If this is true, then I pray Mr Phelps doesn’t end up having severe health problems later on!
***Update: H/T to Anwyn (and apologies for forgetting in the first place!)***
Archive for the ‘Fitness & Health’ Category
Six Times the Calories
Friday, August 15th, 2008Heroes Run 2008
Saturday, July 26th, 2008Mr Gary Patriquin is sponsoring the 2008 Heroes Run in Lockport, IL in honor of CPT Travis Patriquin and service members killed in Iraq. It will be 9 Aug 2008 at 0800. It starts at the Lockport High School, 1323 E. Seventh St., Lockport, IL 60441.
You can choose from a 5K run or a 1.5 mile walk. Registration is $15 and proceeds will go to both The Travis Patriquin Family Trust Fund and the Children of the Fallen Soldier Relief Fund.
If you would like to make a long-range donation, you can donate via PayPal. Just go to PayPal and enter Mr Patriquin’s e-mail address (gary112251 — at — America Online - dot - com). Proceeds donated via PayPal go to the Family Trust Fund for his three children.
If you have any questions about the run, the trust fund, or Children of the Fallen Soldier Relief Fund, you may contact Mr Patriquin at 1-815-483-4830.
Thank you for your consideration!
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15 Aug 2008 Update: The run looks like it went well. Thanks to all who participated or donated!
Weltanschauung Friends in the News (III)
Wednesday, March 19th, 2008Weltanschauung friend Rob T. did something pretty amazing after running his first eight marathons: He ran the Antarctica marathon! (I didn’t even know there was such an event). He and some friends and family put together a short video on YouTube about it.
The event was run on King George’s Island, which is part of the South Shetland Islands just northwest of the Antarctic Peninsula. It’s just across the water from the southern tip of Chile/Argentina.
That’s just plain amazing! Congratulations, Rob!
Fini Ski at Appi
Saturday, February 2nd, 2008My wife and some friends and I all went to Appi to get some skiing in. This would likely be my last skiing trip from Misawa, as I’m due to be reassigned before next winter.
I started off on the black slopes and tried some of the techniques my friend Trigger taught me a couple weeks ago. Things went fairly well, although I still fell a couple times, mostly trying to get around moguls.
Thanks to Grace, my wife and I got to ski together for half the day while Grace babysat. This was the first time we tried skiing down the southwest slope, there were a couple fun runs over there with some fairly fresh powder, so that was definitely worth it.
Since we skiied more and babysat less, I got pretty tired by the end of the day. I wasn’t quite sore the next day, I was just pumped up enough to be primed for BFM/ACM for the next couple days!
Ski Hachimantai
Sunday, January 13th, 2008Yesterday my family and a friend of my wife’s all caravan’d out to Hachimantai to try some skiing there. We hit the Panorama side, which had six or seven easy and well-groomed runs (two or so had decent powder in the morning that was gone by midday, since it wasn’t snowing). The other families brought their kids to teach them to ski, and it was a good area for it. I think some other friends hit the other side of the resort, but it was a car ride plus a separate lift ticket to get over there. That side had two or three black runs. I’ll have to remember this area when it comes time to teach the little one how to ski!
Ski Hakkoda
Monday, December 31st, 2007Today my wife and kid went to the Hakkoda ski area with Shep and his family. Getting there and back was more time-consuming than normal, one of the roads up the mountain was closed, and all of them were snowy (fortunately not icy). The Sheps are snowboarders, so it was my first time both at Hakkoda and skiing with a ‘boarder.
Once there, Shep and I hit the slopes while the ladies took care of the babies together; we switched after about an hour and they skiied/boarded for an hour and a half, then we picked up the last forty minutes.
Hakkoda has a chair lift and a gondola. We didn’t ride the gondola, just the chair lift. We figured we weren’t going to be skiing enough to justify the more expensive and limited gondola ticket. As we rode the chair lift, we noticed it flattened out considerably for three legs and then dropped us off. This meant the first 200 meters or so were relatively flat. I almost don’t know why they bothered adding the length to the chair lift (maybe the chair lifts only come in certain lengths, and that slope just wasn’t high enough but plateaued instead?
