably about as much as I love Peaks, so here's a few more waterfalls I've visited recently:

I took my three older kids on an adventure to the Farmington Canyon Waterfall - and their courage made me very happy as a father!

And Adams is always a fun waterfall:

Looks like I need more peaks and waterfalls!!

Morning Runs

I try to go with a group of Davis County runners early mornings at least once a week.

They meet at 5:30 AM at various places and range around the trails - and it's awesome.

Seriously how often can you run for 2 hours in the morning getting around 10 miles usually and still be to work on time?

Awesome.

Even though they are HARD.

On Tuesday morning we ran up what is affectionately known as 'The Wrong %*$(%* Trail!' to the wrong side of 'Chinscraper' (which is a part of the Wasatch 100 Trail race)

It's the wrong trail because if you continue straight (heading behind Fernwood Castle - yes I would buy that if I had the money!!) you are on the RIGHT trail for the Wasatch 100!

And just like the elevation profile on that chinscraper link, starting around mile 5, that's the type of vertical gain on this trail too!

Still it's a beautiful trail - and we had a lot of fun. Took us 2.5 hours to got 6.2 miles!

One of my hiker friends was amazed we were able to do it that fast.

Sunrise!

Tiptoe through the Tulips!

The Cabin!

Almost lost my hat to the wind!

Heading back down

As a result of this ... my quads are STILL killing me. They hurt to touch! Tomorrow I'm going to run again even though it hurts because I need to work it out.

I've done Yoga and BJJ and weights and bodyweight stuff - my legs still work fine, they just hurt!

BJJ is going great. I can't believe I've been doing it for over a year now! My elbow is still a bit funky from an armbar a month or so ago - and I keep slightly re-tweaking it, so I'm trying to be careful with it. We are also getting some new people out to do BJJ - today we had 6 people!

Next week is Ragnar. The Week after that is Spartan Beast.

I need to take a vacation - but even without one planned I'm very much looking forward to the rest of this summer!

I AM going to have to be shaving everything throughout the summer to make sure I don't have any ingrown hairs on my chest and arms and legs... I'm NOT looking forward to that very much.

But who knows - maybe we'll like it!

Time Flies

It has definitely been a busy past few weeks!

Right after my last entry the sickness I mentioned hit me full force. Fever, Ear infection, shakes, weakness, sore throat, coughing.

Nasty. Then the ear infection caused a major cloggin in my noggin that even STILL hasn't fully gone away. The congestion is mostly gone, but there is still a slight lessening of hearing in my left ear. Very annoying.

Needless to say that cut my fitness pursuits significantly for a few days.

Running wise - I have started using Strava along with Runkeeper to track my running. One thing I really like about Strava is the 'segments' that they have, allowing for a little bit of friendly competition, and giving you goals to beat.

Kind of fun to hold 'CR's' (Course Records I think?) for a particular segment.

During the sickness I did not run as much as I wanted, but I did have a couple good ones.

Went on a nice run with the Davis County Group on the upper and lower Farmington Terrace Trails as well (These pics are on my instagram - yay!)

 

Beautiful Morning runs with that group - especially now that even with a 5:30 am start, you don't even need a headlamp!

After 2 weeks without BJJ I was very happy to get back to doing that - and even happier to see that when we started working on omoplata's  I wasn't completely lost and I was able to pick things up possibly faster than I had before! Yay!

Preparation for the physique contest in September is moving along - I'm still not sure what I want to change in my current routines to improve in certain areas like ab and arms definition...

Here's a torso progress picture from May 20th:

 

As you can see one of the major things that will happen before any competition is a spray tan and some other tanning lotions! If you know of any deals let me know!

I have added P90X Ab Ripper and plan to add a day of the Insanity Abs program into my weekly routine. 2 nights a week each program one time - should add a nice little hit to the abs. I haven't done those programs in QUITE some time - my first time doing Ab Ripper X the other night left me sore for longer than expected.

