Well, it took me a couple of years but I was able to realize a long-held goal of participating in a sporting event which pushes the body to be fairly fit. It was neat because it was held on Independence Day. I was able to complete the Righteous Richland Triathlon. This is not a full triathlon, rather a sprint triathlon. Nevertheless, it was a challenge and a lot of fun to participate with over two-hundred others. The course started at the park along the Columbia River where I frequently go to swim for exercise. You can see a course map here. We climbed in the water for a half-mile swim starting the course around 8 a.m. I hustled out of the water about 15 minutes later, up the bank to the bicycle staging area. I tried to dry a little as I went and got on my socks and shoes and shirt, gloves and helmet. Denise, Nate and Justin were there to cheer me on.

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Will Halter, A friend from my ward was also there participating.

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I also ran across an old acquaintance from Sunnyside, John Kilian. We hung out a little and reminisced a bit pre and post race.

Back to the story, I climbed on my bike wearing my Speedo and shirt and got going (yes, a Speedo. I NEVER thought I’d wear one but the experts said it was the way to go to make for a quick transition. Thus, avoiding chafing of a wet swimsuit. You’ll see it looks like I’m wearing no bottoms but I do have the Speedo on.).

This “sprint” triathlon was unique in that the bicycle section was on mountain bikes. We traversed a 12 mile course, again over familiar territory on single and double track trails through the Chamna Natural Preserve. Chamna is a lush, beatiful area that is about 5 minutes from our house by bike. It is right along the Yakima River and is bordered on the north by Interstate 182. It seems kind of out of place when you think about this area right in the middle of town.

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This is a satellite image of the Chamna area.

This section was marked out ahead of time and I pre-rode the course 4 times before race day. We got back to the staging area and switched to the 3 mile run. This was my weakest section as I hadn’t run in years. Swimming and biking were pretty strong but I didn’t even think I could run the whole course, especially because of plantar fasciitis in my right foot. I pushed on and, surprisingly, jogged 95% of the final leg. I crossed the finish line around 1:27:44. Most importantly, I FINISHED! and, I didn’t have any next day soreness that I expected. Thanks to all those who provided support!

Okay, I’ll admit it, I love to ride my bicycles. Mostly its my road bike in the early morning for exercise. This is my hobby (along with swimming). But I also enjoy time on the mountain bike and today was a fun ride. It wasn’t a long ride but I got the heart pumping hard and had a great view from the top of Badger Mountain. I started on the west end of the mountain at the parking area (left end of orange line on picture). Then I sweated and grunted my way up to the top. The bottom of the orange loop is my trip up, the top is the trip down (until they merge where I went up and down on the same trail) In the picture, you can see a couple buildings where antennas are perched on the summit. Before I came back down, I strapped on the Flip Video camera. You can watch the video if you’d like. Sorry, it’s a little shaky with some glare as I headed into the sun at points. It was a good ride, about 35 minutes total time.

Me and the two older boys had a great late season backpacking trip into the Blue Mountains last weekend. We saw an opportunity when we were all available so we took advantage and got away in the afternoon on Friday. We parked at Teepee Trailhead (along with several hunters vehicles) about 40 miles south of Dayton and set out. We got to camp in about an hour. The trail was a bit muddy and we ran across some patches of snow. We stopped about a quarter mile before our campsite at a spring to fill our water bottles. The trough the spring fed into was frozen over so we had to break some ice to get to the water before we pumped it through our filter. It was dark by the time we got there but we each had our headlights. We had some great foil dinners so we got a roaring fire going first then we pitched our tents. The clear night sky made for some awesome star gazing. We got our foil dinners on the coals and they cooked up nice. We enjoyed them around a nice campfire. Then we hit the hay. Our tents held up but the rustling wind made for a noisy sleep. It was a bit cold at night but we all stayed warm. We got up Saturday morning and the boys saw the amazing view from our campsite to the spacious valleys below. We were hungry so we cooked our bacon and eggs. Then we took a little walk to the fire lookout that has views of Oregon, Washington and even into Idaho on clear days. The lookout was boarded up for the winter. We went back to camp and just relaxed and napped and just messed around. We heated up our freeze-dried lunches then packed up and headed for home. Going down was significantly quicker than the trip up. We stopped in Dayton so see grandpa and grandma’s house then it was back to the Tri-Cities. A wonderful trip!

