Today, I’m grateful for
- Great Western’s new weight room layout. They reorganized it a couple months ago. The main changes that affected me was the addition of a new squat rack and removal of the old bench press rack and incline bench rack. Today was my first day back on the bench press. But even though I de-loaded quite a bit, I went to failure earlier than expected and was very glad to have safety bars available in the rack, which the old bench racks obviously didn’t have. (I would’ve been a lot more embarrassed if I had to tip the bar over to drop the plates 😬).
- Chatting and organizing with my buddy Sean. Whenever I get a message from him, I know adventure’s on the horizon, and I got a LONG text from him over the weekend.
Now it’s settled: I’ll be backpacking the ruins of Panamint City and hiking up Telescope Peak next month (in-between Yosemite, Sonora Pass, and Mammoth!), and backpacking the Backbone Trail (BBT) in the Santa Monica Mountains in October!
Unfortunately, I’ll miss another visit to Beveridge. But I’ve now visited that ghost town three times in the past 4 years (the last time only being this past New Years!). So the next time I visit, I want to do something different or check out some place new — possibly by rope? - PK recognizing me after Kaushik’s yoga class. I wanted to take PK’s class, of course, but by the time I remembered to try registering for it, it was of course already full. But I noticed a new yoga class before his, with an instructor’s name I didn’t recognize. I’m always game to try new instructors, so I went…
While the class itself was, in my mind, below average, PK saw me afterward and told me that even if his class were full, he could perhaps squeeze me in whenever possible, at least at Pac Pipe. (He wouldn’t be able to do that for me at Ironworks though!) - Randomly seeing and catching up with Arturo. It’s been wild to see him effectively convert from a long distance runner to a mid-distance runner — where explosive power matters — while maintaining quite a bit of his former threshold speed. As we spoke, I mentioned that I’ve literally gone the other direction: I’m now seeing what the 100-mile is all about. There won’t be too much need for big power moves (hopefully). Still, I might join him for some of his power workouts someday…
- Climbing with a whole bunch of new friends. While planning the Rainier trip last month, Abby added me to a climbing WhatsApp group (which, as it turns out, she rarely climbs with). But as I’ve started to regularly climb with them over the past week, I’ve met such strong and experienced climbers (who regularly lead trad) that I’m starting to feel more psyched on it! At the very least, being around them has been pushing me to climb harder (I mean, the dude I climbed with today WARMED UP leading 12c with zero problem, wtf?)
More importantly: it’s a fairly large, yet fairly close-knit, group that’s been around for years, with many regulars — hallmarks of a group’s staying power. Is it the climbing community that I’ve been looking for all this time? I’m cautiously optimistic.