I love it!

On Saturday the Refuse2Quit guys (who I run with a lot, especially since one of them is my brother!) finished the Bryce 100 Mile race. I love the last line of the last paragraph before the video. (Which is awesome, you should watch it!)

We certainly have other friends and brothers who still need to run 100 miles. Time to make plans (Brent and Aaron).

HA! 100 miles is a REALLY long run. Like 24+ hours of running without really stopping!!

Maybe I'll do a 50 miler this year though... Who knows!?

Cindy and Clean and Press!

Started the morning off with a private yoga lesson...

Nobody else showed up to the class!

It felt really good and was nice after a crazy pre-holiday week.

I had to leave to attend to a family matter after that, so I was unable to climb. Probably all right because I tweaked my elbow and shoulder on my right arm... so a little rest would be good.

Since it was the last day of working this year - and I didn't want TOO MUCH rest - I decided I wanted to make it to the Crossfit class one last time.

Warmup:
Half Mile run (treadmill) - 3.5 minutes
20 KB Goblet Squats
10 KB Push Press each arm

Workout
1 Round of Cindy (5 pullups, 10 pushups, 15 bodyweight squats)
1 Clean and Press (I used 2 35lb Kettlebells because of the number of people there using the other bars and stuff)
1 Cindy
2 Clean and press
1 Cindy
3 Clean and press
... continued up to 10 reps Clean and Press with a Cindy at the start of each round.

at the 6th rep of the round of 7 clean and press - I had changed to an 80 lb curling bar for a few rounds - I pinched something in my lower back... OUCH! So for the remaining 3 sets I went back to the 2 kettle bells.

In the end I finished in 23:45 seconds - which was 2nd fastest overall.  My arm was twitching from my elbow up to my neck... and it hurt. Thankfully the majority of that pain went down pretty quick.

Unfortunately that back pain! YOW! Stiffens the whole spine up pretty quick!

Here's what I looked like after:

Not bad.

I'm not sure why but I've been taking progress shots like this in the locker room mirror for comparison lately... And while I'm quite happy with my progress...

It's just...

So weird.

Oh well!

Crazy To Run That After Yesterday!

So I figured I'd be pretty sore today - but I still wanted to do something more than yard work or house repairs today. (Finally climbed up on the roof replacing some flashing that flew off in a windstorm a while - HOT and tiring, but DONE!)

After a while watching the Olympics I decided I wanted to go for a run. An easy run because my legs are tired and sore from yesterday's Crossfit workout.

5.5 miles up and down a canyon later... YIKES! My legs are really beat now! A slow but decent 13 min/mile up and a 7 min/mile average down for a total average of 10.5 min/mile. I'm pretty happy with that considering how my legs are. Felt good, got some sun (and you'll see in a minute how PASTY I am still) and had a good run. Definitely need to stretch and roll my quads out some more so I can actually WALK tomorrow!

I did some muscle-ups and pull ups on the bar today as well. Yay! I was feeling weird the other day and was bummed that I couldn't even get a bad muscle-up. Did 4 or 5 today total throughout the day. Getting better, but definitely have work to do.

After my run I had Kakes take a 'progress picture' for me. Here's the difference from last year:

May 2011

August 2012

See I TOLD you I was super pasty still! :)
Like I mentioned with the post on Wednesday, I am quite pleased with my progress. In my Bodyspace on Bodybuilding.com I have this goal

"Be physically able to do what I want when I want to with no restrictions!"

And I am HAPPY to say I am quite close to where I want to be with that. The best thing about that goal is it is ongoing. I missed out on the crazy Bairgutsman this morning - but I know I want to do it and now I can prepare to DESTROY that race next year! I want to do more Yoga, I want to Climb more - and I know I am physically able to do that now! It's a great feeling.


And I really don't mind being ridiculously sore to get there. More reasons to request massage-time from my hot wife!