Year in Review

Great job by everybody this year, we ended up totaling 25,561 miles for 2009. We came up a bit short of the total goal, but still a good effort. Check out the mileage totals below.

Too much Siberia

Our minds are numbing, our fingers and toes are falling off, I think Siberia is going to get the best of us. We managed 233 miles this week, but with only 11 days worth of miles left and 880 miles left, it seems certain that we will have to be air-lifted out of this bitter region. We are just going for pride at this point.

Eastern Siberian Coast (and what has happened since Thanksgiving)

It is fitting that we are stuck in Siberia right now, the weather has been formidable. However, feel lucky that you do not live in Oymyakon, Siberia, a town through which we recently passed. This town is believed to have experienced the lowest temperature ever for an inhabited area (-96 degrees F in January of 1926). They have average highs of 71 in July, but they also have a July record low of -9. Happy picnicking!

We are now near the Sea of Okhotsk along the Eastern Siberian Coast, just west of the Kamchatka Peninsula.

We have had some very low mileage totals since Thanksgiving, and I certainly have not done anything to change that. However, some people have been doing yeomen's work of late. Specifically, Mike, Megan, and Katie have all been piling up big miles. Megan was high-person the week before Thanksgiving (74.5 miles), Katie was high-person during Thanksgiving week (71.8 miles), and then Megan was nearly high-person again the following week (105.9 miles to Mike's 106.1). That gives us 5 different weekly leaders over the course of the year:

1. Mike Wente - 40 weeks
2. Rob Haaland - 5 weeks
3. Clay Peterson - 2 weeks
4. Megan Dabroski - 1 week
5. Katie Green - 1 week

A couple of cool milestones were reached. Chris Fry and Rachel Hohenstein each surpassed the 1,000 mile mark for yearly running (joining Mike). Also, Megan surpassed 1,000 miles in biking. Rob is a measly one running mile from becoming the first individual to achieve all 3 of his goals, and Mike is only about 220 biking miles from joining him. Lastly, we have surpassed 25,000 total miles for the year as a team, and we are only about 1,200 miles from US soil. Keep working, we still have a chance!

Last 3 weeks

3 weeks ago we had one of our best weeks in recent memory (over 500 miles), followed by a solid week (440 miles), followed by a lackluster week (390 miles), and I expect the current Thanksgiving week to be one of our worst. On the bright side, we will all have lots of turkey to work off so we should really start to pick up the pace.

We are currently near the village of Ytyk-Kyuyol in the Sakha (Yakutia) region of Russia. Those that are fans of the game Risk certainly are familiar with the region, formerly known as Yakust (the city of Yakust is the capital of the region), not to mention the folly of engaging in a land-battle in Asia.

We are about 2000 miles from Alaska, if we keep the shoulders to the grindstone I think we can get there.

Some people have really been stepping up of late, including Megan (225 miles the last 3 weeks), Katie (190 miles the last 3 weeks), Rachel (37 miles running the last 3 weeks), Chris Fry (leading runner the last 3 weeks with 65.2 miles), and Chris Ruf (35 miles biking the last 3 weeks). Keep up the good work.

Lake Baikal

This past week (October 26-November 1) we visited the world's largest freshwater lake, Lake Baikal. Lake Baikal contains more fresh water than all of the lakes in North America combined.

Slow week, just 377 total miles. It appears that the first week in November will be much better. With just a couple of months left, we need all of the miles we can get, so keep plugging away.