Training Log Archive: Bash

Tree Huggers Pate Neumann and Brittany Webster arrived in Europe today for the World Junior XC Ski Champs. This is their 2nd trip to Europe this winter. Their first trip in January ended early when the World Junior Champs were rescheduled due to low snow levels. Here is a hilarious video of a couple of Canada's top junior skiers attempting to train in Austria on that earlier trip. The narrator is their coach.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0QEQjlD4HM

'Bent and I went to Albion Hills, thinking that the warm temperatures and new snow with ice crust would make perfect skate-ski conditions on groomed trails. That might have been true earlier in the weekend, but by this afternoon, the trails were icy, rutted, and hard as concrete. I don't think I've ever skate-skied the black trail at Albion HIlls, but it would be awesome in the right conditions - great scenery, lots of hills. Today I enjoyed the uphills (except some south-facing ones that got heavy and soft), but the downhills scared the crap out of me, especially if they had a few ruts and turned a corner in heavy trees. If I'd done a face plant like the one I did yesterday, I wouldn't have ended up with much face left. (I suppose that some people DO spend a lot of money on dermabrasion.) It's funny how two consecutive days of skiing could be so totally unalike. Although we'd brought both skate and classic skis with the plan of spending a few hours there, we beat a hasty retreat back to our place after finishing the loop. The dogs were thrilled.

Safely back home, 'Bent and I took the pooches out to visit a few orienteering controls from the Thomass in Palgrave West. When 'Bent did the course 8 days after the race, several flags were down, and he wanted to confirm the location of control K. The ice crust made for tough snowshoeing, but it was nothing compared to how tough it was to be a Lab Retriever moving through that stuff. Both dogs took advantage of our snowshoe tracks whenever they could. They are both snoring happily now, as is 'Bent.

Went up to Hardwood Hills for some skate skiing while 'Bent headed south to the Bike Show. Amazingly, a day pass there costs about the same as what 'Bent and I paid for 7 days of skiing out west. ($7.50 X 3 visits to the Canmore Nordic Centre - and none of the other places had trail fees.)

It started snowing hard around Barrie, and I ended up skiing with 10-15 cm of fluffy new powder on the trail - beautiful, but not really optimum conditions for skate skiing. Surprisingly, things went well. In Canmore, compared to me, everyone else seemed to skate ski with the speed and ease of Beckie Scott. Given where I was, one of the passing skiers might even have BEEN Beckie Scott. Back in Ontario, I looked relatively good. Best of all, this was only level 3 intensity, even though I went at a decent speed (about 20% faster than last time at HH) in tough snow conditions. I can probably thank the residual effects of spending last week at altitude, since there is no other reason for skate skiing to suddenly feel easier.

I made one serious error in judgement coming down a steep hill when I decided to speed my descent by stepping into the groomed tracks for classic skiing. My left ski slid nicely into the leftmost track, but my right ski slid past the next two tracks and settled briefly into the rightmost track on the double-tracked trail. There was a split-second of wondering whether this could possibly work, then my body decided that I couldn't ski while doing the splits, so I did a major swan dive into the fresh snow. It could have been a lot worse in the knee twisting department, but - luckily - nothing was hurt but my pride.

Enroute to my ski, I needed to stop in at a furniture store and demand a large cash deposit back, since 6 months and many conversations have passed since they promised to make us a bed in 6 weeks. It occurred to me that I didn't look very intimidating in a fluorescent green softshell, Buff and ski tights, so I dug in the back of my closet for a seldom-used "urban professional" coat, hat, scarf and gloves that I could slip on over my ski clothes before I entered the store. I felt like such an impostor! I put on appropriately energetic tunes to get in the right frame of mind while driving over, and "American Woman" was playing when I saw the police officer with the radar gun. A quick glance at the speedometer confirmed that he might want to chat with me, but I guess he had bigger fish to fry. Regardless, I guiltily switched to a Leonard Cohen CD immediately, and drove the rest of the way to the store at a very sedate pace. Miraculously, it looks like we might actually get a bed after all, after months of sleeping on a mattress on the floor, so I gave them a temporary reprieve on returning the deposit.

While watching the Daily Show. Today's main target was... Jon Stewart, making fun of himself for "disastrous hosting of last year's Oscars".

After a long day that began with formatting my C: drive and re-installing my 3-year-old Windows XP CD, and was interrupted by dripping ceilings and damaged drywall in two different rooms, I definitely needed an afternoon break. That suited ThunderDog just fine, since she'd been trying to push me out the door all day. We had a wonderful snowshoe around F&M's place and Palgrave West. It was my favourite kind of snowshoe route - just aiming for hills and ignoring the trails. ThunderDog stopped at every trail and turned 90 degrees to align herself with it, as if to say, "Here you go, Silly Human. Lucky for you, I've got us back on track."

Even with some new snow, it was fun to check out the elephant tracks from the Thomass race 9 days ago. Nice job staying away from the out of bounds trail, everyone - I'd wondered if that would work out OK, and it did!

Hard Core Tuesday. We ate far too well while we were on vacation, so I decided to dig out the DVD for penance.