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Friday, September 19, 2014

Time away from the gym...

This past week Alex and I spent some time in St. George, UT to help my dad Roberto on the vineyard that he started working on a few years ago. I was very eager for this trip, as I have been wanting to return to help my dad with some of the day to day tasks.

In September 2012, my mom, sister and I went to visit him to help trim the vines and check out the land. It was a delicate process to trim the vines as we needed to only keep a couple of the stems from each vine. We would walk along one row at a time and slowly trim away. It was steady process because we had to be delicate to not leave too many stems, as it would take away the growth of the main vine.

It was a great experience and I learned a lot over the few days that we were there, but we barely made a dent in the vineyard and I knew that there was more work to do in the future.




Over the past two years I have received emails with updates about the vineyard and how the wine making was going. It has become busier and more time consuming as he has added more vines and is making some wine of his own. Alex and I decided to make a trip to help him and September was the time to visit as the grapes were ready to be picked and there was lot to do around the vineyard.




I know we were going to spend a lot of time on the vineyard but we talked about going to a gym and possibly getting in some training if it there was time. It turned out that we worked about 10-12 hour days so we didn't make it to the gym, but we still got some work in: raking weeds and clearing the vines, picking grapes and then shoveling them from a wheel barrow to a destemmer, a machine that separates the grapes and stems. We also got some good lifting in with taking out all the old flooring from the house on the property and organizing lots of wood, iron and steel items from the garage.




I did some strict handstand push-ups in at the hotel on two different days, but most of our time was spent at The Vine Yard and it was well worth it. To learn more about how the vineyard is operated and what it takes to manage and maintain everything was eye opening. There is still a lot to learn and experience on my end but I know that our trip there was amazing and worth every day. I wished we could have spent some more time there because there was so much left to do when we took off on Tuesday.

We had an amazing time in Utah and we look forward to returning and being more involved with the vineyard and helping out my dad more as there is a lot of potential for The Vine Yard. As for now, we created some amazing memories, worked hard and enjoyed the beautiful scenery that surrounded us.




The time away from the gym was worth it to help my dad, but I am really looking forward to getting back into training. It is hard because I want to jump right back into the volume that I was doing, but I am slowly easing back into it. I can tell the difference after taking a full week off and it motivates me to get back to where I was.


Here's a toast to everything the future holds!


~ MCA

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