Superhero Up!

I want to start this blog with a quick note…on October 7th, 2011 Michaela and I celebrated our Fifth Wedding Anniversary. I feel completely blessed to have been married to such a wonderful woman these past five years. I look back to where we were 5-10 years ago, and I see how far we’ve already come and I can’t wait to experience the next 50 or so years with her. She is the best wife I could ask for and I love her with all of my heart.

Now, on to the blog…

The last few weeks have been an absolute blur so I’ll do my best to sift through my cloudy memory to share the good stuff. Let’s first rewind back two weeks to September 30th. After a long week of work the three of us piled into the car and headed down to the Bay Area to spend the weekend at my Uncle Dirk’s house. Not only had it been a year since we had seen Dirk and his family, but our good friend Dave and his girlfriend Danyelle came into town to catch up and celebrate some birthdays.

Danyelle had never been to San Francisco before, so Saturday morning we got up early and took her and Dave on a beautiful run around Tiburon, overlooking the water with a great view of the city off in the distance. After the run we took them down to one of our all-time favorite bars, Sam’s Tavern, which is right on the water in Tiburon. We hung out on the patio catching rays (and a buzz) while Landon chased the birds, checked out the boats that would pull up, and talk to whoever came within yelling distance. We even got Landon to eat some clams which was totally awesome! The wine continued to flow throughout the rest of the day and we finished off the evening with a great homemade dinner.

On Sunday we all woke up with some reminders of the fun the day before, but had no time to feel sorry for ourselves as we got back into the clown car and headed into the city. This being Danyelle’s first trip, we hit up the Golden Gate Bridge and then had to take her to Fisherman’s Wharf to do the “tourist thing” for a bit. Then we headed over to Union Street for some drinks while the girls hit the shopping scene. It was great having all that time together, but we were all a bit “out of sorts” from having so much fun the previous day. Unfortunately we didn’t get to take her to some of the other cool locations in the city, but I think she got enough of the vibe for the city to want to take some more trips out there in the future.

This past weekend we headed straight back out to the Bay Area to help run an aid station for the Dick Collins Firetrails 50 miles and trail marathon. This is another race that is being put on by Michaela’s friend Julie Fingar and we volunteered to help out. Originally we were planning to make it an “adults only” weekend since Friday was also our Anniversary (where did the time go?), but unfortunately we couldn’t get a sitter worked out for the weekend so we just decided that Landon was going to have to roll with the adults all weekend (nothing new for that kid). Our friend Melisa volunteered to come and help out as well, so we all caravanned down together. Originally we were going to all fit into one car, but one look at the amount of stuff we’d be bringing for the aid station and that thought quickly evaporated.

For those of you that aren’t familiar with the kind of stuff that you have to bring, let’s run through some of what we had packed: 2 huge pop-up tents, 2 long folding tables, 14 40-lb water jugs, 2 10-gallon Gatorade jugs, 4 full bins of food/supplies, signs, cones, and probably 50 other things that I’m leaving off the list. We also had to fit ourselves and our bags for the weekend, so yeah, it was a lot of stuff! And this was in our Xterra mind you, not some big truck that we rented for the weekend...

Speaking of our stuff, we elected to do a Superhero theme for our aid station this year, so we hit up Party City to get some rockin’ costumes. I went with the classic Batman, while Michaela was Bat Girl, and Landon (who has 5 different superhero costumes already) went for a hybrid costume…he was half Batman, half crazy person. See, he wore a Batman Mask and a Cape, but he also stripped off his pants and ran around all day in his mask, cape, shirt, undies, and shoes…nothing else! We were very impressed with the fact that he kept the mask and cape on all day, and he really was very well-behaved the entire day. Who needs sitters!


I forgot to mention that my buddy Adam came up to help out as well, and while he specifically requested “no costume”, we brought him up a Spider Man outfit and he was cool enough to oblige. The rest of the aid station crew rocked masks and capes and our friend Jennifer did a mid-day change into Supergirl. Jennifer’s daughters were a huge help with Landon, as he was pretty much obsessed with them all day.

The race itself was a blast. We saw plenty of familiar faces out there and helped a good number of people get through our station in record time. We did our best to be upbeat and positive, and even supplied some beer to a runner who was jokingly asking me for a sip. When I said “sure”, he went ahead and pounded it before heading back out for the last 6 miles of the 50 mile race (he definitely earned the respect of me and Adam)!

By the end of the second day we were absolutely shredded. We headed home early on Sunday morning and spent the majority of the day trying to get back to normal (although Michaela had to work so that probably didn’t help).

All things considered, we had two great weekends in the Bay Area back to back….and it was icing on the cake to see so many of our good friends out there.

On a personal note, all this traveling has played havoc on my training for my upcoming ultra, but I did manage to squeeze in 20 miles on pavement before we left last Friday. All this running on the pavement has been pretty hard on my knees and joints and I am desperately looking forward to a month from now when my first ultra will be in the books and I’ll be able to head back out to the trails where I belong….

Keep enjoying the ride!