Weekend in Flag

A few weeks ago my girlfriend asked me to join her up in Flagstaff for a weekend. She had been asked to sub a yoga class and jumped at the opportunity to do one of her last big training weekends for Lake Stevens in cooler temps. I jumped at the chance to get out of the heat and play for the weekend, including a ride up Snow bowl. Truth be told I'm pretty sure I was just ignoring the fact that meant I needed to bust out a 4hour bike ride even though I hadn't gone more than maybe 35miles in a month since Ironman?

Note to self; you can only bank on that ironman fitness lasting for so long.

We headed out of town Friday afternoon and got to our home base, the yoga studio owner's home by 4pm. Without going into too much detail about what we saw when we opened the door to our homestay where we were greeted by a very joyful lab that we would be looking after for a few days.. I'll just leave you a picture:

Bless my gf's heart as I heard her shout "ugh, you will be sleeping upstairs with me," before I even noticed the condition of the house. She immediately went into the room where I was supposed to be staying… and the above picture is what she saw. Honestly, it doesn't even do the cluster f#$% justice, it was THAT bad.

The rest of the house, besides a couple of dubbed "safe zones" were pretty much in the same shape. Now I know I've been spoiled working for Four Seasons and having the opportunity to have stayed in a few of them.. but that doesn't change the fact that I didn't grow up with loads of money, have camped in the middle of nowhere, had multiple roomates that were not exactly neat freaks, spent a year in a dorm at a complete party school and have certainly stayed in a flea bag motel or two. All of the above had nothing on this house.

I will never understand how anyone can live in such conditions.. especially considering the house itself was actually extremely nice, and in a beautiful neighborhood. But, to each there own I suppose… just don't go inviting other people into your mess! Nuf, said.

Be that as it may.. we were somewhat stuck. Sure we could have gone to a hotel.. but one of us is saving for a new bike (tease - I promise that will be a post very very soon) and the other had committed to taking care of the dog. So, we did the only thing we knew possible to get us through the weekend (one of us, ahem…more then the other.. hey, it wasn't MY training weekend, I was just along for the ride)…

I spent the better part of 3 days when I wasn't exercising on the 'safe zone' deck, drinking copious amounts of wine.

At least the view didn't suck.

I have to say besides my dramatic whining about living in the filth, we certainly still had a good time. We had a great 70mile (again, it's amazing what a coke can get your through) ride out by Lake Mary/Morman Lake…and survived the crazy bike ralley/murder/suicide craziness… We were CLUELESS as we stopped at the little general store, but of course had to research as soon as we got home.

More deck and wine time, followed by a nice 3000meter swim (LONG COURSE!) at NAU and ending the weekend with one of my favorite rides up Snow Bowl - ~7 miles going from 7200ft-9300ft elevation. It's AMAZING. And, I just looked up my old data and realized I did the climb about a minute faster than last year when I was in peak Ironman shape. Pretty cool :-)

All in all a fun, exhausting and most interesting weekend for sure! I think I'll ask a few more questions before my next trip to the unknown :-)

And, like they said.. there is NO place like home. Especially when you get home just hours after your cleaning lady was there. Priceless.