Birkie Trail

Christmas has come and gone, and may have taken the good skiing with it.  It's currently misting in Northfield and the snow pack is becoming very dense and wet.  With the expected rain and temp drop things could get very icy very fast down here, a situation the groomers have not been able to deal with in years past with the equiptment availiable.  At least things around the cities should shape up quickly, since there is very little a Pisten Bully can't groom if there is enough snow to work with.

I got a Garmin Forerunner 305 GPS for Christmas with a HR monitor and everything, so it should provide a wealth of new info about my workouts.  Since I don't really have a training strategy at the moment and am not nearly as serious about my sports as I am just dedicated to doing them it probably won't make me faster, but it will extend my enjoyment of the activities into tracking what I've done.  The ski season has been by far my worst for tracking milage or hours put in because I enjoy skiing more than other sports like running or biking, so I'm often not out there just to put in the miles, but rather because I want to be out enjoying the snow and defiance of friction that comes with it.  That should change now that tracking time/distance of workouts has become much easier.  The ability to easily track pace and HR should show at least some benefit for my training I think, since I will have more than percieved effort to base things on (In the past I've also used splits, which is much more effective in running than skiing I think).

I got some good skiing in over the holiday, although not as much as I maybe should have our would have liked too, but spending time with family and friends was the main goal of the weekend and I set my priorities accordingly.  I did get a good evening of sledding in and a broomball game that I still have a couple of bruises from.  On Christmas day I put in a good 2 hr ski (27km according to the garmin) on the now lit trails at the Garfield trail system near my parents.  I brought a headlight and skied the unlighted portions of the trails system as well, since thats where the best hills are.  I also got a 6x5 min interval session in there on the 26th.  Then the 27th it was up to the Birkie trails for some great skiing in nearly perfect conditions.  My brother and sister came up to ski, and my friends Jeff, Mike, and Jim all skied too.  The four of us stuck together for about half of the ski (my brother and sister did not ski with us, they did a shorter ski and went to hang out at the sawmill, a local bar, for a while).  About halfway through I spotted my friend Allie at one of the trail intersections so Jeff and I skied with her for a while.  Mike and Jim didn't see us take the cutoff so we lost them, probably for the best since Jim was on a schedule to get out of there anyway.  We skied with Jallie for a couple km then headed back towards OO where we started and hit almost all of the best hills on the Birkie trail along the way.  Ended up with 40km on the day, so I think I'll be ready for the Seeley Hills Classic in a few weeks now that I know I have handled the distance and the hills I'll see during the race.

It feels strange having such good snow and not racing, but it isn't even January yet, so there's plenty of time left.  No racing this weekend with New Years and family christmas, but the weekend after that things will kick off, then there's pretty much no break until after the Birkie.

Another Friday Night

What's the best cure for a lonely frustrating Friday?  Pulling out the RCS skates for their first run of the season and sailing along through 50k at Hyland in the dark.  It was nice to push off all excuses and just do a long workout, probably my last one in a while with christmas stuff piling up pretty quickly now.  I had to go to the cities anyway, and after wandering around looking for the FedEx building for a while I was sick of being in the car and just wanted to ski.  After a couple laps I really wanted to quit and go home so I could eat supper and sleep, but knew workout time would be hard to come by with my brother's graduation the next day, and an evening of hanging out with his friends, so I kept at it and the 3rd lap breezed by.  The fourth lap I was starting to feel the hurt from pushing hard over some of the smaller hills, just to keep a little feel for a fast tempo, and so I decided to hit one lighted loop at a hard pace just to wrap up the evening.  Then home to crash into bed in what would be the first of a growing string of short nights.  I'll hopefully have time to catch up on sleep during the holidays, maybe even spend some time at my house, although that seems unlikely to happen.

I miss racing

It feels like it's been a slow start to the ski season.  Hoigaards relays is usually a good wake up call how hard I need to be training to really ski fast, and missing it this year has kind of left my season without a benchmark to work off of.  I did 3x10 min intervals yesterday at the arb.  Covered about 2.8k each interval, which is really slow, but considering it was cold, in the dark, and on soft and unreliable snow I am not too worried yet.  Hoping to get in a race soon, maybe I'll come to the cities for the Como championships on the 26th, or else I probably won't race until the Pre-loppet on Jan. 8 which seems really far away.  With the holidays and everything it is just hard to get a free weekend day for ski racing.  In the mean time I hope to start doing more speed work to jump into the racing season ready to put up good results.

Filter Away

A non-training related post for those readers who thought this was just going to be a training blog.  Ok, so I don't think I actually have readers, but if I did I'm sure thats what they'd be thinking.

We have an engineer here who is very talented at working with access databases.  When I started at this job nearly all process records were still in paper logs, so if you wanted data you had to go out to the process floor, get the log, and type the data into a spreadsheet yourself if you wanted to work with it.  Now everything is in a database; great for data security, and super great for lazy engineers like me who like to look stuff up without having to wander all over the place.  I asked for a filter to be added to the already great records searching page the database has, and I got far more than expected.  I got a "Free Form Criteria" option that lets me choose what I want to filter by, what criteria to apply, and over what range.  This is super cool in a really geeky kind of way.  Here is a picture of some of the great data filtering options now available to me.

As long as I'm posting pictures, here are couple more great ones.  The "team" of co-workers I ski with decided to get ski uniforms this year, since a couple of them don't have any and it ain't ski racing if you aren't in flashy spandex.  We worked up a logo to go on the uniforms based on our team name (Equipe Multek Cross Country or EMXC) and here is how they turned out.

