Category Archives: Hikes

A new personal record

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Yesterday morning I left Payson around 7am and drove to Flagstaff.  The drive was leisurely with a few laughs as I was listening to Howard Stern interview Richard Simmons.  I stopped for breakfast at my favorite coffee shop.  The weather was outstanding so I sat at an outside table and enjoyed the wonderful people watching that you can only get in Flagstaff.

I made it to the base of Humphrey’s around 10:30am and parked in the Snowbowl parking lot.  The plan for the day was to summit so I could build up some red blood cells at altitude.  However, my personal agenda was to see if I could break my personal summit record that I set over 20 years ago.  That record was 1 hour and 46 minutes from trailhead sign to summit sign.  There was no Strava, GPS watches, or cell phones when I went to school, but that number has been burned into my brain.   For my birthday, Tracy got me a new GPS watch, a Suunto Ambit.  It’s really cool that will last up to 50 hours plus 100% of the features are controlled via a web interface.   I had the watch charged and ready and pressed start.

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To make my goal, I needed to average about 2.9mph for the 5 miles up the 3000 foot climb.  The climb is fairly easy during the approach but gets really steep when you near the saddle and beyond.  For the first 45 minutes, I was averaging about 3.2mph so I thought I was in good shape.  Once I neared the saddle, the reality of my pace hit me and I slowed to a crawl.  The watch is set on 60s intervals, to save battery life, so winding up the switchbacks in some places shows me moving 10 feet in a minute.  I kept pushing and once I cleared tree line, the cold breeze hit me and I took off.  As I rounded the false summit, I looked down and saw that I only had 8 minutes to go and at the pace I was going, I wouldn’t make it.  I hit the gas and with my legs trembling, I started to run in spots. As I sprinted to the crest, I looked down and saw I was at 1:44.  With a final push, I passed the sign, pressed stop and came in 8 seconds short of 1:45.

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While this was my fastest, it’s only #5 on Strava, with #1 being 26 minutes faster than me (wow).  After a quick snack at the summit, I started down and finished about 8 minutes longer than it took me going up.  Once I hit the car, I cracked open the cooler and had a little picnic in the front seat.

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Today I plan on taking it easy and doing no hiking; just a little yoga and stretching.  Tracy comes in tomorrow and we’ll do a short hike up the rim so she can acclimatize to the altitude.

 

Less than a week

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The week has finally arrived.  On Saturday at 6am Arizona time, I will embark on a 106 mile race.  Race is not the right word since my only goal is to finish under the 36 hour cutoff.   I landed in Phoenix yesterday and drove to Payson, which is the only major “city” near the start line.  It’s about 15 minutes south of the trailhead.  The plan is for me to wonder the trails for the next couple days to make sure I get a feel for the pace and places I may need drop items.  (Course map: mogollon_monster) Tracy flies in on Thursday and will pace me several times during the race.  It will be so nice to have her with me this time.

Today I arrived at the starting trailhead around 8am and did a 20 mile loop (just walking) that traced the first 13 miles of the race and the last 5.  The extra 2 are not on the course, but offered a convenient shortcut.  I included a few pictures and the summary of the hike.  Only about 1/3 of the first 8 miles is runnable.  I’ll need to take it easy until I get up on the rim where the course follows a forest service road.  I should be able to move along at a good clip.  I’m a bit worried about my back.  I’ve been having issues with the left side, but a week ago Sunday my right side started hurting when I was running flats or downhill.  It cramps up anytime I stop moving.  It behaved OK today which is encouraging, but I’m doing a lot of yoga, stretching, and rolling on the ball to keep the pain away.

The plan tomorrow is to drive to Flagstaff and after breakfast at Macy’s Café, I’m going to summit Humphrey’s Peak.

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Flagstaff with Friends

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Jason, Nick, Preston, and I met in Flagstaff on Friday night with the intention to climb Mt. Humphreys on Saturday.    To help with the acclimatization, late in the afternoon we met at 9,300 ft at the SnowBowl ski resort and played a bit of Frisbee.  This accomplished the task of climb high and sleep low.  We stayed at the Springhill Suites which turned out to be brand new, modern, and really nice.  After a trip to the grocery store for some climbing snacks plus a little vodka and lemonade, we walked across the street for a 5 star dinning experience at Red Lobster.  The meal turned out to be fantastic.

We set the alarms for 7am so we could get a meal in before starting the climb.  There is a new Mike and Rhonda’s near campus that still has the “hungry man special” which Jason had to try.  After the short drive, we were on the trail by 9am.  The climb was uneventful and we summited in just over 3 hours.   I can’t figure out how to make the Strava widget work (if anyone knows how to make it work in Word Press – shoot me an email at jim@skelmo.com) but I pasted the screen shot below.  Lots of pictures at this link https://plus.google.com/photos/100459942408114210497/albums/5910660409688791505  We tried to summit the other mountain, but the trail was closed so we just played on the saddle for a while.  We stopped off for a pitcher of beer and a couple of sandwiches at Crystal Creek.  Jason remarked that the Grand Rapids is the best sub he’s ever had.

