Today I awoke at 6 AM with the sun just getting ready to rise, and the minimal amount of light it created started to reflect off of lighter colored surfaces. Our new bedroom in Chicago has amazing huge windows and a giant sliding glass door that makes pre sunrise feel like mid morning. In my foggy early Saturday morning state of enjoying more than one beer last night it felt lighter than normal at this time of morning. As the fog cleared and my dry eyes started to moisten a bit I realized it was snowing. Finally, a nice clean cold December snow. Our new neighborhood in Chicago seems like a small cheerful village, everything from Swedish festival of lights, a Christmas caroling brass band on the street, to the male models dancing in Christmas g-strings in a fashion boutique.
Other than bringing Christmas Joy, early winter delightful traditions like red wine, bourbon, dark beer, warm thick soups and stews, seeing the snow made me want to be in the mountains peacefully and laboriously trudging through feet of snow. The snowy mountain life we had for a few months in South America was amazing, but it was almost overly laborious. We shared the stories of our travels to Bariloche, San Martin, and Las Leñas pursuing fresh snow in the southern hemi. Our rewards were well received, but at a somewhat frustrating cost being we only really rode on snow for a few days out of a few months of travel. Not letting anything get us down and having an attitude of enjoying each other, our experiences, and the raw adventure, we were able to find joy of adventure without reaching our perfect goals.
But come on! NO FREAKIN SNOW FOR THE ENTIRE WINTER IN SOUTH AMERICA NEARLY EVERY PLACE WE WENT! We just could not get past this thought, and it sort of burned us out of snowboarding so we told ourselves we would take a year off to recharge and go next winter with a fresh outlook.
Regardless we are back in Chicago and Nicolette bought tickets to see a ski movie called Solitaire. The film was awesome, and it was really neat to see these guys and ladies ski and ride in areas we explored. It is pretty amazing to be part of the handful of people in the theater who could identify the terrain features and lakes and say we were there. This also showed us is snowboarding is badass and we need to make a trek to Tahoe this year. Nicolette had some of the fastest runs of her life in Tahoe and she is now drooling to get back. What this also showed us is ski trips in South America are a pain in the arse. There was a Q&A session after the screening, the guys answering who made the movie discussed how they had three or four days of skiing a month and how the film took two years to make. So we went, we conquered, sort of, lets just say we made a worthy effort and we rode in one of the coolest places on earth. Below is the trailer.
SOLITAIRE: A Backcountry Skiing, Snowboarding, and Telemark Film from Sweetgrass Productions.
Back in Chicago we are all moved in and I have been working for a few weeks now. Definitely strange but more mundane to be back at an office, but hey we do not have pro sponsors so we still need day jobs! Running was always a big thing that got me through those crazy weeks, and after a while or turned into an obsession, delight, challenge, and adventure to do more. On our trip we had some of the most amazing trail runs (more on these later), but in the process I acquired some hamstring injuries. Thinking I was going to run another 50k outside of Austin in November I was training pretty hard in South America, then we were drawn back to Chicago so I scrapped the 50k and decided to take a running hiatus to heal the hamstrings. This has been great so far, I am about six weeks off of running and things are healing nicely. In the interim I spent most of my time quenching my endurance thirst with cycling. I think I will get back on the running circuit in the new years, the Vermont 50 Miler might be in my future. Regardless I follow the ultra circuit via a handful of blogs of some of the champ runners for fun, and recently a film called Unbreakable was released. Unbreakable details the 2010 Western States 100 mile race near Lake Tahoe. This was a remarkable year due to the level of competition from top runners. This was also a year that both Anton Kupricka and Geoff Rose ran the race in 15ish hours and shattered previous records coming in 2nd and 1st place.
Unbreakable from Unbreakable: The Western States 100.
Finally, Xavier de le Rue and team released their full length video of the Timeline series. The Timeline films is a series of videos of Xavier de le Rue snowboarding in some of the most amazing places in the world late last fall and through the winter. Xavier is amazing to watch because he can ride so fast it gives me goosebumps. Regardless, below is the film.
THIS IS MY WINTER (full movie english) from TimeLine Film.
Other than bringing Christmas Joy, early winter delightful traditions like red wine, bourbon, dark beer, warm thick soups and stews, seeing the snow made me want to be in the mountains peacefully and laboriously trudging through feet of snow. The snowy mountain life we had for a few months in South America was amazing, but it was almost overly laborious. We shared the stories of our travels to Bariloche, San Martin, and Las Leñas pursuing fresh snow in the southern hemi. Our rewards were well received, but at a somewhat frustrating cost being we only really rode on snow for a few days out of a few months of travel. Not letting anything get us down and having an attitude of enjoying each other, our experiences, and the raw adventure, we were able to find joy of adventure without reaching our perfect goals.
But come on! NO FREAKIN SNOW FOR THE ENTIRE WINTER IN SOUTH AMERICA NEARLY EVERY PLACE WE WENT! We just could not get past this thought, and it sort of burned us out of snowboarding so we told ourselves we would take a year off to recharge and go next winter with a fresh outlook.
Regardless we are back in Chicago and Nicolette bought tickets to see a ski movie called Solitaire. The film was awesome, and it was really neat to see these guys and ladies ski and ride in areas we explored. It is pretty amazing to be part of the handful of people in the theater who could identify the terrain features and lakes and say we were there. This also showed us is snowboarding is badass and we need to make a trek to Tahoe this year. Nicolette had some of the fastest runs of her life in Tahoe and she is now drooling to get back. What this also showed us is ski trips in South America are a pain in the arse. There was a Q&A session after the screening, the guys answering who made the movie discussed how they had three or four days of skiing a month and how the film took two years to make. So we went, we conquered, sort of, lets just say we made a worthy effort and we rode in one of the coolest places on earth. Below is the trailer.
SOLITAIRE: A Backcountry Skiing, Snowboarding, and Telemark Film from Sweetgrass Productions.
Back in Chicago we are all moved in and I have been working for a few weeks now. Definitely strange but more mundane to be back at an office, but hey we do not have pro sponsors so we still need day jobs! Running was always a big thing that got me through those crazy weeks, and after a while or turned into an obsession, delight, challenge, and adventure to do more. On our trip we had some of the most amazing trail runs (more on these later), but in the process I acquired some hamstring injuries. Thinking I was going to run another 50k outside of Austin in November I was training pretty hard in South America, then we were drawn back to Chicago so I scrapped the 50k and decided to take a running hiatus to heal the hamstrings. This has been great so far, I am about six weeks off of running and things are healing nicely. In the interim I spent most of my time quenching my endurance thirst with cycling. I think I will get back on the running circuit in the new years, the Vermont 50 Miler might be in my future. Regardless I follow the ultra circuit via a handful of blogs of some of the champ runners for fun, and recently a film called Unbreakable was released. Unbreakable details the 2010 Western States 100 mile race near Lake Tahoe. This was a remarkable year due to the level of competition from top runners. This was also a year that both Anton Kupricka and Geoff Rose ran the race in 15ish hours and shattered previous records coming in 2nd and 1st place.
Unbreakable from Unbreakable: The Western States 100.
Finally, Xavier de le Rue and team released their full length video of the Timeline series. The Timeline films is a series of videos of Xavier de le Rue snowboarding in some of the most amazing places in the world late last fall and through the winter. Xavier is amazing to watch because he can ride so fast it gives me goosebumps. Regardless, below is the film.
THIS IS MY WINTER (full movie english) from TimeLine Film.
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