Mini Golf ... Not the Ultimate Workout

Today, after a second more successful attempt at sleeping in, our son and I decided to go play mini-golf. We had a few fun filled afternoon hours in the sunshine not keeping score, after which he played a couple of video games and then we got an icee. Yummy and cool.


By the time we finished with golf, it was almost time for our workout. I decided to pick Duane up at work, so we could drive to Foothill College in one car, thus saving ourselves $2 in parking fees.

As we neared the track and drove into the parking lot, we could see that there was an unusually large crowd of people gathered. It turns out that the summer hike team was just beginning their workouts and we would be doing our workout with them. They had lots of questions. Unfortunately, this meant that our "workout" was more mixer and ice-breaker than it was a workout. Fun, but nevertheless disappointing.

What was also interesting is that, besides mentors and our coach, Duane and I were the only members of our team at the workout. Where was everyone else?

Sleeping In ... Best Laid Plans

This morning, I had planned to sleep in. School is out! Duane got up to get ready for work at his usual time and as he was about to leave, I heard our son, who was already up, ask him for breakfast. A few negotiations registered in my sleepy brain and I heard them settle on some cold pizza.

The question is, would Duane remember to give our son the right leftover pizza? There were two sets of leftovers in the refrigerator: one with cheese (babysitter leftovers) and one without cheese (for our son).

I decided that I'd better get up and make sure this was sorted out or I'd be dealing with three hours of vomit - something I really didn't want to do on our first day of summer.

Unfortunately, Duane chose unwisely. By the time I got to the family room, one piece of cheese pizza had already been consumed. Duane made an emergency trip to the pharmacy to get some lactase pills, we gave one to our son, and then waited to see what would happen. Thankfully, it worked and he didn't throw up. Duane headed off to work but, of course, I was now wide awake. Harumph! Maybe tomorrow...

As the Ball Bounces

After Mass, we packed up the car with water guns, beach towels, folding chairs, a soccer ball, baseball gear and headed off to the park for a barbeque and picnic with friends.

This particular park had a water play area, and an enormous sand box, as well as the usual jungle gym and swing set. The kids loved it!

We had cheeseburgers, watermelon, wine and conversation while the children played. Parents and children got together for a water balloon game and, later, some of us including myself played volleyball.

After a wonderful time, we headed home thoroughly tired but happy.

El Corte de Madera Revisited

On Saturday, June 6, we had our final long team training hike of this season before our Yosemite event. Next Saturday will be a shorter YOYO (You're On You Own) hike, tapering off to build plenty of energy for Yosemite. This was my last chance to gauge how well my knee is now doing on longer hikes with lots of up and down. This hike was our second team practice in the El Corte de Madera Open Space Preserve. This is on the west side of Skyline Blvd near Woodside and Kings Mountain, just north of Purisima where we hiked the prior weekend.

This second hike was much longer than our earlier hike in the preserve, travelling around the entire perimeter of the preserve and reaching its lowest points. Our goal was to hike eight hours if planning for the Dewey Point or Panorama Trail Yosemite hikes, or ten hours if planning for the Half Dome or Yosemite Falls hikes. Somehow Coach Nathalie thought we were still eager to accompany the fastest hikers on the ten hour version, under some pretense that we were still candidates for getting accepted onto the Half Dome Trail. Yeah, right.

We also wanted very much to see some of our son's final T-Ball game of the season -- we had missed so much of them! Fortunately, our friends and his coach haved helped us out immensely in escorting him to nearly all of his Saturday games.

This hike had a familiar pattern. Lots of down and down and down, through unbroken trees with no views. Then a little bit of level, and no views. Then a lot of up and up and up, with no views. The weather was very accomodating. No drizzle this time, and the local marine layer overhead kept us cool enough that we needed little water. But I much prefer those other parks that lead to awesome vistas.

The long downhill was no problem for my knee. I started having some warning pains a third of the way back uphill. I was glad when our coach decided to make up some time by taking a shorter route than first planned. Then we did an interesting very steep section named 'Steam Donkey Trail', where the old-growth loggers required steam power to move logs around. This was a bit of a huff but no problem when not in a hurry. There were no mountain bikers around this particular afternoon, but they obviously love tearing down this path.

