Vancouver

This last weekend I went to a CrossFit Run Endurance Cert hosted by CrossFit Vancouver. Presented by Brian Mackenzie and Carl Borg of CrossFit Newport Beach. All of you joggers and tri-folks out there resisting CrossFit, stop wasting your time getting slower and s-l-o-w-e-r check this out. Of course, now I will now persuade you with my most potent diplomatic charm. . . get the @#$#@ over it, drink the Kool Aid, now! Otherwise serve your life sentence of wasted time, ruined relationships, over training, chronic injury, doing your LSD.

It's not like they had to twist my arm, I'm in the choir screaming "preach it, amen!" This Cert involved CrossFit's application to the classic endurance sports but more specifically running. By the way running is skill... duh. Like all skills some us naturally click with them but fortunately for the rest of us, it can be learned. But you say, what's the "right" way? I won't waste time debating . . . just say Dr. Romanov, POSE Method. However if you wish to debate, not with me, reinvent the wheel and do your own common sense research of barefoot running (Kenyans, Aboriginies, Tarahumara) or try running on ice. I'll be down the down road . . .

Check out CrossFit Endurance to see how to effectively apply CrossFit in a sports specific application.

Castle Rock

Mike following the "5.7"...



MK leading the "Scary" Canary...

Constantly impressed with the stiffness of the grades or maybe just the stiffness of our bones.

Static Point - Memorial Day

This is a day Kalli and I went to Static Point with Dave and Jesse who I met at Index a couple of days back. The excursion involved the legendary slab in Central Washington that's not too easy to get to, as is the case for most of the "best" in Washington. Yee ha! Here we come alpine peaks with all those multi-day bushwhacking before the climbing even starts.

We did some pitches on the "Right Line" only to get turned back on the spicy old school, old rusty bolt 10b slab crux. But it was a good day out exploring new territory with good company.

Brian Turner, Poet...

Cole's Guitar

It's the sound from the aid station that wakes me,
thin steel from Doc Cole's six-string,
a 4 a.m. sound of sour whiskey,
heroin and sex and dying,
that's the sound I'm hearing now,
slow as smoke from a factory in Pittsburgh,
slow as a needle in the vein,
slow as steam off the bath or a lover with only the blues to sing.

I'm hearing America now.
I'm hearing jake brakes off the Grapevine,
county highways with wheat shocks and Indian summergrass whispering,
foghorns under the Golden Gate bridge,
Ella Fitzgerald from a 4th floor window in Birmingham,
the handles of a suitcase swinging on the downbeat
of a man's footsteps walking out from a Greyhound in Sante Fe.

I'm in Wyoming. I'm in New York.
I'm leaning in to kiss a woman in the cornfields down by the river.
I'm with children drawing portraits in the sand,
old men watching fireflies the way Muhammad Ali lay on canvas and dreamed.
That's what I'm hearing,
the wind on the redwood coast,
old as the ocean and hushed by sheets of fallen snow.

Palm-mute the strings, Doc,
strum that song until I can see the breath on a bus window,
the faces of strangers in the rain,
my own hands tracing the features of every one of them,
the way ghosts might visit the ones they love,
as I am now, listening to America,
touching the cold glass.

Brian Turner

Also see Weekend America story.

More Poetry from Brian's book... Here, Bullet

Stoned Fish

Fish that don't smoke...

Fishy!



















...and fishy!




















...and fishy!




















Moldy cheese wheel? Fishy? Sand dollar?
No silly, just a table.

















Garden stepping stones...

Get Serious!

This is what it's really about...

Metropolitan Gymnastics

Seattle, Hmmm...

Sailboats racing on Puget Sound
Olympic range in the west

















Seattle skyline















X-man
















CFT Rubber-man















Lake Washington
















CrossFit Seattle