Snowmapacolypsegedden

Quite a bit of snow fell this weekend.  Too much for some of my friends who got stuck in Minneapolis when the buses stopped running and they pulled the plows off the road, but I loved every minute of it, except maybe shoveling out my mailbox at 11:00 Sunday night.  Saturday morning I wandered out to shovel and saw a yellow sign with only an arrow on it sitting on my corner.  I couldn't figure out what it was for, but didn't much mind it being there. 
Then just as I was finishing shoveling I saw a couple runners go by.  I thought it a bit odd people were out running in this snow storm, but seeing as how I planned to go ski in it not really all that strange.  Then a few more trickled by and turned where that arrow on the sign was pointing and I quickly figured out it was the Reindeer run going by.  I went in and quickly strapped on some old Fischer touring skis I have around and went double poling down the road along with the runners that were still streaming by.  These were slower runners obviously, and I'm getting to be not a horrible double poler finally (I averaged 237 watts for 2 minutes on the ski erg after 5 hours of skiing, so wherever that puts me on the double poling spectrum I guess).  Anyway, I was cruising past these racers and I'm sure they were jealous of my superior mode of transportation.  I was on the race course for about a mile cruising along and cheering on runners as I went before dropping into the arb where I broke trail or followed the single set of tracks that had been skied in before me. 
I went for about an hour and a half and would have gone further but I had no water with me and the NNN boots that I have start to rip the skin off my heels after about an hour of skiing, so I didn't want to do any more damage to my feet than I had too.
It continued to snow all day Saturday; I'm guessing about 16" all told, although it was so windy it was hard to gauge accurately.  I started to shovel my way out Saturday night, and finished Sunday morning just in time to get to church.  It was well over 2 hours of shoveling, and when I was done some of the piles were close to 6' tall and hard to toss snow over the top of.  When I got back Sunday night the plow had been through again and I had to excavate my mailbox out of a snow bank and shovel my way to the curb so the mailman could reach the mailbox.  I don't have pictures right now, but I'll take some this evening and post them.
I skied at Hyland on Sunday, about 2 -1/2 hours of very easy classic.  I ran into a guy named Steve Carmazan (sp?) and chatted with him for a good portion of the ski.  Then it was off to Emily's tree decorating party which involved much eating of good food and shooting a tinsel cannon in the name of gaudy tree decorations. 
The Hyland trails were in decent shape, and I found out today that the arb trails are OK too, much better than I expected considering the equiptment available here.  The downhill along Hwy 19 had some good snow drifts that the groomer went right over leaving some cool moguls that I was able to get a bit of air jumping off of.

What happened to winter?

I got back to no snow in MN, so it was a rough week of running until the snow came, then back onto the skis.  I skied about 5 hours at 3 different venues on the first day the snow fell.  Hyland downhill for hill repeats on good snow in the morning, Hyland nordic trails for some slow going in very soft snow after that, and a couple easy loops at Como in the afternoon with Annie and Andrea.  Then I went to visit Allie at Finn Sisu and try out my skis on the CXC super flex tester.  Turns out my red cheetahs are a bit soft for me, which means they will drag in cold snow and also not be very stable when snow is hard packed.  This matches exactly with what I've observed about the skis, so now that I know they are warm soft snow skis I should be much happier with them.

Sunday I met up with Jim and Mike at Cleary and put in a solid classic ski.  I took a saw and modified the bindings on my Fischer SCS classics so they will work with my pilot classic boots.  These skis are surprisingly fast, although quite heavy compared to my Atomic World Cups, so they might make good Mora skis, since the Atomics are kind of soft for double pole heavy races.

The rest of the week it was skiing at the Carleton Arboretum (aka the arb).  The upper arb was all rolled and groomed, and in decent shape, but the real gem was the lower arb.  The trails had been groomed and a track set, and then it got cold and the track was rock solid.  The kick wax was working great and it was a few days of great skiing before the snow came again.

Weeks in and weeks out

So the Yellowstone trip came and went with no posts I realize.  If I were to get serious about this blogging thing I think I would need a laptop or at least a pad or something so I can type on the go.  Thats actually when I would probably have the most time for posting anyhow.  When I'm at home there is usually no shortage of other things I have to work on.  Anyway, I'm back now and here is a brief (relatively) sysnopsis of what's been going on.

Yellowstone -  Conditions were far from ideal for training, but when is skiing ever in ideal conditions.  I think the great days are that much better for knowing they are few in number.  After about the 10th wonderful 70 degree fall day this year I started to get sick of feeling guilty for not making use of all the wonderful weather when I just couldn't drag myself out for another run or rollerski, but I never have trouble passing up a ski on a 20 degree day with beautiful courdory or a 10 degree evening with a rock solid track and bomber kick.  Yellowstone got a lot of snow, several feet, while we were there, and the groomers had trouble keeping up with it there was so much.  This made for slow skiing, probably good for the first week on snow, plans for 5 hours of skiing a day, and at an altitude of 6600 feet too.  Then when the snow finally slowed it got cold.  Thanksgiving day the high hit about -10 F, brrr.  Slow classic skiing felt great, but when I tried to skate it was just dismal, the red cheetahs felt like they were waxed with velcro (more on that later).  Friday things turned around, the weather started to warm, and my sister showed up with her two dogs to visit and ski for a day.  The dogs were fun to have around, and much less of a problem than I expected having in the hotel room.  All in all I skied about 350k in 25 hours over the course of the week, not a bad way to kick off the season.

I also watched some racing while I was out there, the supertour sprint and part of the biathlon race.  It is fun to be out amidst some of the best skiers in the US, and I got to see a lot of people I usually only read about, and meet fasterskier reporter Nat Herz.