After reaching the top, we followed the Skyline ridge northwards along the Sierra Morena trail, back towards the cars. My knee had again felt okay on the latter part of the uphill. But now, when beginning an absolutely trivial slight downhill, my knee began having sharp stabbing pains. Weird. No problems during the early hike when the downhill was very steep and long. Some problems a few hours later during uphill. Then major pain on a trivial slight downslope. So the problem comes with total time on the trail, not simply from dropping major elevation. My therapist thought my problem this day may have been because my knee taping was 3 days old and stretched out.

I got permission to end my hike early without any further trail extensions, and did so. Everyone else in our group did the same. 7.25 hours total. It is so so hard to return back to the outward trails, once you know you are near your car.

The Fast & Furious Half Dome hopefuls did their own thing on this hike, and we never saw them again after the morning departure. Mentor Deb led them on a full ten hour hike.

I iced up back at the car, and felt fairly well the rest of the day. These hikes used to leave us very stiff, very exhausted, and hardly able to walk at all. Now, it was no problem. If it weren't for the knee, I could keep this up a very long time now.

This week, my knee would definitely not yet be ready to do Half Dome. So maybe it doesn't matter, that there is no room for us on the elite 36 person team. Yeah, right.

Throughout this day's hike, I was sure that I was going to need to take a dump, out there off the trail in the middle of the forest. No outhouses anywhere. I haven't yet done that and hope to avoid it. So this was on my mind nearly constantly during the hike, adding to my desire to be done with this hike and go home. (It appears that California's budget crisis will be closing every non-city hike venue that has flush toilets.)

On our way home, we stopped in Portola Valley to help a team-mate shrink her fundraiser mailer from 16 megabytes down to 310 kbytes. And a bathroom! But I found that I had nothing to poop. All that worrying, for nothing.

We then saw our son's final at-bats for this season. That was great!

School's Out - Time to Head for the Beach

Today was my son's last day of school and there was half day dismissal. In celebration and in order to visit some friends who were in town on their last day of vacation, a bunch of us school moms drove to Capitola Beach.

The children had a great time playing in the sand and surf. The moms had a good visit. By the time we got home, it was almost 7:00 pm and I still had not packed our son's bag for his sleepover! I ran around the house in a whirlwind, got everything ready, fed everyone dinner and delivered our son to his sleepover about half an hour late.

Then I went home and prepared my pack for tomorrow's hike at El Corte de Madera. This will be our longest hike of the season before our Yosemite event, about eight to ten hours.

Home Improvement

Today I had to stay home because I had workmen in the house for a home improvement project. There will (hopefully) be a number of such projects over the next few years. Today's project was one of the smaller ones.

I did, however, manage to get out and about for a little bit before picking up our son from his taekwondo class.

Still Catching Up

This morning I got in a neighborhood walk before getting down to the business of life, for that was the only time I had available today.

My son had an early dismissal day today, and he brought a friend home for a playdate. The both of them went on a bug hunt in our backyard. Entomologists in the making? I continued to clean house and catch up on paperwork, while keeping an eye out on the children.

After his playdate, I got him ready for his TBall game this afternoon. He had some good hits and also fielded well. I helped the children get organized on the bench. After TBall, it was off to pizza night (which for me is chicken caesar salad night) followed by one of my monthly amateur radio meetings. A very busy day!

Catching Up

My desk is not quite this bad, but it's close. I was supposed to be somewhere else this morning, but I decided that I really needed to use today to catch up on all of the paperwork that I haven't been paying attention to. It never ceases to amaze me how much running a household is like running a business.



In addition to my desk, the laundry was undone and my kitchen looked like a disaster area. Both needed a lot of work. So my day was spent doing the mundane and the unimportant.



This evening we had our Tuesday night workout. Lots of bleachers, laps, stretching and strengthening exercises again. I did planks again tonight and still lost out to Mentor Bowman. He's really good and in much better shape than I.

Funeral

A couple of days ago, I received an email informing me that one of my college professors, Dr. John Gleason, had passed away. The funeral was today and I drove to St. Hilary's Church in Tiburon, about an hour and a half away, to attend. Although I never formally had Dr. John Gleason for a class (he was a Shakespearean scholar), I did have his wife, Dr. Elizabeth Gleason, for a history class, and Dr. John filled in for her one day when she was absent.