We’ve talked about doing it. We’ve thought about doing it. We decided to do it and now we’ve done it! My friend Scott and I swim a couple times a week in the Columbia River between the docks in Howard Amon Park in Richland. We’ve been doing it for 3 years or so (during the warmer months). We’ve also heard about the “Columbia Crossing” event in early September each year. I think we’ve both had thoughts that it would be a good challenge to try it with the “because its there” reasoning. A few weeks ago, the official Columbia Crossing was on September 5. That morning, Scott and I were swimming and I mentioned that the Columbia Crossing was that day. He talked about how he wanted to do that and was sorry he missed it, I felt the same way so we formulated a plan to do our own crossing a few weeks down the road. We picked a date and decided we needed someone with a boat to escort us. Some other friends of ours, Kevin and Lou agreed to paddle beside us in their two-man kayaks. We picked Saturday, September 20. I thought that would be a kind of momentous date since it was the day after I turned 45. We kept swimming in preparation and got ourselves psyched up. I got myself some new swim goggles, a swim cap and even a new tube (we always swim in the river towing a tube behind us, just in case there are problems).

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Well, Saturday morning came and Denise announced it was pouring rain as she went outside for the paper route. I just hoped the others involved in the swim would still be game. As I ate my breakfast, the other participants showed up, ready to go! We headed for the landing spot and dropped off vehicles then to Chiawana park for launch. We remembered that there was a professional bass fishing tournament going on that morning. We were going to be in the water at 6:30 a.m. but that was the start of the tourney when all the boats race up or down the river to their favorite fishing spot to try and catch the big ones. So, we delayed our launch a little and by 6:45 the last boat went by and we were off! I prefer a breast stroke while Scott sticks mainly to the crawl. The water temperature was about 60 degrees but we quickly got our hearts pumping to build up our own heat. I wasn’t sure how long it would take us to cross but the Columbia Crossing participants took anywhere from 29 minutes to an hour. I took the GPS and transferred our course to Google Earth for the satellite picture you see here. We each pulled our tubes (mine also had 3 flashing LED halloween pumpkins for added visability thanks to my wonderful wife!). It was kind of amazing how the weather cooperated. When we started out, we had showers and a head wind from the south with tiny rollers, I swallowed plenty of water but soon, the rain let up and the water smoothed. As we swam from the park toward the middle, we could see the bottom of the river about 12 feet down. About half way across, you can see we go upstream of an island. The underwater extension of the island is quite shallow and we had seaweed brushing across our bellies as we tried to swim right on the surface to avoid getting tangled. After we passed the island, the river got much deeper and we couldn’t see the bottom. We ended up getting across in 35 minutes covering the same course as the Columbia Crossing so we felt pretty good about how we did! Denise and Justin were there to greet us and take pictures (Justin found a monster crawdad to play with). A successful day!

Well, the river was calling this morning. I missed a day of exercise this week so I wanted to get out and raise the heart rate to release some endorphins. Its sure nice to have Saturdays available for activities and other things. I called my swimming buddy Scott and he was raring to go! He had almost written the swimming season off, he was hesitant to call me but was ecstatic to hear my phone call with a swimming invitation. So, we loaded up the inner tubes and drove the 3 blocks to the river. We had several double takes as people saw us in swim suits with our floaties. A couple people asked if we were crazy, did we know it was October!? We got in and the current was swift with some extra debris on the surface. As I watched the shoreline to gauge our upstream progress, it didn’t look like we were moving at all. We’ve had good workouts before without going upstream at all and I thought this would be one of those days. So, I just buckled down and swam and soon realized some progress. I was surprised when we actually made it up to the first dock. Then, we turned around and headed back. Time in the water was about half an hour. River water temperature 54.4 degrees. You can actually check the real time water temp by clicking here then clicking on “Leslie Groves” dot on map.