Awesome run in the Rain at Rancho

It was very rainy today (Tuesday) in the bay area.  I mean . . . a lot of rain.

It was also our first run at Rancho this year for the SF marathon training group.  Since I'm a pacer/coach for the South bay group and generally run the hill runs at Rancho I felt I should go.  On my drive over I had a few second thoughts.  Not so much because of running in the rain (it was only 4-5 miles) but for running in the mud where it might be very wet and slippery.  Me + mud + slippery = trouble.

In any event, as I pulled into Rancho I noticed that the parking lot was nearly empty.  It is always packed.  Before I could have additional thoughts about backing out, I saw two people from our group there.  Which meant I'm running.  Not many people showed up due to the rain.

But, those that did went out and did about  4.5 miles of hills.  It was very rainy.  It was cold.  Muddy.  Wet.  Slippery.  But, most of all, it was awesome!

Oakland Marathon . . .

DNS for the Oakland half.

I have not really been training hard so when a trip to Lake Tahoe that my wife wanted to take came up, I did not have a big issue having a DNS.  I did really miss seeing all my running friends run and catching views of some of the local bloggers that I follow.

 It is awesome to run into a blogger for the first time and with this being a bay area event, I was looking forward to maybe running into others.  Though, I think only a few bay area bloggers might know who I am.

In Lake Tahoe, I had a great time.  Took Friday off work and was able to spend the weekend with my wife and Brooklyn, the best two year old in the entire world.  :)

Brooklyn had blast playing in the snow.  We went for a short walk after we arrived and she found a good patch of snow and immediate started to eat it.  As long as the snow was not yellow, I was okay with her trying some.  We also took her on a snow shoe hike - we pulled her in a slide.  She enjoyed walking in the snow (which meant our hike went really slow at times).  She also went ice skating for the first time.  And, did some jumping.

A video and some pictures: