July 4 Festivities

An action packed 24 hours of Fourth of July activities. Highlights included:

-- taking the kids to the County Fair. I cannot recollect ever going to a county fair when I was a kid. What a huge miss; they are as cheesy as can be imagined, but super fun all the same. Carnies barking at you from all angles, lousy rides and worse food and yet somehow it's become one of my favorite family outings of the year. The lowlight: getting stuck (yes stuck) on the TOP of the ferris wheel with Zevan. He was fine, I was scared sh&*less. I have a slight fear of heights and ferris wheels are not my thing. Oh -- and the reason why we were stuck? Because it had to make an "emergency" stop for my daughter, who had to take an "emergency" leak. Crazy rides and loose bladders: that's how we Solomon's roll.

-- went to Muir beach yesterday, which was a madhouse. One of the rare days in which it was actually hot enough (it rarely gets over 80 in our neck of the woods) to get in the water (the water rarely gets warmer than 62 year round). Zevan and I climbed some rock faces and I really think that rock climbing is going to prove to be his sport. He's as agile as a cat and pretty comfortable on steep faces.

- my main boy Payro came to town for a four day visit. For all of you who don't know Payro, he's one of my closest friends, but on top of that, he's my number one running partner. We ran together nearly every day when we lived in Chicago and over the years, we've done some pretty epic runs together, including a marathon, 50k, the JFK 50 miler -- which to date was our most epic run ever -- and multiple trail races of varying distances.

Whenever Payro is in town, which fortunately for me is pretty frequently, we try to come up with an epic run of some sort. Which is probably a good segue for what we have planned for this evening: we are going to run along my favorite trail, the Miwok, all the way up to Coyote Ridge and and down to Coastal. Then we are going to run back down. Gnarly climbing and descending the entire way.

The only twist? We plan to start at midnight.

We'll be running by headlamp and flashlight on some of the baddest ass trails Marin has to offer. And oh yeah, evening is noted for being feeding time for mountain lions and bobcats.

Why are doing this you might ask? As ultrarunners are apt to say, "if you gotta ask why, you'll never understand....." Plus, it will be good practice for our planned 100 miler, whoch we are gunning for in 2008, health permitting.

Let's hope Payro and I return safely from this adventure and in one piece. Stay tuned for a recap tomorrow.....