Training Log Archive: biggins

It never got below about 40 last night, so everything was soft and slow and punchy. No so fast, and a lot of work.

T-shirts and sunshine at 8am, on 10 feet of icy corn snow. Home sweet home.

Not much selection on clothes or boots or wax, as all of that is still in Paris. Or maybe LAX (not that I flew through there). They're not actually sure for some reason. At least the skis got here.

ha. awesomeness. yay mud.
Jonis and I drove down towards Reno until we were below the snow line, then went exploring on some ranchland trails. Climbed up a lot on some crappy singletrack until we got totally blocked by snow, then came down some fire roads which were a mix of good bits and crazy steep muddy bits.

Went with Carol and her friend Jeff to Chez VeVe in Aydat to get some crazy training maps from Marc. Super detailed terrain, but once my legs were complaining about this running stuff I was going slow enough to read it all carefully. Still got confused quite a bit. map.

Then a contour only map, which I thought was actually a bit easier, since it forced you to just pay attention to all the hills until they made sense. map.

Easy run with Carol over to Montjuzet and back. My legs object to this whole "summer" thing.

Back at Arlanda, after the uncomfortable all night bus that left directly from the party at 1am.  Thoughts on the week:

- The women's team is awesome.  Obviously.  Check out their new WRE rankings.  Props to Cristina for diving in head first so we could field a women's relay team, and then beating everyone's expectations at it too.

- Europe does actually get snow storms once in a while.  Some parts of it anyway.

- Training for ridiculous double poling for the last year helped out a lot, but unfortunately seemed like it couldn't be used to it's full extent this week because of the soft snow conditions.  I felt a whole lot quicker on the narrow uphills last week in Mora.  But then again if the trails were hard and fast this week, the fast kids would have been that much faster too.

- I didn't actually break too much gear this week.  If you don't count the pole straps, where I swapped handles after the model event, all I destroyed was two NIS bindings and a map holder.  And my right leg.

- I guess the most reassuring / justifying thought of the week is that I didn't actually feel like I was improving during WOC this year.  Reassuring because it meant I was probably close to the top of my game for now, and justifying because it made all the trips back and forth to Europe seem like they were worth it.  The past two ski-wocs I went to I felt like I was totally out of my league, and only started to get comfortable by the end of the week.  But there was always that feeling that a little more practice would bring leaps and bounds of improvement. So this year I skied really hard and racked up lots of frequent flyer miles and got in all that practice, and while still nowhere near the map time and the training that the european guys get, I felt like I was pretty close to the top of my potential for this year.  And that felt good.

- Going forward, I get home next weekend to host Markku Vauhkonen, our IOF controller for the Tahoe World Cups next year, for a few days while we check out some terrain and play in the snow.  Also we have a ridiculous amount of new snow at home.  Royal Gorge has been closed for two weeks because they can't find their ski lodge or any of their groomers.  

- Three more weeks of ski races, but none to take really seriously: a biathlon, an uphill, and a 45k marathon.  And maybe some badass corn snow ski-o if we feel like organizing it.  I think I'll start mixing in the running and the biking, road now and mtb when I get down towards reno.  I'm mildly entertaining the idea of doing some doubles in June, and maybe another shot at the triple to see if I can do it without bonking this time, but bike training is tough up at home so we'll see where that goes.  Maybe I'll just work or something.

C • leg 6

C • WRE Rankings... 2

C • there is so much snow in ta... 5

Relay!
Second leg, after Scott and before Adrian. We all had pretty solid races, no big problems, only a few seconds here and there of hesitation. I made a little mistake early on, I was counting little trails off a big one and must have missed one, so I cut in late and nothing matched up at the next junction, but I figure it out pretty quick and it was a fairly flat area so didn't loose much.

The first half of the course was out on the sprint relay terrain, then we crossed the bridge and went up the hill for a big climb, then some crazy twisty narrow downhills with lots of crazy twisty junctions into the finish.