It's been a busy two weeks, as I volunteered close to home at the Muddy Buddy event at Stoney Creek Metro Park 10 days ago. I wanted to participate in this event but I didn't find out until the Friday night before the event. Trying to find a partner to do this with in a 36 hour window can be tough, so volunteering at it was a great option. This event mixes biking and running through obstacles over a 10k distance. Two people take turns riding and running over the course.

Friday morning I get up and waxed my cross country skis as I was getting ready for the Vasa ski race. It took me a couple of hours to wax them since it had been a long time since I did it. Once I started I remembered how it was done and it was fun to do it. To see how smooth the skis get with wax on them. Thats what makes them fast as they glide over the snow.

With last weeks heavy snowfall and as I was shoveling snow out of my driveway. I thought to myself, I might as well enjoy this stuff so I decided to do the White Pine Stampede cross country ski race in Mancelona, Michigan. The White Pine stampede is a Michigan Classic as this was there 35th edition of this race. It's a point to point race from Mancelona High school to Shanty Creek in Bellaire, for the 40k event. The 20k goes from Mancelona to Schuss ski resort. Plus they have a 10k to. The 40k used to be a 50k but they had to go through to much private land, so they changed it to a 40k. Over a period of 35 years things change everywhere.  When I talked to the race director, the first race had 92 skiers and only 49 finished a 20k race. They only had one race back then.

Home for 2 days and back on the road again on Thursday to Houston for the big marathon events over the weekend. Flew to Houston with Art and Jennie, the two main operators of the Michigan Runner. Without them there wouldn't be  a Michigan runner. They put there heart and sole into that publication and everything that goes with it. We get into Houston and off to the Space Station there. We took a tour of the old control station, training center for the Astronauts and one of the rockets they used to send men to the moon. Our other tour consisted of a movie on the space program to the moon and then a guided tour by a former engineer-scientist who used to work there and he told us all the moon landings, the rocks from the moon and the shuttle expeditions. He was like a walking encyclopedia. There was a variety of other exhibits but the end of the day was coming and I'll have to come back next year to see everything I didn't see.