Saturday, December 24, 2011

Incomplete Week in Review.

Got one more run on tap for this week.  I'll get to that when Deneb is down for his nap this afternoon.  Going to let him have a long one because tonight will go late.  Somewhere, someone is roasting a whole pig for the Ascarrunz Family Christmas.

Anyway.  Somehow I've managed to stay on top of my workouts this week.  There was a brief moment of "despair" as I thought I'd miss a workout on Wednesday thanks to Christmas shopping, dilly-dallying, and eyeglasses, but I doubled up on Thursday and managed to log the miles.

I'm not a big fan of making up workouts in that fashion - I think it tends to lead to injury.  Especially if one hasn't built up to the required mileage and toward the end of my second run on Thursday, I was feeling it in my Achilles tendons.  An almost burning sensation which I've never experienced before.

The same sensation resurfaced yesterday during my short recovery run.  Not psyched about that at all, but I was able to make the pain go away yesterday by focusing on high turnover rate and lifting up rather than pushing off. Going to have to spend more time doing form drills.

The highlight (and lowlight) of the week has to be Monday and Tuesday in Cuevas.  In my previous post I mentioned that I stayed in Cuevas.  I actually wrote that post Monday morning in Cuevas before Hugo and I went out to collect some bench making material...

We set out around 10:30 or 11.  Hugo with a chainsaw over his shoulder and me with an axe, oil, gasoline, DSLR and Jackson.  We hiked up above the second waterfall at Cuevas, took a left and quickly reached the property boundary.  After another quarter mile or so we got to the location where a tree was already felled, deposited our bench making supplies and continued onward.

Hugo wanted to get out and visit with the mountains.  We ended up walking the better part of 5 miles with a fair number of ups and downs.  The highlight of our hike was the pool at the bottom of a tiny waterfall which must have been 400 feet high.  The water came down from above and hit a tree making a sound just like rain. Beautiful.

We eventually made our way back to the chainsaw and tools and Hugo cut the tree trunk to fashion 3 long benches.  Wizard with a chainsaw he, but the chainsaw decided that Monday was a good day to die and it stopped working about 80% of the way finished.  That was that and so we headed back to the cabins.

Tuesday Hugo found some help (who had another chainsaw) and went back to finish up the job from yesterday.  When they left I wasn't quite ready and I took off about 30 minutes behind them.

Somewhere along the way I took a wrong turn and found myself above where they were working.  I cut through the brush, heading to where I could hear the sound of the chainsaw and pissed off a nest of bees.  Suddenly I was crashing through the forest, and breathlessly telling Hugo in my worst Spanish, "Arbeja, Arbeja!" which locally translates to: "Peas, Peas!" (Simply adding an R causes all kind of confusion)...

Now there were 4 of us crashing through the woods (Jackson included - he thought it great fun!).  Eventually the bees settled down and I'd been stung on the order of 20 times, putting an end to my day and sending me to the pharmacy for some antihistamine.

I wasn't entirely sure what kind of bee had hit me and having ancient history of allergy to wasps, I had to be careful not to die.  I was pretty confident that I wouldn't have problems because I was pulling stingers out of my head. But I have never been stung that many times before and Hugo was saying that these bees weren't honey bees so we decided the best course of action would be to head back to Santa Cruz.

So much for the week in review.

Thanks for reading and the pictures below are pretty much in temporal order from our hike Monday.
J













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