I went for a run around the lake

... Lake Taupo that is - 160km!!!
OK, so maybe I didn't do the whole thing by myself - although there are actually some nutters that do.

Despite the fact I no longer work for them, my old workmates at Genesis Energy (yes, they still love me! :) asked me if I wanted to join them for the Great Lake Relay as I have done for the past two years. I've always had such a primo weekend that it took me all of a few seconds to say, "h*ll yeah!".

What a team!

(but I wish someone had told me my head was covering part of our flag)

The idea is that a team of us runs around the whole course (which circumnavigates the lake) by selecting one or several from 18 "legs". Legs can be anything from 6km to 14km long and are of varying difficulties to cater for all levels of runners/walkers. The whole race usually takes around 14 hours. It starts at 11 pm on Friday night and finishes during Saturday afternoon - the night legs especially are neat fun.

I ran an 11km leg of "average" difficulty which took me 50 minutes, which is definitely the fastest I've ever run 11km! However, this should be tempered by the fact that it was mainly flat with a decent 1 or 2 km chunk that was downhill. All the same I was mighty sore afterwards.

We were all very grateful for the signs along the course reminding us what we were there to do.

All up it was an awesome weekend. I won't go into too much more detail here because I need to grab some sleep and anyway, what goes on tour, stays there! With a bit of luck I can repeat the experience again next year.

I also had my first quarterly review with my boss at work today. Nothing that interesting to say here, other than, "all good! ... I sure fooled him" ;)

Red Wins!

Yeehaa! The Crusaders won this week, which means some normality!
My mind is hazy on what happened last week at Eden park, although I did find this photo of me at the game:


I was on a course for most of this week at work following Waitangi Day (by the way, I love Waitangi Day... in the same way I love the weekend :)
It was a personal development course taken by Amanda Fleming. She is an ex-cop and is excellent at what she does, I'm nearly finished reading her book.

Today I spent most of the day at Takapuna beach at the mini dragon boating regatta. We got out on the water which was primo, and through a combination of skill, determination and luck our boat remained upright in the water (I suppose that's unfortunate for those who wanted to swim). In our race out of the 4 boats ours was the only one that failed to capsize...

In the afternoon I managed to squeeze in a few hours of waterskiing and yep, I'm definitely getting better. I can officially call myself a single-skier now, as I completed my first deepwater start. I'm also getting the hang of waterskiing in general.

And although very close, I'm still not quite perfect...

Jono tries Waterskiing

This past weekend I was fortunate enough to spend two days waterskiing/wakeboarding/[various boat tow methods] at a place called the "Hidden Valley" (nearish Taupo). Chris, an old workmate of mine asked me if I wanted to go since some people had pulled out. I'm so glad I did, coz it was heaps of fun!

It's actually not that hard to get up on two skis, but I never quite mastered the single ski technique, getting up out of the water is a real challenge - so that's a goal reserved for next time.
The process of crashing is both scary and exciting, and usually doesn't hurt too much - although this can vary a lot depending on how you "choose" to land.
Skiing for any length of time is actually surprisingly hard work. Here's a pic of me shooting off to the side of the boat:

There's lots of geothermal activity around causing holes to pump steamy stuff all over the place. One of the spots had a couple of bathtubs that you could fill up with hot and/or cold water to lie in - they looked a bit skody though, so I didn't really use them.
The sign was quite welcoming, in an odd sort of way:

And this is the view across the river from the lodge:

Across from the lodge there are these steaming terraces - unfortunately you have to pay to actually hop over there. I imagine they're similar to the original pink and white terraces that were around till the 1800's (back then considered one of the natural wonders of the world ;). Although those ones were probably a bit more pink.

This is Chris, showing us how it's done on a single lonely ski:

I even watched someone do barefoot waterskiing - talk about hardcore. Think about the size of someone's bare foot compared to a ski. To keep them above water, the boat has to be going very fast, so crashes happen very fast too...

But anyway, that was an awesome weekend I'd love to repeat one day.

Earlier this week, my good friend Robert cooked a few of us important people an awesome BBQ dinner. I'd been looking forward to the meal all week :) and thankfully, it didn't disappoint.
After gorging ourselves we played some Wii on his wall to wall projector set up - impressive!

The Crusaders will be kicking the Blues' arses in tomorrow's Super 14 opener! I'm certainly looking forward to reminding a number of select individuals of our glorious victory come next week...