The Holidays are here again

Usually, we start setting up the Christmas decorations and the tree the weekend after Thanksgiving. This year, we are setting up about a week early so everything will be ready for when the rest of the family arrive for Thanksgiving. I guess you can call it a 'Thanksmas' of sorts because we will be doing our gift exchange at this time as well. I'm looking forward to the festivities this year, as it is always a good time to get everybody together to eat drink and generally be merry.

The plan is to have good food, good wine, good beer and play some golf too :) I'm really looking forward to the beer. We will be making a trip to Sonora Brewing Company in Phoenix, which is a place we happened into about a month ago and the food and beer were most excellent. I got a growler too, which I will be happy to fill up again to take home.

Urban Dare

One of the 'traditions' that Ed and I have every year is to race in some city race. It started out back in Santa Clara/San Jose where we would run the San Jose 10K. After I moved to AZ (and Ed eventually followed) we started running the Intel 10K. Running 6 miles gets kind of boring and we discovered another type of race, The Urban Challenge. The Urban Challenge consists of a set of fixed clues that you have to solve with the help of a support team. You would then run to the locations designated by each clue and get a picture at that location. The first year we ran the race we didn't do so well and just barely finished within the alloted time limit. The second year we did much better and finished in 10th place, qualifying us for the nationals. Being that we still weren't very good, we decided not to do nationals and just try harder the next year. Unfortunately, after signing up the next year, the Challenge was cancelled with no information as to why.

After a 2 year hiatus, we discovered the Urban Dare. It is very similar to the Urban Challenge, except that at certain locations you have to perform dares to complete the checkpoint. We were hoping for a food challenge, and maybe some water craft challenge, but we didn't get to have either. We did have trivia, a jigsaw puzzle and other simple challenges though. Overall, the race was a success. We finished in the top 10, in about 2:25 (top finishers finished in 1:52). Now that we know what to expect, we figure to do better next year and also try to get in to some kind of shape as well :)

Here's the site: http://www.urbandare.com/
And here's their blog: http://www.urbandare.blogspot.com/