Training Log Archive: Swampfox

Felt de-juiced in the morning, like I didn't get enough sleep and wasn't fully rested, and with that dull feeling you get in your legs when that happens. In the afternoon, gray skies finally started yielding very tiny amounts of snow in town. Up top, things were happier, and there was about 2" of new snow already on the trails by the time I started, and maybe another inch on top of that by the time I finished. On much of the trail, I was the first one out through the new snow. Of course I was careful to watch out for snowsnakes waiting in ambush.

Back home, I watched some Olympics and managed somehow yet again to completely miss any XC coverage. Maybe there isn't any? Maybe I've just been unlucky, but so far I haven't seen even a second of any.

But there was plenty of Women's Halfpipe to see,and that was fun. Chloe Kim will come back home as some sort of snowboarding goddess I suppose. While watching, I wondered how many snowboarders in the US there actually are that spend their time training for the halfpipe. Thousands? Hundreds? Tens of thousands? I don't even have a sense of the right order of magnitude. Maybe it's because I have never yet seen a real, living half pipe.

Felling inspired, I made a halfpipe burger for dinner. Since a main objective in halfpipe is to get as much air as possible, that's what I concentrated on with the burger--getting big air. I think I did a good job, because, working with a bun measuring 3 3/8" inches across, I crafted a McTwisting burger that was fully 6 1/2" inches across, yielding air of more than 1 1/2" on all sides. The judges scored it at 97.8, with a bonus of0.5 points for creative application of mustard and ketchup, which is a pretty good score. I dispatched the burger with a steely fork and knife.