There were two basic ways to go off the chair lift, left or right. No surprises there. The left was pretty easy, although there was one section of it for about 100 meters that might be loosely considered a black. It was decently groomed but heavily travelled. The slope to the right was substantially more fun and had more powder. For our last run, just before we started down the black section of the right slope, we noticed a trail off to the right. We took that trail and after me sinking thigh-deep in the snow twice, we made it over to what must’ve been one of the gondola slopes. That one was a blast! There was some fairly fresh powder and it was a great (but fast and over too quickly) run all the way to the bottom!
Of course, what would any day skiing in Japan be without curry for lunch!? I tried the chicken special. The meat wasn’t quite as tasty as I’d hoped, it seemed about 40% gristle. The curry was fabulously hot, though! I had to drink an entire bottle of water with the plate in bite-pant-drink-repeat fashion.
My wife, who is a much better skier than I am, said the powder was world class. She also pointed out that she went through some fresh powder on one run, and by the time she finished down, then back up the chair lift, then back to the slope, her trail was covered with new snow. It may have been snowy, but that has its’ advantages.
While we were eating dinner, we ran into this guy. If you happen to be in Japan and want to take a hiking tour of the Hakkodas, you may want to get in touch with him.
Appi Kogen Revisited
Monday, December 24th, 2007Christina, the kid, and I took off with friends Deuce and Pitch and their families and spent Christmas Eve skiing at Appi. We had a lot of fun, of course! Having brought the baby with us meant that one of us would have to babysit while the other hit the slopes! Lucky for us it had snowed the night before, so we had good snow. Plus, this was the inaugural use of the skis Christina bought me for my birthday after last season, so I was stoked to finally get to use them! Since it was Monday, there weren’t a whole lot of people out and about, either; although there were times I had to avoid a gaggle of snowboarders.
This was our first time out this season, so I started off with the 5 km green run both to warm up and to practice keeping my shoulders squared down-slope; Christina started immediately with a red for a warm-up and went all black afterward. After the first run, both of us (separately, as I mentioned) hit the black runs. Christina jumped in with both feet and had a blast. I actually did okay, I only slid three times; I never wiped out and lost my skis, which I found a little surprising for my first outing of the season. Then again, the black runs on the main slope at Appi weren’t as difficult as the "Tower run" at Okunakayama. I have a tendency when I get tired to put too much weight on my uphill ski, which leads me to turn my shoulders in the direction of travel instead of down-slope, which leads me to turn uphill when I’m trying to go downhill, which leads to a stop (if I’m lucky) or a fall and a slide. I still haven’t gotten to the root causes of my wipeouts, but fortunately there were no data points today!
The new skis worked great! They’re 156 cm Atomic Metron. In my opinion, having your own skis is as essential as having your own bowling ball. Take that for what it’s worth. . . I don’t own a bowling ball! The new baby did great, too; he slept most of the time, even when the cafeteria at the bottom of the mountain got noisy during lunch. The couple times he woke up he just smiled a lot, mostly because he’s ticklish and Dad spent a lot of time tickling!
We’re looking forward to our next outing. We’re considering Hakkoda since we’ve never been there and it’s supposed to be pretty close to us. We’ve heard great things about Hokkaido, but since that’s an entire other island, I don’t see us getting there.
If the Mountain Won’t Go to You
Sunday, July 15th, 2007Last Thursday our friends Paul, Andrea, and their kids, plus my wife and I all took a nine-hour bus ride to Tokyo. The next day we all got up really, really early (that would be early as in "What does the ‘O’ in oh-three-hundred mean? ‘O-my-goodness it’s early!"), we handed the kids off to my wife for babysitting, and Paul, Andrea, and I all jumped aboard the tour bus to Mt Fuji!
The bus stopped at the fifth station trailhead at about 0600 (that’s 6:00 AM for you non-military types). We got out, bought ourselves one each official Mt Fuji walking sticks, and proceeded up the mountain trail at 0620.
The trail was well-marked, mostly in Kanji, but sometimes in English. Besides, once we got to the northern side of the mountain, you could see the huts all the way up the mountainside. The ascent to the summit took me six hours, Paul and Andrea were in better shape for such things and could probably have gotten topside within five-and-a-half. They always stopped to wait for me, which was nice of them.
