Monday, June 6, 2011

Teva Mountain Games in Vail



We went to Vail for the Teva Mountain Games, which is a festival-type thing which celebrates mountain sports, music and art and such. Last year we went up there and I did the half-marathon with a friend and Julie did the Mud Run. The Mud Run was a 5k-ish run which has a mud pit that they make you crawl through. The half marathon was really hard last year (it runs up Vail Pass to the top), and Julie and Kim didn't want to get as dirty as they did last year, so we all decided to do the Spring Runoff 10K. Of course, it was a very hard run, and it got us all very dirty. More on that later.

To start of the weekend, we got up to Vail early in the day to check into our hotel and check out the day's events. We started off with the dog jumping competitions, which involved a dog jumping off a long platform into a long pool, with the object to either jump the furthest or the highest to grab a target. The long jumps went to around 20 feet or so, but the action was truly in the high jumping.

Midair jump:



This dog, named Yeager, tied a world record by jumping 8 feet!!!!


We decided to wander around the town a bit and see some other events and all the vendors who were giving away stuff. That turned out to be exhausting, so we went back to the hotel to clean up a bit, and headed out to a fancy pants Italian dinner. We left the restaurant after a bottle of wine, some desserts, and no pictures of our food. So we strolled back to the hotel to sleep well for our big race in the morning.

Our bib numbers are all in a row, how cute:


The run was supposed to have some uphills, then some downhills, and then be done. This year, however, there is still quite a bit of snow and mud around, and they decided to make us run through every bit of it that was left on Vail Mountain. We ran uphill through a large mud pit, then through some snow, downhill on an oddly dry road, then up again through snow and mud, then downhill on a large snow field, followed by running through the streams caused by the melting snow. When we were down, there was mud up and down our legs, my socks were soaking wet, and all of our shoes were a uniform brown color! It was great!!

Here's a great shot of the Gore range behind Julie.


I wasn't kidding about the snow fields:


So, as you can tell, Julie's plan to stay dry and clean this year didn't quite work out. But after cleaning our shoes in the river (while still on our feet, of course) and a shower we were back down in town and looking for more swag! There was more dog jumping, which included the furriest dog I have ever seen in the water. He took forever to swim out!





They also held an event which involved three rafts at a time coming down Gore Creek in the middle of Vail, and each of them having to negotiate an obstacle course to hit targets. It was chaos, it resulted in a lot of pushing and shoving, and lots of people out of their rafts!



This guy jumped into the river from the bridge (you can see part of the bridge on the right) in an attempt to retrieve his raft. He eventually fell off the raft, but got a nice round of applause for his efforts.



4 rafts stuck there, crazy!!!



Thanks for reading! We had a great time, and can't wait to do it again next year!

No comments:

Post a Comment