Dearest gentle reader (sorry, just finished binging season 3 of Bridgerton), this author has been remiss in updating you on the last year! Ok, returning to my normal voice, I have been mentally writing a lot but the actually sitting down to do it just hasn’t happened. I know some people end up here to read about our adventure vacations, some to read about the adventure races, and the others I have no idea! In order to not bore any of the camps, I’ll break down the past year in three sections, so feel free to skip ahead!

Part 1 – Life update – thoughts, emotions, and other sticky things

After Endless Mtns last year I came home and had to face the reality of the approaching school year. I knew my schedule already and was concerned about the course load. Teaching four different science classes (Physics, AP Physics 1, AP Physics 2, and Chemistry) was going to push me into a mental space that I really didn’t want to go. I had told my boss ten years ago that if I had to teach Chem again I would quit. Unable to follow through with that threat, I had to suck it up and get my act together.

I won’t drag you through the anguish of the last school year but it was every bit as awful as I had feared. Don’t get me wrong, the kids were still pretty awesome, in fact I had some of my favorite students ever in class this past year!

My co-workers were all lovely people, helping with the Chemistry content since I had a ten year hiatus from the subject and my materials needed updated! The new principal was also doing a great job, steering the school in what I think will be a good direction a few years down the road. I can imagine if you are reading this, it doesn’t sound that bad, and you are correct. It wasn’t one single thing I can point to that pushed me over the edge. It was more like bleeding out due to a thousand paper cuts! I had a lot of late nights the first 9 weeks, more than a couple of my “corn dog and tequila” Tuesdays, a least one full on rage cry – all of this under the umbrella of I AM NOT DOING OK!

Outside of the school crap, I still hadn’t really processed the grief of losing my mom in 2022 (that will be a post on it’s own) and our cat Max was in the last few months of his life. Through all of this Steve was my rock as always, but there wasn’t anything he could do to make my struggles better. The 2nd nine weeks happened, I cried for my mom, did Thanksgiving with my brothers, ran a 100 miles, and then it was Christmas. Coming home from our New Years trip to Michigan we found Max gasping for breath and rushed him to the emergency vet. He did not come home with us.

Another blink and suddenly I’m back in the classroom, trying to put on my best face, holding all my shit together, and slowing falling apart. Here’s the thing, through all of this I sheltered my students from what I was dealing with. It is the job of the adult in the room to not burden the kids, they have their own stuff to deal with. My students of several years could see that things were not great, and offered sympathy and humor and I am grateful for that! As we started the 2nd semester it was very apparent to us both that education was no longer a viable career for us. Steve was having his best year ever with the AP Comp Sci course but even that wasn’t enough to make up for the other stuff. I would never have imagined that the 19th year of a profession would be harder than the very first year. As Spring Break loomed on the horizon, we decided we just couldn’t do it anymore.

As the last 9 weeks drug out, we told the people who needed to know our decision to leave. We did offer to come back half time the next year and teach our advanced classes to help with the transition but were soundly told NO. I slowly let it slip to kids that the Hamblings were finally graduating high school, the seniors showing happiness for us, the underclass kids showing remorse. This was a good indicator for me. It is better to leave a career like education a year too early than a month too late. I did not want to end up that bitter old teacher who everyone dreaded having in class. The culture of the classroom has changed so much in the last ten years, moving from content focused to more social-emotional layers of stuff. I mean, nowhere on the teacher evaluation rubric was there a spot to mark for “knows their content and teaches it”… Add to this the increase in cell phone usage and lack of student interaction, it just wasn’t feeling fun anymore. To riff off of T.S. Eliot and his poem “The Hollow Men” – This is the way the career ends, not with a bang but a whisper… of hope –

Part 2 – Travel Update

Honestly I had to look at the calendar to see if we had gone on any adventures in the past year! Turns out we did lots of little things but no major trips until this past May. All major school holidays were spend at home this last year, that could be one of the reasons that the year just drug on and on and on. The school year started with a fun trip to New Mexico for the wedding of two wonderful friends!

The Fall fun continued with our epic Hambling Hollerween Party, glad to report there were no pole dancing failures this year! We danced our butts off with all the friends we can cram into the barn, from all walks of our life! Seriously, you should come next year, it is a killer time!

The end of October saw us traveling to the Red River Gorge with friends to do a mini Via Ferrata course as a warm up for the big Italy trip this summer!

Fast forward to the end of May when we were finally free from school (forever!) and headed to Iceland! You can check out my StoryMap write up of that trip here: https://arcg.is/10OGKi0 I tried out a new format to share travels but I think I’ll stick with blogging here, even though I really like the map centric feel of StoryMaps!

Part 3 – Adventure Racing Update

Looking back at the spreadsheet, there is no way I can remember enough of each race to warrant a full race report but I’ll see if I can bang together some highlights and take aways!

OWL 8 hr (31.8 miles) – This was the inaugural year for this race with a big course, pretty bike heavy, and they did a great job! We started with a prologue around the park to find painted rocks, once we had the required number/color, we could start the race. The setting was urban with lots of green spaces scattered around, enough so that I managed to pull off my signature move of “most miles, fewest points” with no problem! We saw some cool areas, dealt with bridge and trail closures, biked a muddy as crap trail right behind Kings Island, and travelled 35.7 miles.

