Summit junkie!

Weights at the gym for an hour with Kristina working my upper body/core.

View Benchmark with CraigL in a blizzard:

I received the following text at 5:00 AM this morning "You sure you want to do this. It is coming down pretty hard here". Hey, as long as I'm up might as well give it a go. The drive to the trailhead on Vintage View was downright scary. Going over the point of the mountain was terrifying. It was snowing hard and really blowing and I knew we would be in for some adventure.

There was already 3-4 inches of snow on the trail, so we were breaking it all the way up to the top. Once we got onto the VB trail the wind really picked up and in the exposed parts of the trail it was pretty strong and cold. Up on the summit ridge the wind was coming from the north at well over 40 mph. It was a nice test for my new windstopper hat and my ears actually got cold. I think the hat is really good, but the wind was just a beast. We tagged the summit and went straight back down and got off of the ridge as quickly as we could.

The run down was fun flying down in the snow. We were much slower than usual out there, but the effort was definitely harder than normal plowing through the snow and in several spots our tracks from the way up were gone. Other than the really high wind near the top I was warm and felt great out there. I'm glad we didn't bail out on this one.

7 miles on the track at the gym:

12 degrees and a slight breeze after dark and I had no desire to run in that so I hit the gym to do some laps on the track. I ran a steady 7:40-7:45 pace the entire time and felt great.

Ave Twin peaks with MattW:

From I street in the Aves. It was a balmy 12 degrees when we started, but the sun was out and after about 10 minutes we were both heating up with the sun reflecting off the snow. After a mile and a half we were cooking and sweating like a couple of banshees, but as soon as we hit the upper ridge the wind was blowing and we were both instantly cold. The sun tucked behind a small cloud and with all of our sweat it really got chilly. We hit the top and took a quick break and then Matt led all the way back down. He pushed a pretty strong pace and we had fun crusing down in the snow, but as soon as we dropped down out of the wind it was another sweat fest.

Ave Twin Peaks with MattVH, MattW, ZacM and Je10:

We had a really fun group run from the Capitol building up to the Ave Twins. It was bitter cold when we started and stayed cold the entire run (5 degrees when we finished), but I only felt cold for the first minute or two and then I warmed up and felt great the rest of the morning. It was quite chilly on the summits, but we didn't linger up there at all.

Group date at the Starbucks after.