Charleston Peak Summit: North Loop up & South Loop Down - 7/17/20

Sean did this hike last year and had been wanting to take me since, as I'd never been. I was appropriately reluctant and terrified, but I agreed in exchange for him teaming up with me for the ECS 8.5 ITG team tournament recently. Was it worth it? Welllll....maybe ask me once I've had my rum and like 17 hours or sleep. In the meantime, here's how it went:

We woke up yesterday and got our mile and the rest of our 100 in 100 Days daily challenge in. (More on that later!) Then we munched a bunch and stayed up all night working. At 5:30am or so, we took off to Mount Charleston to hike up. An hour drive and couple of Rockstar energy drinks later, we were at the trailhead!

The hike took us nearly 19 miles in a little over 9 hours. We hiked up 4,769 feet to an elevation of 11,863 feet at the summit.

Tbh this was one of the hardest hikes I've done. It probably doesn't help that I can't remember the last time I did a notable hike or tried more than a slow, 1 mile jog max.

Some hike highlights:

•We passed the remains Sean had told me about of the airplane that'd crashed into the side of the mountain years ago.

•We encountered an expansive forest of trees, dead from an old fire and extending for miles in seemingly all directions, a couple of miles or so into our South Loop descent.

•There was a small clearing that was swarming with large dragonflies! We had no clue why, but it was quite a sight.

•Aside from smaller wildlife, we encountered a wild horse near the South Loop trailhead.

After like 18 hours without food (beyond a few chips), we grabbed some Burger King and headed home to Netflix and knock tf out. Sooo...lots more pics later. We've been up since who knows when yesterday, and I'm destroyed, so it's way past time to grab some Zzz's.

^My Strava type-up from the hike. Pics are now up on my Facebook. Vids coming on YouTube soon!

Check out my activity on Strava: https://strava.app.link/Rlt31IcOd8

And Sean's: https://www.strava.com/activities/3778103309?utm_source=com.twitter.android&utm_medium=referral

ECS 8.5 ITG Team Tournament: July 5th marathons AND raw output with Sean

The day after Independence Day was the final day of the ECS 8.5 ITG team tournament. I'd been meaning to enter, but time had gotten away from me, so I woke up on July 5th with a mini hangover and no team. :( Fortunately enough for me, there was a husband but one room away from me when I realized this. Hmmm... Needless to say, I'm now massively indebted to him. In fact, he's cashing in on that debt by making me hike like 16.6 miles up Mount Charleston and back next week or so. x.x

Anyway, after doing most of our 100 in 100 days challenge (see my post on that for details) that day, we hopped on ITG to squeeze our 3 half hour or so marathon segments and 4 hour raw output session in juuuust before the 9pm PDT deadline. Here's how that went:

-Sean did one marathon segment, getting nearly 98%

-We did raw output. Though we'd both exercised a lot two days prior, my legs were still much more fresh for it than Sean's. I've been playing ITG singles while Sean goes for runs, plays PIU, or plays ITG doubles this year and Sean already had a marathon segment down. Also, he had far more pad and machine issues than enthusiasm so this was more my thing. That said, he stepped in and knocked out a couple of 14s for me in addition to eventually convincing me to spare my legs and cut the session short when we knew we would already be fine on points as far as qualifying for shirts. (It was getting late, I'd done eighteen 16s and 17s with an average difficulty rating of 16.44 between them, and we had other things we still needed to do, e.g., work and the 1 mile minimum for our 100 in 100 days challenge, so it was for the best.)

-The machine got laggy and even stuttered and froze halfway through my marathon segment. Lucky for me, it started and caught up again without causing me to fail. I was able to finish, though the sound was messed up and the charts were significantly off sync for the second half. At some point, perhaps we should consider upgrading our setup from the computer we found at a thrift store and shoved in our machine. Lol I'm kinda curious if my timing would then get back to being at least as good as it was roughly a decade ago.

-We restarted the machine, and it was pretty much fine, so Sean wrapped up our entry by doing the last marathon segment, finishing with another near 98% score.

Finally, we squeezed in a couple of celebratory drinks, A LOT of food, a much needed bath, and our daily mile. Speaking of that mile, we almost felt as if we were getting paid a bit to work out when we took our dogs out to get that small distance in with an around-the-block walk and came home $20 richer after finding a bill someone had dropped in the road. Not a bad conclusion to a very sweaty day!

4th of July in Vegas!

Our day:

-Went to the park with dogs

-Did a bunch of work at home

-Drove to the crazy busy Lake Las Vegas area and parked in a turnout with everyone else (all properly socially distanced) to watch fireworks

-Pulled over and admired more fireworks all across the Vegas skyline on the way home

-Used app deals and got two kids meals and two Rodeo Burgers at Burger King for ~$2 total

-Climbed on the roof at home to watch the fireworks in our neighborhood

-Ate and got pretty tipsy in the backyard while lighting our own fireworks and watching everyone else's in the neighborhood and the distance