I packed about two miles into Echo Lake around midnight with 35 pounds on my back.
Thirty-five pounds is a funny way to test ultralight gear, but that was part of the plan. The other part was getting out of the city and into the woods with friends.
I needed it.
Aaptiv's $22 million Series C had gone public earlier in the week. The financing had been all-consuming. I had already reached the point where a month of 12-to-14-hour days nearly melted me down.
Finishing the financing did not mean the work was finished. It meant I now had a lot more work to do.
First, I was going camping.
The weekend had very little to do with work. There was a pack, a trail, a campsite, rain, and wood that needed cutting. After weeks of investor conversations and long startup days, those were all extremely manageable problems.
I crashed for a few hours after the midnight hike, then covered another four miles over two hours Saturday morning. The trail rolled uphill with a few short, steep sections. The pack stayed around 35 pounds.
Later I started a 90-minute run with eight hard four-minute efforts on the closest thing the trail had to flats. The pace looked terrible. The heart rate said otherwise. Trail flats are not actually flat, and it started raining like crazy.
The watch was never going to make this look like a normal training day. Every mile had climbing, footing, or pack weight attached to it. I cared more that the work was there and my body was handling it.
I cut the run short by 30 minutes when the rain became absurd. The final downhill was technical enough that walking was the smarter option. I wanted a hard weekend, but I did not need to throw myself off a wet mountain to prove it.
Sunday included another 45-minute run that I accidentally deleted from my watch. So much for the perfect training log.
I am writing that one down manually and moving along. It happened even if the watch forgot it.
Then I hiked for an hour with the pack and finished with 45 minutes of Zone 2 running back across the ridgeline. An 8:30 pace over that terrain was actually rocking. More important, it was super fun.
My Achilles and calf felt good. My upper body and quads were sore from cutting wood and carrying the pack, but nothing seemed broken. I felt ready to hit another week.
The weekend had been a much-needed mental escape. A few hours later I was in a car headed back to the city.
The woods were over. The financing was done. The lot more work was waiting.