The "Willi" and such

The weather forecast for Golden just gets better and better for Monday and Tuesday. Even Saturday is looking OK, good for the Psycosis fest tomorrow and party tomorrow night. For those of you who don't know what the Willi is, it's a week-long paragliding comp where the tasks are open distance every day. The Willi is named after Willi Muller, who pioneered flying in the Rockies and deserves remembering for his strong character and the contributions he made to flying around here among other things. It's one of the best paragliding competitions I do, I really look forward to it every year.


The basic program is to fly as far as possible, usually down the range past Radium and on to Canal Flats. Extra points are given for flying from Mt. 7 to anywhere down the range and all the way back. Last year Keith MacCallough and I had few great days, flying a 168K flight out and back on the best day. That flight went almost to Radium from Golden and back, a great day of flying. Golden is probably my favorite flying site in the world, there is nothing like bombing along the tops of peaks for huge distances. There are a lot of good pilots coming including Canadian HG champion Bret Hazlett, should be a great week of going far and high, yeah! Hope to see lots of friends there. My friends OJ and Miles are in town, wanted to do a little base jumping but too windy (I don't jump anymore, I was just going to walk up and down).


Yesterday's "maintenance" workout:

Ran on Bench for 30 minutes, did Yoga. I'm glad to be at home where it's easy to get out the door and do stuff, plus the dog is motivational...





Roger Chayer photo of Chili, the high-speed mutt caught in an unusual still moment.

First post

I've been posting Blog-style writing for a long time, thought I'd make it easier for everyone to use by posting it here.

A lot of my old stuff is up at www.gravsports.com under the gadfly pages (link at right). If you check that site you'll see my web skills are weak, that's why this is here now.

On deck this week is the Willi Muller paragliding event over in Golden, BC, along with the Red Bull Psychosis. I'll be posting daily or near-daily commentary on that event as it progresses.

It's been one hell of a month, starting with the Canadian Paragliding Nationals (Canadian Champion, second overall, RESULTS) to an iceberg climbing trip in Labrador (check out FHM mag Sept 8), to the US Paragliding Nationals down in Chelan, WA (First, RESULTS).

So welcome to the page, hope people enjoy it!

Each day I'll also post my workout routine from the day before, whatever it was. Early summer is full-on paragliding season for me, so I tend to spend a lot of time flying and relatively little time working out, but I try to maintain some level of fitness through it all.

Yesterday's Workout: Canmore, Alberta

Rode the mountain bike for an hour on the Canmore bench with Kim, went to the Vsion and did one of my favorite standard off-season workouts: 100 pullups in sets of 20, 100 pushups in sets of 20, and 100 lying stomach things in sets of 20, for time. I got it done in 28 minutes but was tired and other excuses. You have to do 20 pullups before moving to pushups, same with pushups before doing the stomach cruncher mess...