Training Log Archive: blairtrewin

Started the day out with a run, albeit a short one. As one might expect of an alpine village there aren't a lot of flat places to go, which is not really such a bad thing. A reasonably routine run but fairly happy with how I handled the climb back to where I'm staying (1.5km at about 10%), and didn't seem to make too much of a mess of my quads with the downhill start.

The valley was a frost hollow par excellence this morning: +3 where I was staying, but probably about -5 on the valley floor.

First foray onto the slopes since 2005. I've never been the world's most expert skier but counted myself in my Canberra days as a reasonable intermediate. It didn't take too long to discover that the scale of things is different here, spending the first few runs discovering my limits (and only having one crash in the process of discovering them). Probably only about a quarter of the runs were within my range, but by late morning I'd found a set I was comfortable with and had a pretty enjoyable afternoon. Getting back to the cablecar wasn't so much fun as the snow conditions were getting pretty ordinary on that side of the range.

The range straddles the French/Swiss border - I'm staying on the Swiss side but the snow was better on the French side so it was well worth heading for there. There hasn't been any new snow for three weeks and today was quite warm (probably +4 at 2000m).

No doubt I'll learn a few things in the morning about muscles that aren't normally heavily worked (I already found out a few things about said muscles on some of the sharper traverses, to say nothing of the inadequacy of my arm muscles on my one venture onto a poma - stuck to chairlifts after that).