After several month of hard work in the Utah wilderness,

I decided to take a vacation. I spent a few days in Leadville where I climbed Mosquito Pass, Mount Sherman and Hope Pass. I am currently in North Dakota visiting my parents for a week.

Here are some pictures from one of my favorite running trails in southern Utah.

I was struggling with figuring out how to pay for RAAM while still having enough time and energy to train for RAAM. Since I don’t buy lottery tickets, I decided to push RAAM off until 2011. I’ve taken a job with a wilderness therapy program for troubled teenagers just north of Saint George. I work 8 days and then have 6 days off. I think I should be able to stay in decent shape that way, because most of the days I am working, I will also be hiking.
In other news, I went mountain biking today with a former pro downhill mountain bike racer. I don’t care how easy someone like says they’ll go or the fact that they haven’t raced in 9 years, I wouldn’t recommend it. I could keep up in the non-technical flats and uphills, but anything downhill or technical (or horrors of horrors, both) and he was gone. The non-technical downhills I would sometime see him riding with no hands, I on the other hand had a death grip on the handlebars. I think my shoulders and hands are the most tired at this moment.

I went to visit my parents in North Dakota for Christmas. It was a nice trip. There was a fair amount of snow but at least it wasn’t that cold (above 0 for most of the time). Tonight it’s in the -20’s there, so it’s good that I’m in St. George. It was in the 40’s here today and I went for a 50 mile bike ride to start the new year. I hope everyone had a very good Christmas and I wish you all a happy new year.

Today I decided to take a break from the road bike and try some mountain biking. I have determined that my bike handling skills are only slightly better than 0. I’ve done very little mountain biking and the course I choose today was more technical than I was ready for. Lots of sand and lots of rocks and some fairly steep hills. It was a very slow ride with lots of stopping. I think I will be looking for an easier route before I get on the mountain bike again.

This past weekend I did my longest ride since Ironman Wisconsin 2006 — 87 miles of the Ironman St George bike course, only 2913 more miles and I’m ready for RAAM. My legs and energy level felt good, but my low back and shoulder were very tight. This is going to be an interesting journey…

Yesterday I biked from LaVerkin to Zion National Park. It ended up being about 56 miles round trip. It was a beautiful ride (other than the headwind in both directions) and I highly recommend it. Seeing the park by bike is better than by car because the roof doesn’t get in the way when you are looking up at the walls of the canyon.

This past weekend I went to Zion National Park, which is about an hour drive from Saint George. It was very impressive and I highly recommend going to see it.

The rest of my pictures can be found here.
Saint George is nice and I’m enjoying the warmer weather for training. Today I rode one loop of the Ironman bike course. If it’s as windy on race day as it was today, those people will have a very memorable race. Nothing better than riding uphill into a 20 mph head wind

So this week I left Leadville I headed west and spent the night at Bryce Canyon. In the morning I did some hiking. As you can see, portions of the trail needed some work.

It is a very beautiful and I highly recommend seeing it.

After Bryce Canyon I headed west and south to Cedar Breaks. This is another beautiful area.

The rest of my pictures are here. I’m now currently in Saint George, Utah.

Today I moved out of my apartment and into my pickup

After living out of my backpack, it is very spacious. I though about going back to the backpack, but I couldn’t figure out how to get my bike into it