The Off Season and Beyond!

Well it's been awhile... So a good number of things have happened.  After getting home from Europe I settled back into Bellingham and tried to get back in the school gear.  So that is what I spent most of my month or so long off season doing.  It was only interrupted by a week long visit from my cyclocross season traveling buddy Adam.  Adam likes to ride mountain bikes so I rode my mountain bike more days of the week than not for a bit.  We had some good fun and it was a good way to get back into the bike riding.

After Adam returned to Oregon I started up the training again and somehow I lucked out with nearly 3 weeks of great weather.  I think moslty I just got really lucky and had sun for the long days and most the rain came on the shorter days.  Until this past week when the weather got real for Bellingham and we got a decent amount of snow.  Which of course led to my nearly only once per year snow adventure involving some skinny skis.  It turns out you don't get any better at something if you only do it once per year.  Nonetheless I still headed up with some buddies from the WWU Cycling Team and proceeded to flounder around in the snow.  I think I did do some gliding on the skis, but there was a lot of pushing and a lot of soreness afterwards. I may have crashed a few times too...  I did my best to pretend I knew what I was doing though.  We managed to ski 8k through the 6inches or so of powder that was on top of the groomed-awhile-ago track.  Then I came home and looked up some ski race stuff.  8k is about half the distance of the shortest xc ski race.  Respect for those that do that and longer.  Oh ya, they also do it way faster too...