Training Log Archive: W

Its cold. Cold enough to be one of those, "I'm not going to go outside today at all" kind of days. So, I jumped on the trainer and watched food network for a while. I really like my new trainer, quite a lot.

I've come across a scheduling conflict. Next weekend I'm thinking about doing the Drayton Valley race, a 33k skate. The weekend after, there's either the Golden Bear Open, 3000m on the track, or I could do the Athabawatinaw double, which consists of the Athabasca 20k skate on Saturday and the Tawatinaw 30k classic on the Sunday. I'd quite like to test myself on the 3000m, but I've been wanting to double down on those races for many, many years now.

I'll bet you right now: I'm going to decide to not register for the track race (which closes this friday), and then both the loppets will be too cold and get cancelled, and I'll ending riding my trainer in the basement watching food network.

C • Guess its too expensive to ... 2

A nice toodle around the river valley that started far later than it should have! The ground is firming up nicely so I'm able to bring back my slightly higher pace of the fall. Unfortunately, its soon going to be cold as balls again, so good thing I got a new training for Christmas!

Sort-of-hooray!

Hopped on my new training for a nice spin! Its not quite as quiet as I hoped, and I think I need to order the gel stuff they really want me to have, but aside from that, I really quite like it. Its a bit more difficult than my old trainer, so a slightly better workout. And wow, the fluid compartment gets crazy hot. I'm going to have to sort that out somehow. Like a fan, or something. I'm mostly concerned about it setting fire to the carpet or something. They didn't mention that in the manual!

So Paul and I decided to head out to SWC wilderness centre. The plan was to do about an hour of classic/double poling, and then switch to skate and do an hour of skate/legs only. At some point on the drive it started raining. Therefore, our wax = 100% not working. Basically it was an hour of double poling. At an hour, we switched to skate, and continued to toodle along merrily.

Thanks to the rain, it was ROCKET fast. Like, fastest I've ever experienced. The snow was glistening from a combination of snow and rain. At around 1:45, I realized we were approaching around 36-37, and at 2 hours, we had covered just about 40k.

We got back to the shelter, and briefly had a discussion:

"So... what shall we do now?"
"Well, we're at two hours... but we're also at 40k..."
"I'm pretty sure we can't not to 50 at this point."

And, with that unanimous decision, we toodled around for another 45 minutes and polished off 51.61km.

At no point in my life have I ever covered 50k quite so easily and casually as today. Honestly, if I didn't have stuff to do, I felt fine enough I could have put in another 10-20k without batting an eye, it was just that easy.

Aside from the rain, that was a great ski. Wrists, though, VERY sore.

C • Fast Skiing! 1

It a new year! Why not start it off with a race?

Troll in the Park 10k. Really happy to learn that the course would be just one loop of all the trails, that's way more fun than several loops of 5k. I was reasonably pleased to be hanging on to the two young punks in front of me, but I should have well, tried more. The flat section around the lake was my chance to try to attack, since I had convinced myself I wasn't going to be able to hang on to them on the climb. The climb came and I let them gap me almost instantly, and when they really took off, they put huge amounts of space in very little time because I wasn't right on their heels. I don't think I can chalk this loss up to fitness, but lack of confidence, timid racing, and maybe questionable motivation. Kind of disappointing, in that sense.

My resolution for the year?

"Sometimes things happen."

More of a mantra than a resolution, but its all I need.

Another cold cold ski, but with toughed it out and did a couple laps. Toes very frozen at the end.

On the other hand, the conditions were amazing. Firm track, basically no one had been there. Wax of choice? Ex-Elite cold special , it says for -10 and colder. It also says "Kärvt före" (literally in quotes), and I'm not quite sure what that is 'meant' to mean.

But it worked so well. This is stuff is awesome, that and the blue, such a cool find down in the basement. Those Lundgren Brothers from Lycksele sure know how to make a wax. I'm going to be real sad when it gone forever.

The gym! I know! I can hardly believe it myself! Actually, when I got there I was really shocked and disappointed to learn that they had lowered gym entrance fees from 10 to 5 for the Christmas holiday! I totally would have gone several more times had I known that. $10 is a ripoff for that gym, $5 is perfectly reasonable.

Anyway, I was expecting to feel pretty weak and subsequently feel pretty sore, but that actually was not the case. Sure, I'm not lifting nearly as much as I used to, but I'm lifting more than I thought I might've.

I also anticipated being absolutely shattered for several days, but aside from the inability to lift my arms over my head for 6-8 hours, I actually felt pretty okay. Score!

In the afternoon, my sister and I went for a fairly chilly run through whitemud. My watch promptly died partway through the run and completely ate my workout. Thanks Garmin. Actually it wasn't too cold, it was almost getting close to that "just right" temperature.

At least it wasn't raining.