Shaking the Snowglobe

I’m back in the city! On February 1st I drove up to the ski lease in Homewood, which sits around 6,200 feet above sea level. Since then, I haven’t spent time below 4k (Moab was roughly the lowest). Averaging out the time spent in Tahoe (~6k), Salt Lake City (4.2k), Taos (7k), Frisco (9k), and Bishop (4.2k), and taking a look at the relative oxygen content compared to sea level at those elevations, I’ve been operating at roughly 15% relatively lower oxygen levels compared to sea level San Francisco for the past month! Needless to say, going on my typical running route through the Presidio and the Baker Beach dunes felt like a piece of cake, I’m practically floating down here!

I leave for New York on a red eye on Sunday night, and am figuring out how to spend the next couple of days. Part of me is exhausted and wants to just sit back and do nothing. Part of me is super excited to be back in the city and wants to do as much as possible, and see as many people as I can in the next ~60 hours. I’ll end up doing some combination of both, but I really hope that I can allow the trip to sink in a bit. It was truly special to see beautiful parts of the country with amazing people, spending what felt like 90% of my waking hours in the outdoors, and in the mountains. Looking outside the window into the Inner Richmond, my eyes are almost super imposing snow capped peaks off in the distance, confused by the flat surroundings. I often joke with my friends about the different lenses that trips like this can bring to our every day lives, but I’m not entirely sure what tint this latest layer of the bifocals will offer me. At times in the trip I felt I was in an old Western adventure movie, cowboying through the desert and isolated red rocks. Other times it felt like I was in my college dorm room. Other times it felt like I was on another planet, awe struck by the beauty of night time hot springs, endless stars, and surrounding, craggy peaks. I think ultimately it is a lens of gratitude for the adventures that are, have been, and will continue to be at my finger tips – partly because of the natural beauty available in every part of the world, but mostly because of the people that I’ve had the fortune of surrounding myself with who seem always up for adventures with me, and often are already on adventures of their own.

Without a doubt my snow globe has been shaken. The little crystals of snow are floating around, slowly faceting back to the surface. Thank you to my loyal readers (I think the two most consistent followers of the blog have been Mom and my roommate Alex), I think I’ll definitely do this again sometime! But for now, I plan to settle into some sense of routine, making the contents of this blog a little less interesting and thus marking an apt time to close it out. Have a blast out there everyone 🙂