Week four was my first rest week. My body wasn't crying for rest, but I want to
set a groove early, and also catch up with family and friends outside of
running.
4 hours, 37 minutes running and skiing
18.7 miles
2,425 ft D+
We had snow and it's sticking. I skied around Pineridge on Wednesday and took
my medicine ball to the barn to work out in the snow while my daughter checked
up on her horse.
Breaking trail at Pineridge
The gym
Sunday I went up Towers Trail to get some hills and sunshine. It's snowy up
there. I saw signs of someone skiing (tele, I suspect) the slopes adjacent to
Towers.
Tuesday and Wednesday I ran after dark, a rare thing for me. Friday I did
a speed workout, doubling the volume of hard running from week two. I slowed
things down on the weekend with back-to-back two hour long runs Saturday and
Sunday.
Next week I'm going to run a bit less, do more strength and conditioning and
projects around the house.
I ran five days last week, rode my bike another day, and did core strength
workouts twice. Here are the running numbers.
8 hours, 24
37.1 miles
4,669 ft D+
Saturday I went for a big slog at Horsetooth and Lory State Park with other
runners who are training for Quad Rock in May. The trails started out in
a runnable state, packed powder and a little ice and frozen mud. With mild
temperatures and sun the conditions degraded quickly. The last hour or so of my
run was through heavy mud and puddles of melted snow. That's just how winter
trail running goes around here.
I went to multiple live rock concerts in 2022 for the first time in years and
it was all a result of my 17 year-old daughter's prompting. In July she was
visiting a best friend in Montpellier, France. Her friend's parents went to see
The Smile, Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood's band, in the Arènes de Nîmes. My kid discovered that the
band would be in Denver in December 2022 and insisted I get tickets. I did. And
then we started looking into which bands were playing at Red Rocks at the end
of that venue's season and found tickets to see King Gizzard's long-delayed
Red Rocks debut. I got tickets for that, too.
I hadn't been to Red Rocks since the 20th century (Lyle Lovett in 1998, if
I remember correctly). All the good things about this venue remain,
particularly the views over the plains at thunderstorms or the Moon. King
Gizzard was amazing. They took some selfies, referred to us affectionately as
"cunts" (they are Australian millenials), invited us to "get fucked up and love
each other", and then rocked everyone's socks off for 3 hours. Here's the set
list
and a full recording of the show. They kicked off with "Mars
for the Rich", which is increasingly appropriate.
Moonrise from Red Rocks
Getting to Red Rocks and back from Fort Collins is a slog. Denver's Mission
Ballroom is much more accessible. I relaxed in the passenger seat while my
daughter drove and we killed some time in a River North pub. In the line for
the door my daughter and I met a couple from Kansas City who were there for
their second show and who had all kinds of stories and advice for navigating
the venue. The Mission Ballroom has less than half the capacity of Red Rocks
and feels more intimate. We were seated, not on the floor, but could easily see
the band. The band played a bunch of yet unreleased songs and treated us to an
extra heavy version of Bending Hectic in the encore. We were super satisfied!
Denver's Mission Ballroom
These shows were great musically and a great chance to connect with a teenager
in the context of different adult audiences. The King Gizzard crowd was young,
like 5-10 years older than my kid, and exuberantly high. The Smile's audience
was about 10-15 years older than that and much more subtly high. If you're
a parent of a high school junior or senior you may know what it's like to go to
shows like this. The chance to have candid conversations about partying and
intoxication and the consequences is something you have to seize if you can.
Find a band you all like and do it!
We don't have anything on our future concert schedule except They Might be
Giants in May, but we're looking. The two of us are the more natural late night
rock-and-rolling team of the family and are looking forward to more.
Hi, my name is Sean Gillies, and this is my blog. Blog is short for "web log".
I write about running, cooking and eating, travel, family, programming, Python,
API design, geographic data formats and protocols, open source, and internet
standards. Mostly running and local geography. I live in Fort Collins,
Colorado, and sometimes in Montpellier, France. I work at Planet Labs PBC.
I appreciate emailed comments on my posts. You can find my address in the
"about" page linked at the top of this page. Happy New Year!
