August 28, 2005

What a month this has turned out to be! On the 20th, I competed in the Pikes Peak Ascent. If you're not familiar with it (and managed to have escaped listening to me blather on about it nonstop for the past two months), it's a 13.32 mile half marathon up Pikes Peak. I had never participated in a running race before and I think I set some pretty lofty goals by choosing the Ascent for my first. But it was definitely great motivation to keep me off my butt all year to meet my goal!

I had set my expectations at completing the race in 4 hours. The day of the race came and I had lots of training under my belt. On Wednesday and Friday mornings before work I would meet up with some co-workers and do a 7 mile run. On Mondays and Fridays after work I would head up the Incline. On Wednesdays after work I'd take it easier with a 6 to 7 mile long hike and on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Sundays I'd play hockey. Also, for about 6 weeks before the race I had to get a lot of extreme altitude training in to prepare me for running at 14,000 feet. This involved what we called 3-2-1 training: We'd drive to the top of Pikes Peak and run down three miles, back up, down two miles, back up, and finally down one mile and back up. This is a killer workout for sure and would usually take me about two days to completely recover from.

All the hard work I had been doing all year paid off on race day. I completed in 3 hours, 35 minutes, and 9 seconds. This put me at 202nd place out of 1223 male finishers! I was shocked I could make it up so quickly - and so excited that I beat my goal by a healthy margin. I actually felt really great at the end of the race. I could have pushed even harder and knocked maybe 15 minutes off my time, but the last mile and a half was full of people from the first wave of the race (that started 30 minutes before those of us in the second wave) that I couldn't pass easily because of how narrow and rocky the trail is. I was feeling great even at that high altitude, but I could tell it was affecting a lot of the people around me pretty badly. Next year I'll try it again, but now I'm officially qualified to start in the first wave, so I'll get to see what my true time can be with fewer people to pass. (I ended up passing about 300 people from the first wave! That's 1/3 of them!

It's quite a different experience when you are running a race as opposed to just getting out there to train and exercise. There were people all along the course cheering for us all and what a thrill it was to hear my name announced as I neared the finish line and hear the people cheering and clapping as I crossed. What a rush! I didn't think running could really be so fun, but this proved me wrong! For my efforts I got a nice fleece finisher's jacket, a medal, and a nice shoulder bag.

Here's my official bib:

Here's my official finisher's medal:

And my official results from the Gazette:
(The 19/83 is my ranking within my group - males age 25 to 29)

This weekend, I hiked up the tallest mountain in Colorado, Mt. Elbert. At 14,433 feet, it proved to be quite a steep challenge, but the views from the top were just amazing. Check them out for yourself here. So that's two goals for the year completed within a week of each other! What's in store for me next? Well, I'll be heading to Las Vegas in October with my hockey team to compete in a tournament. I haven't been to Vegas since I was 12 and this should turn out to be quite interesting!

July 30, 2005

If you've never gone skydiving before, go and do it now!!!

It the most amazing thing you'll ever experience.

So, as you can tell, I finally made it out skydiving today. We had a group of five people, but since the planes only hold four and we had to do a tandem jump for our first one (basically, you are strapped to the front of the instructor, who handles all the parachute stuff), we split into groups of 2, 2, and 1.

So, my turn comes up and we get all suited up and head for the plane. It was this tiny Cessna with basically the side of the plane missing. Very nice! So, all four of us scrunch into the plane (me, Ming-Jen, and our two instructors) and take off for a 15 minute flight up to 12,000 feet. There are awesome views from up there of the entire Front Range and the Sangre De Cristo Range as well as the Royal Gorge.

Time comes, make sure we're fastened securely to our instructor, put on the goggles and slide right to the edge of the plane. So, for just a few seconds I'm hanging there off my instructor with my feet on the bottom of the plane outside, a quick count to three, push my head back, lean forward and we're falling! The sensation is just incredible. My instructor asked ahead if I'd like to try some flips, and of course I said yes! So we tumbled around a couple of times -- it's so hard to tell which way was actually up at that point!!! So then after our flips, we spread our arms out and fall for several more seconds.

