Training Log Archive: biggins

Neuchatel! Easy run along the lake with Carol for a couple minutes until she had to go home for a nap, then some more in the other direction until I ran out of lakefront sidewalk.

Easy run through le neighborhood. This running crap shouldn't be allowed during ski season. It hurts. Now I know why all of you are broken. At least we're finally getting snow again at home, two feet last night and another three tonight. Nobody tell the WC panel.

Easy trail run up around le hilltop while queen whooping cough took a nap. Raining a bit, with lots of mud to squash through.

C • Ha, you thought that was a ... 2

Transjurassienne (76km skate, but turned 50k, then 42k, and really 39k)

What a joke.

So there's no snow anywhere, except right on the race course where they'd obviously scraped it from somewhere a month ago then piled pine branches on top to keep it from melting. Then this week they took half the branches off and groomed the other half into the ice.

Four thousand people on a race course thats one skate lane wide. Four wave starts, but the course loops back on itself twice, just in case there were little corners that didn't get crapped up into sugar snow the first time. Half the course had gravel all over it, so when you weren't stopping dead on your own, the guy in front of you hit some and tripped and you'd run into him. But fortunately its not like you were moving fast when that happened, since from the best that I could tell the wave starts were ordered to put the slowest people in front. And in case any slow people accidentally got in a start behind you, the course looped around on itself so you got to mix back in with the later waves for another 10k.

For future reference, the following things disqualify you from starting in front of me:
- wooden skis.
- full size backpacks.
- poles with round powder baskets.
- falling. on an uphill.
- snowplowing down a hill that mom wouldn't drag her poles on.
- taking your skis off and walking up a hill that mom would skate up.
- yelling something angry in french while you cut me off on a downhill to get into a tuck right in front of me and stabbing me in the leg with your pole, and then not even having a fast enough wax job to back it up.

My wave started an hour late, either because at the real start time it was still below 50 degrees, or because the gravel trucks hadn't finished filling in the corners on the all downhills. I realized a minute out of the start that this wasn't going to be a race at all, when about four people stopped in the middle of the trail on the first hill (still within sight of the start) for a chat and a water break. And then five km into it when we get to a steep section of trail thats barely one groomer wide, and the race course goes both up and down it, so the downhill guys had half a lane to try to snowplow the sugar on one side, and there were a dozen race workers trying to queue everybody up to herringbone up the other side in a single dignified line. That'd be the part where I'm standing still for six minutes.

Never really got a chance to skate, I was either double poling along the edge trying to get around people, or stuck coach skating in the line. Now my right shoulder really hurts. I should learn crappy technique on the other side too. Not really fun at all. Wave 12 Birkie was better than this.

And then at the finish somebody stole my poles. My good ones.

I hate France.

pics

C • Wow 11