A decidedly not white Christmas

With the complete lack of snow dimming my enthusiasm to ski I got to spend a few fun Christmas days with my family.  On Christmas Eve we went to my maternal grandparents in Southern Minnesota, a first for the wayward Cardinal branch of the family.  It was fun to catch up to cousins who are in college and buying houses and other grown up stuff.  The realization that I'm aging is catching up to me this year for some reason.  Anyway, Christmas!!  Nothing spectacular really, but great to spend time with family that I don't see often enough.  It was odd sleeping in my own bed on Christmas eve, I don't know if that has happened since I moved out of my parents house.
Since this is so late getting posted I'll also include second Christmas with my mom's family at my cousin Andrea's.  She has a nice, newly purchased house in Mankato and we got together to play games, eat chillie, and drink wine.  Me and my cousin Allie almost won the game of life (not as exiting as winning actual life, but maybe more exciting that winning the cereal life) and I tried my hand (ear) at madgabs.

Double Hill Challenge

Christmas break wouldn't be complete without a trip to the Birkie trail.  This year it was just Jeff and I that went up to do some skiing on marginal snow (but still better than found anywhere closer than the UP).  I was debating a trip to the UP but wasn't really motivated to do that much skiing.  Not that the idea of 2-3 days of skiing sounds unappealing, just that my overall energy level to plan and go on a trip like that is really low.  A shame really, because once I hit the snow everything is wonderful.

We put in at OO and skied North.  The original plan was to head to the powerlines on the classic trail, but Jeff was falling a bit behind so we decided to cut it short and catch a quick break at the North end cabin before heading back.  The trail had pretty good coverage, but was very uneven and had a lot of debris everywhere.  The further north we got the better conditions became.  My arches hurt pretty bad the whole ski, just from lack of time on snow I think.

On the way back South the Birkie trail was in quite good shape for the first few km, so I put a lot of time into Jeff quickly as we headed through the climb/km section.  I decided to try the double hill challenge.  I came up with this challenge a couple years ago on my friend Mike's first trip to the Birkie trail.  I was a much faster skier, so it was my goal to ski with him until a hill and then try to climb the hill, go back down (initially to take pictures, then on subsequent hills because it was fun) and climb the hill again to see if I could make it to the top a second time ahead of him on his first time up.  Since Jeff is a much stronger skier than Mike was then I modified it a bit, so I would ski ahead of Jeff, climb the hill, go down and climb it again.  This gave Jeff time to catch up and me time to get some extra climbing in and burn off some of that excited energy one gets while skiing the Birkie trail.

After crossing the county line I decided to go ahead to the high point and see how many times I could climb it before Jeff arrived.  I figured it would be a double climb, but when I was starting my 3rd time up with still no Jeff in sight I decided I would not go past 5 times.  Luckily for me as I descended to start my 4th time up he was beginning his climb.  After 4 times up the high point climb my energy level was sufficiently subdued that I could ski the next couple km with Jeff (the downhill probably helped too).  The 18km hill I was not intending to double ski, but then I ran into Caitlin Wilke at the top and decided to ski back with her until we found Jeff.  Again at 21km I was not intending to double ski that hill, but I reached OO and knew I had some time to kill, so I went back down and found Jeff at the bottom.  This probably marks my best effort at the double hill challenge yet.  I don't know if that is a good sign for my conditioning or a bad sign for poor Jeff.

Behind the times

I took a couple weeks off posting over the holidays, but it's time to get back at it.  This post will be somewhat short, since I just want to lay out the topics I hope to cover.  I will have subsequent posts to actually address those topics, since I think I will jump around less and the posts will be higher quality overall.  So here is the list:

• Christmas with the family
• Birkie Trail
• New Years (and old year by the books)
• Minecraft
• Tour de Ski 
• Social night at Tri store
• Racing outlook and machine outlook

So for now I'll let you know I haven't been consistently working out most of this ski season.  Today the EMVC went out to do the Illinois loop and Ivan came along.  We pushed a fair bit harder up the Cannon City road climb and both of us were in the hurt locker at the top.  This made me think that Seeley might be a bad idea since I've only been on classic skis one time since West Yellowstone in November.  On the plus side, I haven't driven my car since Thursday of last week, and should be able to make it a whole week without driving with the help of the studded tires Fixie Paul gave me for my Gary Fisher.