So I felt a little relieved about my lack of blogging as of late when I realized that just about everyone else's posts have been, shall we say, less frequent as of late. You know who you are. Thanks for making me look not quite so bad.
So I wrote the above line something like 2 weeks ago. OK, I look bad, enough said. Seriously, with all the summer activities I've been up to, plus some healthy doses of laziness and procrastinations, eh -- blog posting has fallen way off my list. I don't even know how many posts I've got to catch up with in Reader. Too many. I suck. Let's move on, shall we?
So, what have I been up to? Here's the condensed version, aided by some iPhone photos.
We have been sleeping outside. A LOT! This is soooo easy to do, especially when some of this: 
is right outside your back door. Well, OK, this particular lake was a little bit of a drive, but utterly deserted and totally wonderful. Tom and I have the car camping thing down to a
science, man. Really. Within 20 minutes of making the decision to spend the night elsewhere, we'll have the truck totally packed with everything we need, including food, mattress and all manner of niceties, and will be backing out of the driveway. With 15 minutes of reaching our destination, we're unpacked, the bed is made, and I'm doing this:
in someplace like this:
On other fronts, we've got the tandem dialed in and rolling. Sometime last week or the week before, we met up with our friend Yeti -- who is all the name implies -- for a trip down in South Lake. We were originally going to go up Blue Lakes road, but about 1/4 mile into the ride Yeti's tire went pow!
ppppthhhhhhhhssssssss, with a big ol' hole, and that was that.
Oh, sadness.
We regrouped after a bicycle change, and instead went riding in the Minden/Gardnerville area of Nevada, and put the bike through its paces. Verdict? We are in love with this bike. It's a fucking dog on the long uphill, but downhill and on the flats it's a beast and motors like nothing else. On this ride, we were easily -- effortlessly! -- hitting 20-25 mph on the flat, and topped out at 38mph (no pedaling!) on one of the downhills.
I saw a lot of this:
And will undoubtedly see a lot more of the same thing, with some scenery shifts. It is so cool for me to be on the tandem, 'cause otherwise I have no hope of keeping up with such cyclists as Tom and Yeti (or, really, pretty much ANY cyclist, but these guys in particular are hard core). It must be something like being a little kid, living in the adults' world and spending all your time looking at peoples' thighs, and then having someone lift you up on their shoulders and Oh! Brave new world! Or something like that.
What else??? Oh yeah, um, running! Yes, I've been running. Plenty. I haven't really changed anything in my running as far as speedwork or anything goes, but I am slowly inching up the mileage and really inching up the elevation gains. Here's a profile of a run I did (last week, the week before? Whenever these distant activities occurred):
That's 1500 feet of elevation gain, which is becoming about my average for almost any run. I ran this one with the mountain bikers, in a place I've never run before. Tom, bless his heart, insisted that I download the .gpx track to Gary, and I took a map along with me as well. I started 45 minutes ahead of the bikers, and within 30 minutes I was, not lost, but rather misplaced. I wandered around for a bit, looked at the map and couldn't really make heads nor tails of it (and I am a woman who can read a map), scratched my head and decided I was way off track. I then put the map away and merrily continued on my run. What a concept, I gave the Garmin a glance and realized, in fact, exactly where I was and how to pick up the trail again. From this point on, I listened only to Gary and, despite a few wrong turns quickly realized, I found my way around. This was a very interesting navigational test and lesson, and learned me to rely on the .gpx. At times. Here's the path:
Interestingly enough, about 3/4 of the way into the ride, I stumbled upon the mt. bikers, and THEY were lost! By this point, I had Gary all figured out and knew where to go. By the time I finished the 12 mile run, it was getting a little dark out. Still, before the last of the light left, I got a great view of Prosser.
More to follow in a bit, I will try to get caught up to the present time. Hopefully, this mythical post will arrive before another 2 weeks pass . . .
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