Pacific Northwest

Yeah, I’ve been sewing new footbags at a pretty slow rate, but I’ve still got a few to show:

This was a custom bag for a customer in the UK.

All black footbag. My black Ultrasuede is somewhat thicker than my other colors, so this bag is kind of stiff. I might kick around with it to test its durability.

I haven’t actually played any footbag for many weeks. I’ve been devoting all of my time to running. Lots of running. I have a marathon coming up on June 3rd, so I’ve been getting long runs of around 20 miles in on the weekends for most of the past few weeks. It feels good to be running so far, but also very time consuming. I’m looking forward to having less structure to my running schedule after the marathon, so I can  just run in whatever manner I feel like running for that day. I suspect that will include some long runs in the mountains once they melt out a little more.

A big reason why I haven’t posted anything in so long is that I now live in Silverdale Washington. I was offered a good job, and having been mostly unemployed for the previous 1.5 years, I decided to take the opportunity. The job is going good, but the area is surely lacking in climbing. There’s basically zero climbing around Silverdale. Climbing has been probably the biggest, or one of the biggest, components of my life, so it feels strange to not have that creative/physical/whatever outlet that climbing always afforded me. Going from living in a car to climb every day, to not climbing outside and only going to a climbing gym, to now only going to a gym on the weekends (1-2 hours away, depending on which one I go to), has given me a little bit of a mental shock. I can’t help but question my motives for making employment such a priority over climbing that it has nearly ruled climbing out entirely. On the flipside, I’m gaining a lot of job experience that will hopefully lead into another job in a place that has climbing readily available. One thing that a friend pointed out that is very helpful, is even if I decide to leave, I can look for other jobs while I still have one and am getting paid, rather than living in a tent and applying for jobs while I look at my bank account dwindle and wonder where I can stay in 2 weeks. Its an interesting choice to mull over, with so many variable it can be overwhelming.

Since I do have weekends off, I’ve made a couple trips to Seattle to sample a gym called the Seattle Bouldering Project. That place is pretty cool; one of the few places that has a section dedicated to just training, with three lanes of campus rungs, hangboards, and even H.I.T. strips. If it were closer, I would be able to get uber strong!

On the ferry over to Seattle, with a distant view of Ranier

Approaching Seattle, with another ferry leaving

On the ferry back to Bremerton, with the Olympic Mountains trying to peek out through the clouds