T minus one week

T minus one week until the big triathlon event this Sunday! With just a week left, here starts my favorite part of training called “tapering”. It’s the part where it's actually sanctioned not to train so much so your bod can recover for the big day. Now I can feel good instead of guilty when I bail on a scheduled run to grab a beer instead. My mom comes into town in a few days to visit me and my sis and root me on Sunday.

Here is a shot of me and a few of my TNT teammates this weekend at a teammate’s fundraiser downtown…a rare moment in which we have seen each other not in exercise getups and sweating like pigs. The dapper young man with the outstanding handlebar moustache is one of our team’s Honored Heroes. Tom, a Hodgkin’s Lymphoma Survivor, had his last treatment of chemo almost exactly a year ago today. And did I mention he’s competing in the triathlon next week? And another member of our team who was declared cancer-free a couple years ago is about to tackle an Ironman...how's that for some inspiration?!

Life in Austin rolls along. Just had a visit from Nate, who some of you will remember as my better half from my trip-leading days in Central America as we traipsed around the subcontinent with our family of students in tow. He was in town to help teach a course on human consciousness and other such zen-master topics for a week. I got to check it out for a couple of days and learned lots…not the least of which is that I’m very far from zen-master status. Still working on that one.

A recent discovery (and now daily guilty pleasure) we made while he was here is the snow cone stand just around the corner from my apartment. As you can see, it’s a trailer set up in an abandoned parking lot sandwiched between two office buildings. But don’t let the ghetto-ness of it fool you, you’ve never tasted a finer snow cone in your life. And excuse me, is that a snow cone wearing sunglasses on the roof…what’s not to love?

And in spite of my love-affair with Austin, I leave in a couple of weeks for another summer of trip leading with Backroads in Yellowstone and the Tetons. Excited to be back in Jackson Hole, see some friends and not be a rookie at the job this year!