Four peaks and a shopping bag

I don't ordinarily discuss (my) life events here (this just isn't that sort of blog), but as the song says, it's my party, and I'll write what I want to.

Lest this has escaped your notice, I am not what you'd call Miss Pro Athlete, Miss Marathon, or even Miss Athlete or Miss Half-Marathon.

I am, however, Miss "Sure, I'll Try That." Which is how I ended up doing the Summit Challenge in Phoenix, AZ this past weekend with my friend, LW, who will forever more be known as Little Goat.

The Challenge kicked off for us, who were doing the Four Peak Challenge, not the Seven Peak Challenge (are they crazy?), at 8:00am Saturday morning. Luckily, the Challenge was a challenge not a race—at least for us—because Little Goat and I left the house a tad late, then noticed we were low on gas, and then the low-air-in-tyre (my car is German, so, yeah, tYre) alarm went off. Would you believe, not one, not two, but THREE tyres were low? I kid you not. $1.50 worth of air later (and some gas)—we were finally on our way.

We were only perhaps 10, okay maybe 15, minutes late to the starting line, but we didn't let a little thing like that deter us from recognizing that we really couldn't begin our climb before partaking of the complimentary coffee and pastries provided. Breakfast was had. We did truly want to start, however, so we also recognized that walking all the way back to our car to stash the fancy bag of samples and pamphlets we'd been given wasn't the best use of time. We kept the bags and off we went to hike Papago Butte, looking for all the world like we were about to stroll down Fifth Avenue, shopping bags in hand.

We strolled, I mean hiked, around the base of the butte, up the back and down its front. One down, three to go. Turns out navigation is part of the challenge—we had to make our own way to the next peak. Auto GPS, bada-bing, bada-bang, and we were there. And making up for lost time too.

But then, oh dear. Somehow between the second and third peaks, bada-bing, bada-bang, we got lost—we were at the bottom of Phoenix (South Mountain) instead of the top of Phoenix (North Mountain), which sounds like a much dumber move than it was, because we did input the correct intersection into the Auto GPS—but, as it turns out, there are TWO places in Phoenix where 7th Street and Thunderbird Road cross. Who knew? That little boo-boo cost us about 45 minutes of drive time. Still, even with all that, we started at 8:30am and were done at 1:45pm. And the allotted time is from 8:00am to 4:00pm, so Little Goat and I feel pretty good about that.

And Miss "Sure, I'll Try That?"—she's agreed to do all seven next year. What was she smoking?!