USARA Nationals Vermont 30 hrs (142.6 miles) – This was my third year racing at Nationals with the Chickpoints and it was the hardest one yet for me! 2019 in NC was the longest race I had done at that point, with the most saddle time and one huge ass hill at the end, 2021 in Wisconsin was a brutal paddle but overall fun, and 2023 in Vermont was all about the climb. I wasn’t as conditioned as I should have been, but I’m not sure if I combined all the elevation in Indiana it would have made much of a difference for Smuggler’s Notch! I think everything was going fine for the first few legs, even the 22 mile canoe wasn’t awful, thanks to the portage wheels Kristy brought! It was on the Stage 4 (2nd bike leg) that things started to go wrong. “Leaving the My Topo TA (TA 3), the teams mounted their bikes and started climbing. The race features almost 19,000 feet in elevation gain. Having lost a few feet moving down the river, the rest of the race will feel very much uphill, with a few very fast downhills for good measure.” – straight from the USARA website, and they were not joking! It was 16 1/2 hrs into the race when we started this stage. Most of the bike is missing from my memory, I have blips of really muddy trails, climbing near vertical steps carrying our bikes, and a never ending uphill climb on the road. This was when we overshot the entrance to TA 4. I noticed, but did not remark on, the flag in the parking area/forest road. I don’t remember it saying USARA so I didn’t think much about it until a mile later, climbing the 7.5% grade, Kristy was like crap, we should see the TA by now… Yep, we had biked right past it, straight on uphill! Back down, trek for longer than we should have, then right back to climbing that damn hill. The otherside was a nice long downhill to the split O-course where each of us took a map and headed out to collect our CP’s. This part was delightful! We did have an issue with the time, we had to be out of the TA by 7 am to be a full course team and we didn’t make that cutoff. All that was left was for us to climb back up and over the Notch and cruise into the finish. I think we were all a bit bummed to be short coursed but given how the wheels fell off a bit during the night there wasn’t much we could have done about it.

The Fig Cave Run Lake 12 hrs (43.4 miles) – I only have a few memories of this race, can’t even find the map for it! I did look at my Garmin trace and that helped to remind me. We started on the canoe at sunrise and it was beautiful! A smooth 9 mile paddle and then we headed out on the trek, which was about 27 miles and took us the bulk of the race time (8 hrs 5 mins). I recall some beautiful fall views, lots of climbing, and one major goof. On the last CP before the TA to the bike, we performed a fabulous example of a parallel error! What made this so special is that we did find a flag at the location but it was missing the punch. This happens occasionally in races, sometimes the punch gets broken or lost. We snapped a pic of Kristy at the CP and headed back out. We ran across another racer on our way in and commented that the punch was missing, he informed us nope, punch was there when he came through. Odd we thought since our timing was close to his but meh, no worries. We should have been worried… We reached the TA and told the people in charge that a punch was missing and that is when it was confirmed that we had found a CP flag from a race long ago! Well crap! Rather than miss the point we hiked ourselves back up the dam and out to get the correct CP. On a normal parallel error, there wouldn’t have been a rogue flag to find and we would have caught the mistake! From the TA, the bike was short and fast, only about 11.3 miles and mostly roads for the route back.

Chenar 12 hr (38.3 miles) – For the life of me, I cannot remember more than a few moments of this race! I remember a big bike climb to start and then a big down to the finish. I looked at the trace and it appears we did a canoe but again, zero memories! All I can think is that it was March and the beginning of the hardest part of the school year, doubly so because it was my last year!

DINO Mission 18 Hr (56.7 miles) – Kristy and I tapped Beth again for her 2nd adventure race with the Chickpoints, this one starting with a canoe instead of a swim! Beth had checked us in the night before and we each went our own way with our bags, completely forgetting the fact that as a new racer she wouldn’t know about the passport being in a bag… Just as the race was about to start I asked who had the passport and that was when we discovered that the answer to the question was “no one”! Luckily Beth had her race baggie in the car and it was in her bag, so off we went on the paddle. The first CP was out past the marina of moored boats and required the passing of a couple of walkways. Rather than all of us get out and portage around, Beth and I exited while Kristy stayed in the boat and went under the walkway! Took a little shoving the boat down into the water but it worked!

After the paddle we rode our bikes uphill to the start of the O-Course section. This was a fun 12 km trek around the woods, picking up the CP’s over the next three hours. I’m getting a bit more comfortable with the orienteering maps scale and level of detail. We hopped on our bikes and biked around the east side of the lake, making our way to the next TA at the dam. From there, we had a fairly long (15.7 miles) trek around the west side of the lake and cutting over on the causeway. This was all on a very well marked trail and for teams with more gas it would have made a lovely trail run! I was unfortunately dealing with an achilles tendon issue that made uphill trekking pretty painful and not super fast. We got the job done in 6 hr 15 mins, a bit slower than ideal. We hiked into the TA, which was also the start/finish area pretty foot sore and more than ready for a snack! I’m not sure if we knew beforehand about a time cutoff for the next section but we made it with just a few minutes left. Brian told us we could proceed on the paddle if we went directly to the dam and did not stop for any CP’s. Since we still had about 3 1/2 hrs of racing left and our bikes were down at the dam, we changed our shoes, had a snack (I enjoyed an ice cold beer), we set out on paddle #2! This was a straight forward, flat water paddle a little over 4 miles and we did it in less than an hour. From here it was a quick 11 mile bike back to the finish!