Bitton Earns Horse Certification

Photo by Jana Bitton (my gorgeous wife)
This week I visited Sister-in-Law Becky's Stables in Sandy, Utah, to earn my horse certification for the BEAST race next week in Seattle. What? No horseback riding in the BEAST? Shucks. Guess I'll just have to use this cert at Primal Quest!

I know, I know, there's no horseback riding section in the BEAST adventure race coming up next week in Seattle. But I had the chance to ride this week, so I took it.

Training kinda goes down the tubes when you're on vacation. Sure, I could be militant about it and go run for an hour, but instead, I took an hour-long walk with my 3-year-old daughter and my gorgeous wife. Yes, I could borrow a bike from my grandpa and ride frontage roads along Interstate 15 for an hour. Instead, I spent an hour with my family taking turns riding a gentle white horse named Sebastian (see above) at my sister-in-law's house. It's spring break. We're road trippin'. And I ain't trippin' 'bout trainin' right now.

Duncan, my teammate for the April 12 BEAST, read with great interest my recent training blog entry about falling off my bike. "Let me save you from yourself right now," Duncan wrote in an e-mail. "You aren't going to wear your bike shoes at the BEAST. You're going to wear your Montrails."

Apparently the trails at the race location are "technical single-track," which to the uninitiated means trails that are narrow, muddy, boulder-strewn, root-crossed nightmares. So my odds of "clipping out" of my pedals in time to avoid EVERY potential disaster are zero.

Thanks, Duncan, for saving me from myself!