Hot day in Port Townsend

Bienvenue!

Today I headed up to Port Townsend for a little tempo work at the 12k race they hold annually. The area where the town is lies in the Olympic Peninsula. If you aren't from Washington you probably haven't heard of it but its quite beautiful. The spring time has blossomed all the bright flowers along the drive north on the 101, which goes along the east coast of the Peninsula. The trip was amazing, we stayed on Fort Worden, a Fort that has stood strong since 1883 and even housed soldiers during World War I. The Fort sits at the Northeast tip of the Peninsula sitting quite close to the Canadian border, by boat of course! Oh, the guy in this pic at the top of the page is the guy who got me into running. I was quite the bad kid in elementary and middle school as I have stated before. Once he introduced me to this addictive sport I changed in so many ways and I love him for taking the time to talk me into running and the support he has given me since 7th grade. He is like family now, in fact he is family!

Race day came and as I took a stroll outside I could tell that it would be a warm day making any attempts for a fast time next to impossible. During the cooldown we headed toward the beach and went to check out the scenery and took a few pics in the middle.

On the beach seaweed could be found in abundance. Kinda made me wonder how people can eat it. It looks so weird, but sushi is soo tasty. Its a mystery to me. As you can see, Uli my buddy from Germany and his Wife brought along their dog who has some serious energy. We went on a pretty long run once on a Sunday and the dog ran with us the entire time and best of all, unlike most dogs that cut you off and do not understand how to run with humans Uli's dog is pretty good about running straight and out of the way. Impressive I must say.

When I woke up this morning I didn't expect to see a deer outside of my window! The start line is about 20 meters away so the deer may have dropped a few paddies on the course. Deers were everywhere out here and they weren't afraid it seemed. In my neighborhood if a deer sees you, you better believe its in fear of its life that it may catch a nice hot lead bullet in the side of its ARSE. (:

Below: Me heading to the finish. The crowd was great, very energetic. All throughout the town you could hear people cheering locally. The finish goes around a parade field so the finish is quite spectator friendly.

Here we are below with our medals after the awards ceremony. The announcer did a great job, pretty funny guy and he definitely knew what he was talking about, which is always good.

On the way back you could see nice glimpses of the Olympic Mountains the crest along the peninsula. We had some time to check out a beach along the way as ahead of us a head on collision took place. We heard it was fatal and later a guy said that he was not sure if anyone had died, but still, a head on collision is not something you see everyday so the wreck was pretty messy and held up traffic pretty bad so like the rest of traffic we parked the car and went for a walk. We already had a long trip ahead of us due to the closure of the hood canal bridge. Anyone from the Easy side of the Puget sound was forced to drive south and all the way around the Puget Sound to arrive in Port Townsend. Had the bridge been open at least 30 mins would have been taken off our trip and probably an hour or two for nearly everyone else living north of us.

Above: Quilcene is a town we passed along the way. I remember seeing this town years ago and we used to laugh about how small it was. Even after all these years it really hasn't grown much. We pretty much saw the whole town in about 20 seconds of driving at 30 MPH! Off I go, we finally have good weather so I'm gonna make sure I check out the beach and show off my muslces hahahaha, I wish (;