California Skydiving

Normally, I don't post a lot of my skydiving on here unless it is important or I was training for a competition (in that case, it was a snipit mention on top of the running that I was doing). However, I haven't really been skydiving since October due to my injury and I knew that any skydiving I do from now on will be a workout. I made a jump in December and two jumps in January and that's been pretty much it for me. There are other reasons why I haven't been jumping, but that doesn't have to do with training for a half marathon.

When I made plans to visit Ashley, of course, my first thought went to my love...skydiving. I have never skydived in California, but I wrestled with lugging my rig for maybe one jump. In the end, I said, what the hell and brought my rig. After we made the plan to skydive on Saturday, we then had to determine which dropzone to visit. The great thing about skydiving in Northern California is the fact that you have so many options within the hour. We initially said Skydive Monterrey, because it is the closest to the coast and would have spectacular views of the water and mountains. Also, Ashley had never been there before. We opted out of Skydive Lodi, because of recent plane dangers that didn't give me confidence. We brought Skydive Byron in to play, because Ashley had been there before and it was fun jumper friendly; Monterrey would be a tandem factory. In the end, I made the decision for Byron since our view would be the rolling green hills (similiar to Ireland) that I had never seen before in my skydiving. I had seen the beach and mountains when I skydived in Puerto Rico. Plus, we could jump with other people at Byron.

This is important, I swear. Ashley and I made two jumps, because the winds picked up making us both uncomfortable. We both did freefly jumping (something I haven't done since October and was rusty), which works out your arms and legs. It is a quite an arm workout, especially if you are doing it the lazy way (which I was). My arms and legs were sore when we left. My body was sore just because I haven't jumped in a long time...oh and I did my own packing. So, this was a workout for me...a cross training shall I say.

Some of our views are shown in the pictures below (taken on our drive out...so not really the same thing, but close enough).




I took this next picture, because the cow was outside of the fence (not a good thing). And it was weird to see this in California; I'm used to it in Texas.