Next week I bump up the mid-week run mileage in preparation for the 4-day training session that is soon approaching.  The start of the 4-day sessions puts me at week 1 of 16 for my marathon ramp up.  Everything I’ve done to date has been to prepare me for the 16-week marathon training schedule.

Garmin Connect – Activity Details for Irvine Riverbed.

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Yikes, originally uploaded by tigerpaw511.

Even though I am biased of course, I think my sons are tough-guys. I’ve watched them climb on the playground, gone head-first down the tallest slide, and walked up to strange dogs that were more than twice their size to pet. However, on a recent trip to the Irvine Spectrum, Parker REFUSED to ride on the carosel.

The moment he realized we were walking over to stand in line for the ride, he burst into tears. Not wanting to force the issue we stepped out of line while Dylan stayed to ride. As Dylan was going around I snapped a few photos that can be seen by clicking on the picture above. When I got home and uploaded the images I took a look at the one used for this post and realized that the horse would scare the cr@p out of a small child. While most of us see the carosel as a whole (lots of different animals to sit on as it goes round-and-round), he must have seen this horse or another like it and lost all interest in the ride.

When I was growing up I cannot remember being afraid of things like this. The only thing that I was not fond of was clowns. And hey, who can blame me.

Local Mountains, originally uploaded by tigerpaw511.

After some much needed rain in the region left, we went out for our usual Sunday stroll to discover a nice dusting of snow in the local mountains. We seem to forget just how beautiful an area Irvine is when smog blocks the view of our local mountains.