Am I going to do those damn recaps again in 2023? Indeed, I am!
I signed up for my first ever attempt at a 100 miler, the 2023 Bear 100, and this past week was week one of a 36 week plan.
The time on feet and mileage all go up from here. I might do 20 hours and 100
miles or more in a week in July. Week one's numbers are a step up from my
November and December running.
7 hours, 56 minutes
36.8 miles
4,268 ft D+
This weekend I did back-to-back 2 hour runs for the first time since last
August. I did a long slow slog on the bike path yesterday and then a hilly loop
at Horsetooth Open Space today. I saw nobody in the park away from the
trailheads, only birds. On Spring Creek I ran through a large flock of
chickadees and at the Towers crossed paths with a Golden Eagle (Aquila
chrysaetos) which seemed to be doing stooping exercises. From on high it would
tuck its winds and dive headlong toward the ground, pull out of the dive, coast
back up, and then repeat. Larimer County encourages Golden Eagles to nest at
Horsetooth by closing a stretch of the Spring Creek trail each spring. I would
love to hear about some breeding success this year.
View from the Towers-Mill Canyon-Spring Creek junction
Looking out the window at the landscape below remains the best part of flying.
My family and I went to Boise, Idaho, last week and the views were extra good.
I've driven from Fort Collins to Cody, Wyoming, and Idaho Falls, Idaho, for
Thanksgiving in years past when I had more time than money, but I'm done with
that. BOI-DEN-Fort Collins (last leg by car) takes 5 hours, maximum. Traversing Wyoming on the ground via I-80
(Wyoming alone, not counting the CO, UT, ID legs) in Winter takes 2d6 + 4 hours.
I was on the north side of a 737-900 leaving Boise at 7 a.m. Friday and got
some superb early morning views of the Lost River (ID), Teton (WY), Wasatch
(UT), Uintah (UT), Rawah (CO), and Never Summer (CO) ranges.
Planet Labs, my employer, suggests people take a Friday paid day off every
month. I used mine in October to go on a little adventure that I'd been
thinking about for a couple years: running from my house to the summit of
Horsetooth Mountain and back again. I spent eight and a half hours on the
trail, including many stops for photos, water, and food, covering 33 miles and
4100 feet of elevation gain. Horsetooth Reservoir, 7 miles long and half
a mile wide, was my primary obstacle.
Horsetooth Mountain from Centennial Drive, 5 miles in.
The first four miles were on the Spring Creek bike path and dirt in Pineridge
Open Space. Beyond that was seven miles of road shoulder to go around the south
end of Horsetooth Reservoir and reach the upper
Horsetooth Open Space trailhead. I drive this road once or twice a week, but
had never run it before. It's fairly busy, so I ran strictly on the left and kept
a close eye on oncoming vehicles. Waving and mouthing "thanks" when drivers
give me extra room is my standard practice.
13 miles in, 10 minutes from the summit.
From the Horsetooth parking lot, I had 10 miles of peaceful single track,
mostly all to myself. I took it very easy, only using a little speed to reach
the Lory State Park visitor's center at the north end of Horsetooth Reservoir
before closing time, 4 p.m., to buy a Coke and refill water bottles.
View west from the top.
I found the smuggler's route from the vistor center through to the north
Horsetooth boat ramp, saving me from three additional miles of road shoulder,
ran the road back along the reservoir's east shore to Maxwell Open Space, and
then through Maxwell to Pineridge and back down the bike trail. Overall it was
half road, half dirt.
To cap things off, I ordered Sichuan and Wuhan style noodles from Beijing
Noodle (awesome place, closest restaurant to my house) using my phone's browser
on the trail, and then carried the takeout boxes home on foot while drinking
a beer from the store next to the noodle shop. It was such a satisfying day.
I'll be thinking fondly about this adventure for a while.
We’re hardly four weeks into the Elon era on Twitter and he’s already
cueing up a storyline in which he tried to placate the Blacks and the Jews
and the gays but they betrayed him and set out to “kill Twitter.”
Musk isn't Tony Stark, he's the Donald Trump of batteries and rockets.