Then out comes the parachute... Those harnesses hurt when you're trying to support 200 pounds slowing from 130 MPH to almost zero in an instant and all the weight is on your groin! The pain goes away a bit once you're slowed down completely. We did a lot of twirls and a stall on the way down and then we landed right in the middle of the landing area. Not quite as smooth as it could have been, since I ended up on the ground, but nothing was hurt :)

All in all, it was quite an amazing thing to do. Strangely, I wasn't even nervous at all, but I thing I had a huge grin the whole way down. I was smiling on the whole ride back to Colorado Springs. I wish I could do it again, but at $165 a pop, it's going to be a while before I can justify giving it another shot. But it was completely worth every penny. Just amazing!

April 17, 2005

Well, I'm officially moving up to the Intermediate hockey league at Honnen. For all you local fans (Hi Deanna!), the schedule for this league is here. As of this writing, my team is being listed as "hot pink". Of course, this is a joke (or so the guy in charge of the league told me this morning), so the color will be changing as soon as we have our first game on Tuesday. Check out the roster to see which color we end up as. I still have one more game with my Gelb team on Sunday the 24th as I transition to the new league. Three of the players from Gelb are moving up to this league, I wish our team good luck -- I'm sure they'll have no problem improving on our record from the past two sessions... Hopefully I won't get eaten alive at the intermediate level!

I need to go somewhere interesting so I can add more photos to my galleries! I may be able to swing a trip to Yellowstone this summer with Chris Evey. Anyone else interested in going?

January 7, 2005

Last night was the first practice for our newly formed LSI Logic Adult Novice Co-Ed Hockey Team! It took a bit of fanagling, but we got our team officially in the league. It'll be quite interesting since we have players running the entire skill level of what you'd find in the novice league. Three of the guys had never been out on the ice with a stick and puck until last night! I'm really looking forward to our first game on Thursday night next week! Here's our team roster. We're the Gelb team (it's German for Yellow, don't know why it's in German, guess we're special). And here is our game schedule for those local website readers if you'd like to come cheer for us! (and for those of you too far away to make it to a game, the schdule will be updated with results of each game the week after it's played.)

December 31, 2004

Well, it's the last day of 2004 and since I finally had a free day off of work and not travelling, I finally found a few spare moments to update this site. I added 5 new photo galleries from various adventures I've had throughout the year since my last photo gallery that I made from December last year!

It's been quite a year for me. I visited a ton of new places in Colorado and New Mexico -- there are pictures of most of these in the photo gallery section. I took up playing ice hockey in May. that's something I've been wanting to try ever since all the games we used to go to watch back at UIUC, and let me tell you, it's hard work, but more fun than I even thought it would be! I've been playing 4 times a week lately, and my novice league team recently finished our session undefeated (7 games).

I guess the biggest thing that happend this year is buying my first house. There are quite a few pictures of it in the photo gallery section. I love it a lot :) I'm so glad to be out of an apartment and be done throwing my money away on rent. Not to mention it's nice to live less than 2 miles from work and have 2200 square feet all to myself. Yeah, it's excessive, but I have to plan for the future, you know. Also, having a garage is possibly the best thing in the world - especially when it snows out.

I also accomplished quite a few fitness goals this year. I lost about 30 pounds over the course of the year, so I only have about 10 or so left to get to my ideal target. I'm sure I can manage that this next year. I hiked the Incline twice a week almost every week this summer. I'm getting close to my goal of getting to the top in less than 30 minutes (so far, I've broken 32). Once the weather warms up again, I'll be back at it. I hiked up Pikes Peak and then ran back down it the same day (that's more than 26 miles round trip and 7500+ feet of elevation gain! I've decided to enter the Pikes Peak Ascent this upcoming year (it's a race up Pikes Peak!) and will set my goal at completing in 4 hours. I'll be far from winning it, but it'll be great to be able to say I did it. (so far my best time is 5 hours)

I also added another 14'er to my reportoire. I hiked up Mt Yale in July and enjoyed every minute of it. I hope to keep adding a new 14'er to my list every year (and more than one if possible!

©2005 - Brian Einsweiler