The service and especially the music was lovely and the church in which it was held was quite beautiful even if modern. I saw some friends and professors.

There was not much time left in the day by the time I got back home. Time enough to pick up my son from taekwondo practice, do the household chores, cook dinner and do some webmastering.

Only 36??!!

We are now at the deadline where local and national Team in Training coaches work out which hikers, nationwide, are best prepared to be on the Half Dome hike. A dozen or more cities are participating in the June 20th Team in Training event day at Yosemite. All of those cities will be adding hikers to each of the available hike events on various Yosemite trails.

The criteria for most of the trails is simply, can the hiker do it, and do they want to do it. The Half Dome hike has the additional criterion: can the hiker do this strenuous trail at a fast-enough pace, that they can reach the cables of Half Dome before it gets crowded midday, and not hold up other participants hiking with them on this very long day. We hike in groups of up to six or so. Last year, one Half Dome group got back to the valley floor much later than other groups and after dark, because some members were too slow.

We've been long aware of this issue, and so we have trained to hike faster than we'd prefer, and taken many of the many opportunities created by Mentor Deb to do longer/steeper hikes. We've rarely been able to keep up with our fastest participants for an entire hike. (I was most successful at Saratoga Gap, when the 'Fast & Furious' group kept getting lost and kept waiting for me to show up with a better official map. They stubbornly refused to carry it.)

Christina and I have been in our local chapter's second-fastest group (of four groups total), called 'Hot on Your Trail'. We were told that people in the two fast groups had a chance of getting selected for Half Dome. We would be matched with others of similar speed. This gave us hope for doing this amazing thing and motivated us to keep training and keep pressing ourselves harder. But no guarantees. Every pitfall in shoes and knees and endurance seemed to put our goal at risk.

Meanwhile, many participants who started this adventure with us have dropped off. Some lost their jobs and couldn't raise money. Some got injured. Some couldn't spare enough time. Some got discouraged. The main Saturday hikes had fewer and fewer regulars. The Tuesday evening track workouts became visibly smaller. Several times, Christina and I were the sole participants at track, outnumbered by our unflagging mentors. This feeling of being a survivor was accentuated when the Grand Canyon participants had their event, weeks before our Yosemite event, and they stopped coming to workouts afterwards. I felt like we now stood a better chance of getting selected, with so many already fallen away.

On the May 30th Purisima hike, Coach Nathalie told me that the June 20th Half Dome hike has a very limited roster of just 36 participants (plus guides for each trail group). Nation-wide. She expects that many of those 36 would be hikers that are far faster than any of our local participants. The limit of 36 is apparently due to the perceived need to hire very expert trail guides to accompany each group, who are each able to handle the emergencies that could arise on this extreme hike. There aren't many such guides available for hire. (She did not mention this, but I suppose the cost of those guides is another factor.)

This number 36 came as a big shock to Christina and me. It now seems very unlikely that there will be any less-than-fastest Team in Training groups arranged for Half Dome that day. We have no hope in hell of getting selected.

Apparently we never did have any real chance. None of the participants who started out at our level of fitness or hiking speed have advanced into the already-fast-and-fittest group. The dream of doing Half Dome (with Team in Training) was a mirage. Team in Training was not set up to support lots of participants achieving this goal. There apparently never were any plans to have moderately fast hikers summit Half Dome.

Christina and I now plan on doing our second event choice instead: the Panorama Trail. This goes one-way from the top of Glacier Point down past Illilouette Fall, Nevada Fall, and Vernal Fall, down to valley floor. It has lots of knock-out views of the entire area, but not enough uphill to challenge Christina. When we hiked up past Vernal Fall this Spring, I was very intrigued by seeing lots of water dropping down from Illilouette Fall high above. I hadn't known it was there. I will enjoy seeing it again from above.

We are now discussing when and how to someday do the Half Dome hike on our own in some small group. The speed thing is not important outside of Team in Training. Hikes during midweek or Spring or Fall do not have big traffic jams at the cables, and so it doesn't matter so much when you arrive at those cables.