One of the unique things on the Mt Fuji trail was the ‘stamps’ you collected on the ascent. Most of the huts had someone with a small fire and a branding iron that they would use to burn a ‘stamp’ into your walking stick. The idea was that you could prove how high you got after the fact by the stamps on your walking stick. The odd thing was the hut topside gave us the ‘Sunrise’ stamp, although we didn’t make it up there until about 1215. Some people actually hike up one evening and then stay overnight at the hut either at the top or at the eigth stage (where it’s considerably warmer!). These folks then awaken at 0300, finish the climb, and watch the sun rise on top of the mountain. While that would have been cool, it wasn’t part of the package deal we paid for, and none of us brought camping gear anyway. We settled for simply walking over to the edge of the crater and taking pictures. I was asked if we saw a lake in there. If there was a lake, it was way farther down than any of us could see. We spent about an hour-and-a-half at the mountaintop, partly because we were sore from the ascent, partly because we were hungry and eating lunch, partly so we could see the crater, but most importantly because at about 1130 the weather got a little bad, and we had to trudge through some freezing drizzle for the final 45 minutes prior to arriving at the summit.
Overall the hike reminded me a little bit of the Bright Angel Trail in the Grand Canyon. Both paths were about 12 km, it took 5-6 hours to go up and 3 to descend (obviously the Grand Canyon was the other way around, a descent followed by an ascent). The Grand Canyon path was certainly more developed. Mt Fuji had a plowed-out descent over pea-gravel sized igneous rock that ultimately shredded the soles of my way-too-old Gore-tex boots. The ascending trail was slightly technical at times, but it was easily managed.
The legend among the USAF is that if you are stationed in Japan and do not climb Mt Fuji, you’ll get stationed here again. I may have just written myself out of a follow-on assignment in Japan.
Return to Okunakayama
Saturday, February 17th, 2007Christina and I hit the slopes for our anniversary today. Christina taught a couple kids the basics of skiing while I warmed up. I’m getting better at the black slopes, and I even got to try some powder today. I felt like I was doing pretty well.
Christina finished her class and we broke for lunch together. Christina usually gets some sort of Japanese soup with noodles. I always end up eating curry and rice (with some sort of meat, usually pork cutlet). I can see us whiling away our future on slopes in Austria or Colorado, and I’ll end up missing curry. I wonder if there are any Indian restaurants in Telluride?
After lunch, we hit the slopes together. After falling down a total of once all morning, I counted at least five falls in the afternoon. I was starting to get really frustrated, but after about six runs I finally got my feet back and quit falling. Christina didn’t want to try powder or moguls today, which was a bit disappointing, but she watched me on two runs and reminded me to face down-slope (I guess with moguls I was tending to face the oncoming hill). Other than the early afternoon tumbling spells, today worked out pretty well.
I think I’m almost ready to buy my first set of skis ever! I’m just waiting until the season is over so I can get a $900 set for 75% off.
Ski Okunakayama (or as I Say, “Not Appi”)
Saturday, January 13th, 2007Christina and I took the day off and went skiing again. Christina is going to try to become a skiing instructor, and the instructor course starts soon, so she wanted to get in a day of good practice with her favorite student, me!
Okunakayama was a little closer than Appi resort, and it had half as many runs. Three of those runs had near-black-diamond equivalent slopes.
One new thing I learned on my own while Christina was chiding me for not facing down the mountain and putting too much weight on my uphill ski was that as humiliating as it is, I still have to do a warm-up run on a green slope. Otherwise, something interesting will happen. I might get onto a narrow path that’s too steep to snow-plow and I’ll have to face a choice of going too fast off a ledge or into a snow-bank/side of hill (I wisely chose the hillside, following the old maxim that if you must crash, make sure you hit the softest thing you can as slowly as you can). In any case, I can’t quite just hop off the lift and ski a black slope. Not yet, anyway.
Another thing I learned is that enough snowboarders sliding down the mountainside will uncover roots. Don’t try to cross over the roots on your skis. Roots bring pain.
Otherwise, the snow first thing in the morning was pretty good. It kept snowing off and on all day, which led to the hiding of ruts, bumps, areas of powder, etc. It was a little challenging for me, but I managed to get down two of the black slopes without falling (out of about twelve attempts). There were two wild-card falls on blue slopes.
Overall it was a good day. I can’t wait to get back to Kitzbuehl someday now that I really feel like I know what I’m doing.
Since when, though, did I consider skiing on a Saturday "Taking the day off?"
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16 Jan 2007 Update: It turns out there was an earthquake north of here on Saturday, it measured 8.2 on the Richter scale. I’ve chosen to lay the blame for all my falls on the earthquake (except the root, that was the snowboarders’ fault).