A Long Overdue Update

First of all, congratulations to the country for regaining a bit of my faith in one of the most important elections of our time. Yes. It´s true. Proposition II WAS passed. Take that you doubters.

Oh, and in other, less important, news, apparently Barak Obama was elected as well.

I have an awful lot to say and too much time. A whole lot has happened in the last week or so since I last updated.

Last weekend, my roomate and I took a 4 day hiking trip around the Quilotoa Loop in the Andes. It´s a group of 5 or 6 small Andean villages with beautiful hikes between each. The centerpiece is the Laguna Quilotoa, which is a giant Volcanic Crater lake high up in the mountains. We ended up hiking about 50 miles in 4 days at 4000m, so it was a pretty tiring weekend. A more long and detailed report of this is hopefully coming soon.

Other than that, I´ve been working and running and not a whole lot else. I had a great interval session Monday, a difficult but satisfying long run yesterday, and I have more speedier intervals on Sunday.

This weekend, we´re planning on doing a bit more hiking, but just around the mountains in Quito. Assuming the weather´s all right, we´re going to try and summit the big volcano next to Quito.

Also, next weekend, we are heading down to the coast, which should be really nice (again, weather permitting). I´m set to do a time trial down there on next Sunday at sea level. Jon has told me to shoot for 5:08 miles which comes out to a total time of 15:56. A 10 second PR at this level is a pretty big deal, but given that last time I ran this distance at sea level I was running about 10 miles per week less and not doing any intervals, I´m feeling at least relatively confident.

I´ve also been thinking a lot about what I´m going to do with the rest of my year off. The hiking trip made me really miss Arizona for some reason (the terrain is remarkably similar), so I´m going to try and spend at least a bit of time out west. Mostly, though, I need to get some work so I can pay off all these expenses that I´m incurring. I presented a first draft of my plan to my folks which was regarded only as ¨pretty ridiculous¨ so I see that as quite a success!

I´ll try and post more later but I´ve got to eat and then we´re off to see the new James Bond.