Training Log Archive: biggins

easy flat ski around TD with Jonis. nice and icy fast.

I think I came down with the Adrian/Scott plague just after I got home, I've felt pretty terrible for the last couple days, but not terrible enough that there's really anything specific wrong. Mostly stomach aches and fevers and only sleeping for a couple hours at a time. I felt a little better today, but didn't decide this until it was too warm out to go ski, so I went down and put together the new road bike. omg new bike yay! Took it for a little ride around to see if everything worked, and its pretty awesome. Definitely different than the old one, the steering geometry feels weird, and the new cranks are huge. I'm pretty sure my cadance dropped by a lot, and it wasn't too high before. I have to use way more range of motion in my legs each stroke, which I suppose will be a good thing once I get those extra parts of the muscles into shape.

C • Nice 2

easy ski with Carol around TD. It got down to 47 last night, so we weren't expecting much, but it was more solid than I would have figured. Quite nice and glazed in a few places, a little soft in most.

Home sweet home, with only minor running through one of the airports to make a late connection. Bags and skis didn't make it through that one, but they got delivered this morning at 2:30, which I know because I've been wide awake since 2.

A big thanks to everybody that was following along from home last week. Travelling and racing and trying to be at our best in weird countries is super stressful, and it sincerely does make that little extra difference to know that people back home are cheering for us. It might be because of pride, or showmanship, or just stress-induced homesickness, but it really helps.

It was 72 degrees when I landed in Reno yesterday, and it looks like its down below freezing now, so out for a t-shirt ski as soon as the sun comes up. And after I get all that icky non-tahoe cold wax off the skis of course!

easy morning ski around TD. It was already like 45 degrees, but the trails were softened icy hardback, aka all sorts of effortless awesome.

It's 1am in the Almaty airport, 9 of 12 hours done here, 20 of 51 hours done until home. The gigglies are asleep on the floor, Anna and I are plotting the truckee orienteering club, Scott is miserably sick, Swedish Ed is wandering around forlornly, and Adrian disappeared a little while ago, though we're assuming he's not in prison yet. Good times.

C • TruckeeO 9

early morning darkness jog. it was going to be a morning skio, but they knocked on our doors at 6am to say the busses to the airport were leaving two hours earlier than planned, so that cancelled that plan.

Ski-WOC long. Rocked it.
This was a really good race, snowing and warmer than we expected by 15 degrees, but the snow was wicked greasy fast and all the narrow trails were rock solid. Four loops, three forked and then a short common forth one. I had the same first control as Scott and followed him there, but then we split and I saw very few people afterwards. The first half of the loops were up in some steepish reentrant hillside, then we dropped down across a sketchy bridge and onto the giant flat hillside for a loop, then back across the river and a few more flattish controls through the sprint terrain back to the arena. So it was always physical dp at the start, then a long up and down traverse to the bridge, then an ignore-the-trails bushwhack-fest on the hillside and back. Took two GUs without water at the top end of loops 2 and 3, which were delicious and needed and didn't cause any problems. Had lots of energy all the way through to the finish, which is definitely a first for a steep-dp-fest long course.

The dodgy hillside bits were fun with lots of short cutting, almost all of which I nailed perfectly. Came through the last exchange with a German guy, but didn't look which one it was. I figured it was Bernd, since he looked too short to be Eike, but he caught up at the first control and it was the young fast guy. I vaguely tried to hang on, which worked until we hit the big trail and then he just rocketed away. He had about 30 meters by the time we turned onto the narrow trail, and it was all downhill straightline after that so I couldn't make it back up.

Quite happy with the result, best wre points I've ever gotten, and I beat a whole bunch of people I've never beaten before.

C • Excellent! 7