Training Log Archive: biggins

boo. Just as clutzy as the rest of the week, but then I made a bunch of navigation mistakes today too. It was pretty ugly.

Then I took the rental car back to the airport, since we won't have time to do it tomorrow. It's about a 40 minute drive down there, then I was gonna take the bus back up to Boden. Or really a bus from the airport (LLA) to Lulea, then a different bus to Boden. Except there aren't really any flights to the airport on Saturday, so the next (and only remaining) bus left the airport at 8pm, in many hours. So rather than wait around, I figured I'd walk, which google said would be like an hour and a half. But right when I got outside the airport, there was a random snowmobile trail going straight towards the lake, which I figured would be more fun. A km of that through the woods and I came out on a road by the lake, and started heading up towards the bridge where the original route went. But then I spooked this giant white bunny rabbit from the side of the road, and it went hopping away out onto the lake. So I then figured if it worked for the bunny its probably cool for me, so I bushwhacked my ass a couple km straight across the lake to Lulea. Take that google. Also upon further inspection its probably not really a lake but more the baltic sea. Same idea, didn't die. Got to the bus station like two minutes after one of the buses left, so I waited around for an hour on the outdoor heated bus stop benches, got the next one for a long many-stop bus trip back to Boden, then walked back home. Total rental car return time: 4.5 hours. We'll call that the warmup for tomorrow.

C • 4.5 h warm-up 2

C • Note: 5

early morning training down at the model map area

C • soup 3

WCup4 Relay with Ali and Alex
Yay relays. Alex and Ali did the men's relay with me, which was awesome. My race was pretty terrible, is this season over yet? Its not really cold here any more, so the tracks were soft, and also made with a narrow track scooter, so that if I moved off the center 12" my skis would nosedive and I'd faceplant. Which happened three or four times before the second control, which were basically in sight of the start, and after which everybody else was out of sight. Not really any navigation mistakes after that, just picking my way through pine needles and clutziness.

20-25 ski-o wc 4 sweden

WCup4 sprint. Sortof ok, sortof crappy race. Mostly problems with the map exchange (on a sprint?!), which was in the middle of the woods and so had no landmarks, and was also a different shape then the first map, so when I got the new map I had no idea which way it oriented. Obviously I used the compass, but it didn't seem right, though I did it anyway. Then 20m away nothing matched up, and the compass was backwards. So back through the map exchange (the correct answer was to 180 out of it the first time), where the compass freaked out again (can radio controls do that? or was the control just on a metal tree?). Then a mistake going into the next one, I think because the trails got super dirty with tree crap and I didn't see one. Not the bested race ever, though I thought I did good until I figured out that the splits printout didn't have the first leg time included, so my time compared to the ones they were announcing gained two minutes.

Model event, south of town a little bit. Tracks were old and rutted and icy, except for the one they just tilled, which was bottomless sugar. The woods were ok in places for crustiness (almost skatable), especially in the more open sunny bits, but still soft in others. And this year's ski-o skis are now definitely crappier and slower than last year's, even though they're only a month old.

Weather looks nice here, should be around freezing all week, with some sun and no precip. Sprint tomorrow afternoon, Relay on Thursday (suckered the gigglies into skiing the men's relay with me), no-longer-mass-start Middle on Saturday, and then the 48km I'm gonna die ultralong on Sunday.

C • Course info 6

And then to Sweden yesterday. I forgot how much it sucks to fly through big airports. Took an hour and a half to check in at SFO, mostly because I was waiting in line, but also because they couldn't find my ticket in the computer (!), and then couldn't figure out how to enter skis+boot bag into same computer. To be fair the lady understood that they should count as one bag and thus not charge me for it, but she just didn't know how to make the computer do it. She had a uniform and everything, so I kept assuming she worked there.

And then the eleven hour flight to Frankfurt, and a one hour connection, which doesn't happen when you're in the back row of a 747, so I missed that, and got shuffled to 19 different desks trying to get rebooked. Eventually did, after three trips in and out of security (try that with a boarding pass for a flight thats already taken off...). Finally got on a flight to Stockholm, then had a 35 minute connection to make my original flight up to Lulea, which I made with a solid couple minutes to spare. Silly non-Delta airlines.

Then got the rental car, and Alex, and drove up to Boden, where we randomly drove around looking for a building that might have Ali in it, and when we finally gave up and checked the map we were actually only 200m away. Its not very cold here, and has a normal amount of dark, and what looks like enough snow.