Monday, May 5, 2008

Karen vs. The Mountain

Bill Battle
This is going to be one of those I'm honing my skills posts. (not a "I suck post as Mike May correctly pointed out that I should take a page from the pros who never suck... they are honing their skills, or have a stomach virus, or beri beri or something.)

I am not a climber. I'll never be a climber. Which per James is what my problem is. Not that I'm not a climber, but that I don't believe that I'm a climber, and you cant do what you dont believe you cant do. Well, not exactly. I can climb Wintergreen. I'm just slow as shit.

What was fun, in a masochistic way was riding around with James and Jake, who are both the skinny climber dude body type. Paired up with Tom Richeson on the team who makes Rassmussen look fat, and I was surrounded by skinny climber dudes. Jake was bouncing around feeling the love, Tom was doing that little Tom giggle, and James was busy trying to pull my head out of my ass. All in all, a party atmosphere, with Katie's daughter Kylie running around collecting rocks and attempting to get in the road.

So... I honed my skill up the mountain. It wasn't pretty, but I eventually got to the top. Thankfully everyone else hadn't packed up and gone home before I got there! Lets just say that the team did great... Jake 2nd cat 4, Tom 3rd 40-49, James 11th 40-49, Greg Guinter 12th 50-59, Frank Smith 16th, Bill Battle 17th, Katie 5th cat 1-3, and Sonya 5th cat 4, I squeaked 5th 40+. *Thats because there were 5 of us...*

Now good ole Bill was the star of the day. Bill has Battled Wintergreen for years, and swore if he could get below an hour he'd never do it again. Since last year he dropped about 28 lbs, and several times a week climbed Wintergreen on the computrainer. We all knew that Bill would do something wonderful on Saturday, and he blew away that hour mark, 51:10. I'm expecting that it may be weeks before Bill comes down from this performance. I may need some more honing, but Bill fought the mountain, and won!

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