Monthly Archives: December 2008

Merry Christmas!!

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Merry Christmas everyone!!! just a quic post to wish you all a happy holiday! Right now I’m making a list of all th things that I have to pack tomorrow. That’s right, I’m going on a family trip (13 of us, between cousins, aunts & uncles) tomorrow to Mont Tremblant, which is near Montreal. I am soooo scared of the weather there!! I’m going to freeze my everything there!! The coldest place that I’ve ever been was Orlando (16 years ago!), I went there to visit Mickey Mouse and one day it was 6 ºC… I remember it being sooo cold back then. And now where I’m going is going to be at -23 ºC!!!! That’s just too much for my warm caribbean ass!!!! On the other hand, I’m soooo excited that I’m going to see snow for the first time in my life! Not to mention that I’m going to go snowboarding!!!

On another news, I got myself a Garmin Forerunner 50! I ordered it on november 23th and it arrived yesterday morning (Yey! a xmas present from me to me!!). The batteries on the heart rate  strap of my polar watch died, and it was imposible to replace them (good one Polar!), so instead of ordering a strap I decided to get a watch that would also allow me to track my pace/distance so I can finally get rid of my nike+ (it was actually 2 xmas gifts in one!!!). I had thought on getting a garmin 405, but since Caracas (where I live) just got the ‘honor’ of being the murder capital of the world, the idea of running around with a 350$ watch don’t seem like the smartest thing to do, so I decided to get a cheaper one that still does most of the thigs I want it to do. I took it for a short test run today and so far I LOVE it, i’ll wait untill I’ve used a coupple of times before I make a more complete review.

BTW Terri, about the question you asked on my last post, ‘what’s it like living in what I consider paradise-weather’. Well, It’s awesome not knowing what hot or cold weather is, or heavy rains, or storms, or anything like that. Beaches here are incredibly beautiful (oh yeah, did I mention gas prices? it costs me less than 1 US$ to fill my tank). On that side this IS like living on paradise… on the other hand, things here are pretty different from the US (or any other first world country), I try to avoid going into local political stuff here (this is a training blog after all, who wants to hear me complaining about each time the national guard visits my university?), but you can read the link above to get an idea of why it’s easy to forget that we live in paradise around here.

Well, enough of that! It’s Christmas!! So Merry Christmas to all!! Have a happy holydays and a happy new year!!! I doubt I’ll be writting much from Canada, but I’ll be back here full speed once I get back next year!

I’m still around!

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I’m back!! I know that I’ve been a bad blogger and that I’ve been neglecting all your blogs lately. I know…. I know… Bad Alien!!! I was training for a 10k race, that was supposed to be the last race of the year, but it got postponed to next year. So with nothing to train for, and a bajillion of other things to do, I have not been training as much as I used to, and also stopped blogging. I guess that the off-season bug got to me…

But since It’s the off-season, I decided to start something new (besides yoga, which I’m LOVING btw!). So I joined a scuba diving course at the university. It’s a really cool class that gives me some extra credits and also at the end of the semester I’ll get my PADI Open Water Diver certificate. And the best thing of it, I get to travel to some exotic beaches to dive there and see all kinds of marine life! I’ve done 2 trips so far.

The first one was 3 weeks ago, to Mochima, which is 7 and a half hours away from where I live. Or to be more specific, the red dot on this map:

Mochima is a really small town in the coast, people there are really friendly and they live from fishing and tourism. We stayed there on a ‘posada’, which is a really simple/rustic hotel, no commodities, nothing fancy. My room consisted of a bed and a (at least 20 year old) small TV, I didn’t have light on the room, so I had to turn on the TV to change clothes.. it didn’t even had a closet or anything to put my stuff. But well, it’s a small town in the middle of nowhere, so I can’t ask for much, and I didn’t spend much time in the room anyways… The town also has a (1) restaurant , a lady that sells hot dogs and a lady that makes ‘empanadas‘, which is a local dish that EVERYONE should try at least once in their lives! Here’s a pic of Mochima from the road to get there, what you see is everything there is, it consists of 2 streets!!


From Mochima we took a ‘peñero’, which is a small boat made by the locals, here’s a pic I took of on of the ‘peñeros’ that we took:

The ‘peñero’ took us to this BEAUTIFUL beach (I forgot it’s name)

And from the beach we would get all our gear on and go diving, the experience of breathing underwater is Awesome! And all the things you can see there is breathtaking. All the underwater life is beautiful, and it’s incredible how much you can see in half an hour underwater, you could never see so many different things anywhere else!!

The second trip was this las weekend to Morrocoy, which is 3 hours from where I live (like 1cm west from where Mochima is on the map at the begining of the post). Morrocoy is a bit more civilized than Mochima, the ‘posada’ there had a pool, directv, and this time my room did have a light!!! From Morrocoy we also took a ‘peñero’ that took us to ‘cayo norte’ (pics below), a paradise-like beach with white sand and crystal clear warm water. And form there we went scuba diving.

I hope you enjoyed reading this post, it’s not related to training, but more to scuba diving which is what I’ve been doing lately. My next trip is going to be next year to ‘Puerto la Cruz’, I’ll make sure to take some pics there too.

And about my training, well, I’m still working out, just not as much as before. I have planned most of my big races for next year, but I don’t want to say anything about it just yet. But make sure I got some BIG plans for next year!! Maybe I’ll even get to know some of my fellow bloggers on a race next year!!! We’ll see, I’ll say what the plans are when I’m sure I can make it.