A good laugh for you all…
Happy New Year’s Eve.

I will be in the Packfiller studios tomorrow (December 29th) at 5:00pm pst interviewing Chris Thomas LIVE with host Patrick Bulger.  Tune in and listen live, join the chat room, or  SKYPE us…or rather Chris.  If you miss this small time window, you can also download the interview on iTunes a couple days later.

A couple weeks ago we interviewed Andy Hampsten.  Maybe one day, if we are lucky, we will be able to interview the infamous Tom Schuler.  But I don’t think we are quite big enough yet.

 But, back to commitment. When I ran for Boulder City Council this year, I jumped in with both feet, both arms, and my entire body and soul. Unequivocally, no candidate worked harder than me; although, some may say that was because I had the most to learn! Regardless, I was committed!

Two weeks ago, it was minus 7 degrees here in Boulder. Wednesdays have become one of my 2 long runs each week, and my goal was to run roughly 16-18 miles on this day in order to see whether I should attempt a 50K run in January. Well, I did it! Throughout the run – on hardpacked snow and in absolutely frigid temps – I kept thinking about making that commitment. It is what kept me going, and the satisfaction of the result was enormous. The picture here shows me at the end of the 2:21 run. Funny – when it’s that cold, the first part of the run is a cool down, and the end is a warm up :).

After the triathlon season ends, I always find it tough to take a break, so I rarely do.  I definitely take the intensity down, but I soon resume to my “normal” training.  I know it’s best for my body to rest more, but I still want to keep racing.  That’s why I wanted to sneak in one more race before the end of the year.  Since snow fell early in CO this year, Nikki and I decided to do a snowshoe race.  

A couple days after Thanksgiving, we went up to Copper Mountain to do the 6th Annual Gobbler Chase 5K snowshoe race.  It’s a quick 5k loop on Copper Mountain basically going up and down at around 9500 ft.  Nikki, myself, and my sister in law all raced on our Atlas Snowshoes and it was super fun.   Even though it’s a 5k, running on snowshoes is always a lung burner.  I lined up next to my ultra runner friend Dave Wilcox, who lives in the area, and we were on our way!  I took the lead early on, pushed hard and finished in 23:48 to take the win by 2 minutes.  The topper was winning 4 ski lift tickets to Copper Mtn.  Nikki had a great race and placed 2nd overall among the women!  The next day I noticed that I had my picture in the local paper, The Summit Daily (see below). If you’ve never been on snowshoes before, give it a try!

Tim

In an attempt to get into the holiday spirit and get some exercise at the same time I participated in the Jingle Bell 10k this year.  I have been enjoying the off season since Ironman Hawaii and haven’t done much running, so this race was a last minute decision for me.  Well, honestly it was both the lack of running and the huge dump of snow we had received just a couple days before the race (see example below):