Similarities between mud and snow!

Hi Everyone! Ski season has started and I am back on the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society Team in Traning team. We are again, heading to Anchorage, Alaska to race through the city. This year, I have returned and am a mentor on the team. For those of you who are new to the team in training thing, a mentor is a person that is put in charge of some new folks that might need guidance with setting up their fundraising page, with fundraising in general, who might have questions since this is a new experience for them, etc.

Unfortunately, this season started off with me getting tonsillitis and potential strep throat! I missed the kick off b/c another one of the mentors threatened me with my life if I showed up and infected the whole team....so while everyone got to meet each other, I was sitting on my booty at home, wishing that the god's had been nicer to me. :)

In any case, I got over the tonsillitis and I never had strep...which is great! And the day of our first hike arrived! The whole team met up in San Francisco, for us to hike along the waters edge, under the Golden Gate Bridge and onward. Mike, the other SF mentor, and I arrived with a crash! He road up over the curb.....and that is how I met the 2006-2007 ski team!

The day had called for rain...we all definitely expected it to rain all day long, since it had been raining since the wee hours of the morning. But the heaven's had mercy on us and the sky cleared up! It was a gorgeous day, a great day for a hike. The first 30 minutes or so were spent doing name games and attempting to memorize everyone's names, then we moved into stretches and then the hike began. It was pretty easy in all honesty....that is until we got to the MUD! We were walking up and across a hill when the mud got really bad.....and we all know what happens in mud.....SLIPPING AND SLIDING! Man was I having flashbacks to last season! Several people were a bit freaked out about slipping and all the people from last season pointed out that this is exactly like being on snow for the first time! You are going to fall....and just like mud....it is soft (that is unless you hit ICE...but we didn't mention that part).

Did we convince people that falling is okay? We were successful in giving people the confidence to do this race? I think so....but I guess time will tell!