After cleaning up and chilling, dinner was at a restaurant called Café Ole.  We met my college advisor and her husband there, Kathy and John Eastwood.  The meal, conversation, and company were wonderful.  Jason wanted a night cap so we had another pitcher at Granny’s Closet.  This morning we drove back to Phoenix via Oak Creek and Sedona.  Oak Creek is still as nice as always, but Sedona is a metropolis with what seemed like 10 roundabouts.

Note, some of the pics are from Friday morning when Preston and I were exploring the trails around Pine.

Tomorrow, Tracy and I head off to Oakland where we will meet Eddie O’Rourke (Tracy’s long-time trail-running bud and my JMT co-adventurer) for the start of the John Muir trail.  I’m not sure if I will be able to update this while on the road, but you can find Eddie and me via Eddie’s SPOT (satellite transmitter) at:  http://share.findmespot.com/shared/faces/viewspots.jsp?glId=0R7Kj7qCKvbOECEdmcOx8HVfxYiT6no3v

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Last day of work

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It’s official, sports fans, I’m on sabbatical.  Yesterday was an emotional roller coaster as I tried to have short-timer’s disease but was too worried about closing the tech-summit event.  Our Wednesday evening activity was to go to the Diamondbacks game where Tallman worked his magic and arranged for 3 suites for a bunch of the group.  After that, Ashley had put together a little get- together at a downtown roof-top bar.  While I wanted to stay out late and enjoy the company of so many that I’ve worked with over the years, I also knew my 6:45am Thursday event meeting was looming, not to mention that I was scheduled to introduce our Chief Commercial Officer (Steve Felice), who would be giving the closing speech… .  I compromised and stayed out ’til 10:30.  Thursday morning’s meetings went as planned, I met Preston at the airport at 8:30am, and then hustled back to the hotel.  Preston accompanied me to the closing rehearsal at 11am, and sat in the audience as I introduced Steve.  After Steve spoke, things got interesting, as the craziness of Kevin Peesker was about to begin.

The SMB team has been around Kevin for years, so they had a pretty good idea of what was about to come, but for the rest of the audience…I’m sure they are still talking about it.  Kevin started off with funny, striking facts about Canada and his world-class sales team.  He thanked the technical team for the great event and shared some of the facts, including data on all the websites people visited while they should have been doing their labs.  All of this was outrageously funny and had everyone roaring…Kevin went even further by matching these websites to the offending reps’ service tag numbers, culminating with Dan having to stand and confess to his Facebook addition.  Kevin then enlisted the audience to stand up and stretch to the beat of some dance music.  Of course, some of the leaders were tricked into coming on stage to lead the stretching.  After a quick video and outfit change for Kevin, he had 5 of the team members challenge the leaders (including me) to a game of family feud.   The questions were funny and were part of a survey all the participants had taken earlier in the week.

The hard part for me was coming next.  Kevin had spent hours putting together a history of my career and accomplishments at Dell, and also had conducted interviews with team members–all of it really touched me–even while typing this now it’s hard to not get choked up.  Of course there was great Peesker humor, too, including a top-10 list.  I think my favorite item on the list was that I was going to sell the software that interconnects my 19 years of spreadsheets across my home SAN back to Dell for $1 billion.  I was then brought up on stage and presented by Curtis (my backfill) and Kevin a bunch of items to keep me safe on the trail:  a bear whistle, environmentally safe toilet paper, etc…  I was so emotional that I couldn’t get anything out of my mouth beyond thank you.

I cannot thank Kevin and Ashley enough for their thoughtfulness and hard work in the last couple of days before my big break.  It’s great to have such close friends.

Enough of the mush….  After the event we got the hell out of Dodge and headed north to Payson for the “official” start of the sabbatical.  We drove through Payson and up to Washington Park, which is the hub of the 106-mile race I’ve signed up for at the end of September.  The idea was to stretch the legs at altitude so we can get the red blood cells flowing for the climb coming on Saturday.  Preston was concerned at first that he wasn’t up to the climb, but after 20 minutes of his asking me where the steep stuff was (we were on the steep stuff), his concerns seemed to fade.  We climbed the 2 miles up to rim road 300 and then went off road in search of a great view of the rim.  Off-road to me is usually following a jeep trail, but Preston wanted to go cross country, which resulted in us scaling a canyon.  We found the view we were looking for and stopped for a few pictures, but needed to hustle back since the sun was setting.  A few pictures are below, but hit the link if you want to see them all.  The last one is Preston pretending to eat the salamander he caught.

https://plus.google.com/photos/100459942408114210497/albums/5910124492833668001?authkey=CNK9j6_yg6DwxwE

 

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