Toby Guillette: Athlete, Adventurer, Social Media Expert

After a great weekend and a solid week of training in the books, I feel like things are back on track.



A winter wonderland in the mountains of San Diego

On Friday night, my friend’s band, The Northstar Session, performed here in San Diego. The venue was small and the sound was great. I really liked their new songs and I’m stoked they are cool with me using their music in some of the videos I’ll be making this year! Check them out on their site or on Pandora.



I enjoyed quite a few tasty brews that night which made for a challenging indoor trainer session on Saturday. Tatiana came over and we watched Pulp Fiction while riding. (If you ever need a 2.5-hour movie to watch while doing an indoor workout, Pulp Fiction is exactly 2.5 hours.) It was a solid spin and I discovered some adjustments I need to make to my bike fit as I continue to transition from tri to road setup for Grand Fondo San Diego next month.

On Sunday I woke up at 4:45 a.m. and Paul picked me up at 5:30 a.m. to head to east county and meet Stephen and Carl for a run. It started raining pretty hard during our drive. We parked next to Boulder Oaks campground on Old Highway 80 where the Pacific Crest Trail crosses the road. The rain let up a bit right at the start and we set off on the PCT heading north. The trail climbs steadily all the way up to Mount Laguna and we ran a 12-minute mile pace average (auto-stop was turned off) as we climbed. The rain started coming down and when we got higher in elevation (4000’), the rain turned to snow!!!



The snow was beautiful and the trail conditions were really good for running. The plan was to turn around when we hit 7 miles but we could have easily kept on running because we were having so much fun. The way down was fast and it felt good to open up the stride. We dropped our overall pace for the day to a 10:58 average. For the first run of the year that I’ve hit double-digit mileage, I can tell the strength and conditioning work I’ve been focusing on is going to pay major dividends this season when I begin to increase my miles.

I’m really looking forward to my new waterproof camera that is scheduled to arrive late next week because I used my iPhone on our run and got it soaking wet. There’s a new SD card-reader for the iPhone coming out in April and I just signed up for an account with Animoto so I’m pretty excited about being more mobile with my photos, video and slideshows.

Besides all that, not much more to report other than getting organized and packing for my move that starts next week!

~T