A little disappointed, but moving on

Last weekend was the Race Up Boston Place stair climb.  I was registered to climb twice again.  I got my start times emailed to me Thursday and I knew it was going to be rough.  I had about 10 minutes between start times.  My first climb at 9:32 and my second climb at 9:41.  It took me 8:30 to do the climb last year and I was in better shape and did a little training for it.  This year I had no training and a little extra weight to carry up the stairs.  I figured I would do the best I could and just see how it went. 

Friday after work I went for acupuncture and facial rejuvenation.  A little pampering and preparation for the big day ahead.  It was nice as usual and I had a few magnets strategically placed on points for lung capacity just for a little extra help.  Got to sleep early and tried to rest.

Saturday morning I got up, had some tea and breakfast, and headed to Fit Lifestyle Studios to meet up with one of the two teams I was climbing with.  I think if they had a trophy for best looking team we would win it:

I'm in the middle wearing the running skirt.  It was freezing cold out, but I wanted to look cute.

Drove to the financial district in Boston and parked next to the building we were about to scale.  41 floors, 82 flights, 789 steps - and I was doing it TWICE! I must be crazy.  But my answer to anyone that asked me "Why would you want to do this twice?" was simple, life is short.  I want to cram it full of crazy fun challenging experiences and not waste a single minute.  I think I do a pretty good job of accomplishing that, but I want to try harder in 2013 and really get a lot done.

I got my bib numbers, which was a little confusing considering I was on the list twice with two different numbers, start times, team names.  Eventually the volunteer got it and pulled both numbers for me.  I went up to the lobby and pulled a sign out of my bag so that the rest of my team could locate me.  I knew half of the members, but the other half were from different parts of my company and I had never met them.  One of the girls I know was standing with me and noticed there was another group of people standing nearby with sequential numbers right after ours.  BINGO!  The rest of our team!

So, a lot of the teams that do the stair climb have matching shirts made up for the event.  That's expensive!  I can't afford to buy everyone a shirt.  I came up with an alternate idea.  I found stick on mustaches at target and thought that would make for a great team photo.  We all put them on and put our game faces on and in an effort to intimidate the competition here is what we looked like, pretty bad ass if you ask me.  Hahaha

8 of the 10 team members were first timers so I tried to give them a little pep talk before the start and tell them to start slow and just keep going.  Before we knew it, it was time to go.  I checked my bag and got in line.  I got to the front and the woman told me to go.  I started out and right away it felt harder than I remembered.  I looked up and saw that I was only on the 3rd floor and I was already dying.  Pushed through it and just kept moving.  Got to the first water stop on the 16th floor and saw people stopping, my chance to pass them.  Kept climbing up and up and up.  Volunteers in the stairwells this year were a lot more enthusiastic and pretty great.  There was a guy on the 23rd floor giving high fives!  AWESOME.  Water stop at 28th floor, pass, kept going.  Before I knew it I was at 30 and then 35 and 40! The girl at 40 was pretty annoying.  She had one of those clacker things and was just making noise and not cheering.  FINALLY, made it to the top.  Bypassed the water and headed straight for the elevator to get downstairs to go again.

I almost forgot to pass in my timing chip before I got on the elevator.  I got to the lobby and got right behind the next person to go.  Still hacking and breathing hard.  Time to go again.  The timing woman started to do her little speech about when to go and what to do and then realized she had already seen me.  And off I went to climb again.  OH. MY. GOD.  It was so much harder without any recovery inbetween.  Holy crap.  I was instantly spent and dying.  I made it to the top again, but it took me a lot longer.  My official finish times were 9:21 and 11:17.  A lot slower than last year.  Guess I should have actually trained for it.  Oh well.  It was fun.  Here is Team One More Flight at the top inbetween coughing fits:

A few of us went for brunch afterwards and stopped along the way for a cupcake at Sweet.  A-M-A-Z-I-N-G!  I told the guy he should offer a deal to the people that climbed because he would make a killing.  I had a buttermilk pancake cupcake with blueberry preserves and maple infused buttercream frosting!  That counts as breakfast right?  It was so yummy.  I got his contact info so that we could make arrangements for some sort of deal next year.

After brunch, we went back over to the building to watch the fire fighters climb and hopefully to watch Portland Fire defend their title.  It always amazes me to watch all of the fire departments climbing in about 50lbs. of gear.  It's hard enough without the extra weight.  And a lot of them climbed faster than me!!!  Super impressive.  I was tempted again to climb in gear, but after disappointing times in the morning without gear I decided against it.  Maybe next year.

After Portland and Andover finished climbing, we hung out for a little bit and then made our way over to the bar for the after party.  I don't drink much, but the beers tasted pretty good after shredding my lungs all morning.  We ended up drinking with my friend's husband and Andover Fire dept.  I won the bet I had with him, Portland Fire beat them by an average pace 20 seconds faster.  Although they did have the fastest fire fighter overall on their team.  That made me a little nervous as they were reading the results, but I knew PFD wouldn't let me down.

The rest of the night is kind of a blur.  There were shots ordered, drinking from the fastest fire fighter trophy, moved to a different bar, got hard cider in a free frosted glass, then someone suggested another bar and as we made our way there we got separated and while trying to figure out how to get to the bar we met this very well dressed man in a cowboy hat who happened to have a limo and he offered to give us a ride FOR FREE.  We made it to the next bar and in case no one believed us about the free limo ride we took a picture:

We finished off the night with some dancing and very expensive appetizers.  I paid the tab and apparently it included some drinks that I didn't know I was paying for.  Oh well.  Grabbed a cab to the parking garage, which turned out to be the wrong one and we had to walk a ways to the right one which wasn't the one MY car was in so the group gave me a ride to the one my car was in and I eventually made it home around midnight just before I turned into a pumpkin, just kidding.  Needless to say Sunday I was complete junk.  Spent the day on the couch drinking lemon ginger tea with honey.

 
Monday I kicked off the week with a 6 mile run along the Charles and Tuesday I did a deck of cards workout at home (Hearts= squats, Diamonds=dips, Clubs=burpees, Spades=Sit ups). Each number card is it's value, face cards are 10, aces are 16.  Going through the whole deck equals 100 of each exercise.  I was dripping sweat by the time I finished.  Time to get serious about my training and get back on track.  FOCUS!  About 80 days til Big Sur and then it will be triathlon season before I know it.  Enough of this being lazy BS, I'll rest when I'm dead.  hahaha