At the Lake!

I arrived at my folks place on the Lake. I'm going to be living here till the end of April. I'm pretty stoked about it to be honest, what's not to be excited about? A great big lake to snowshoe on, rolling roads to hill train on, mom's coffee, Ray's jokes (more about that later) and naps! Not to mention my cat Bomber is here and I miss the big lug. Also, I get to hang out with my folks, which, as you get older becomes a more cherished thing I think - if you're lucky enough to enjoy spending time with your parents. If you know my folks then you know what I mean, if you don't know them then I think you'll figure it out if you keep reading this blog, they're unique and wonderful. Let me introduce you. MOM is 79 years old and has one of the best attitudes about life of anyone I know. Ray is 93 which seems like a ridiculous number. As I don't exactly know who is reading this blog and at my mom's request I do want to respect their privacy by keeping some things a bit more vague, such as the actual location of their home and their last names. And really, those things don't matter as much as the experiences that I'm sharing. 

I was excited to see the large expanse of snow on the frozen lake with visions of snowshoe routes beginning to dance in my head! The snow started falling within minutes of my arriving which brought a big smile to my face. I have a trail marathon in the Napa Valley on March 24.  This is shockingly soon when one considers that a standard road marathon of 42KM (26 miles) takes significant training which I wouldn't be too fussed about. But take the same distance and run it on single track trails with significant elevation gain and you have a race that now takes a fu*** of a lot of training and I have 2 months. It's kind of funny how these races sneak up on a person, it seemed so far away when I signed up for the race. Now... not so far away really. I'm running about 2 hours relatively comfortably right now but that ain't 4 hours or 5 hours which is my wildly optimistic goal. Lets call it a "Stretch Target"... ya... that's it.

Mom mentioned that she hadn't seen the wolves on the lake lately, especially since she saw the cougar walking along one of the neighbour's dock and according to her wolves tend to stay away when cougars are about. Which is probably not a bad strategy but MEH... cougars schmoozers! I'll stay out in the open, I have my bear spray and happy thoughts. :-)