Sunday, January 23, 2011

Blog or Dissertate?

Blog, of course! Just a quick break to try to get back in the habit of my weekly updates (at the very least).

It was a reasonably good week, exercise-wise. I did ride my high from last weekend's race a little too long but I figure it's alright. Running races hardly ever leave me feeling that way anymore so it was a nice change.

The three-day weekend was greatly appreciated around here. I spent the majority of the weekend with a friend - having girl-time, watching TV, reading, napping, and generally ignoring schoolwork. Monday I got back into my groove by spending 7 evening hours in the office while Doug worked at the athletic club.

Before getting back to work I took my friend K out to the trails at Burchfield to teach her how to ski. Ski rentals were free for the day and the Place Was Packed. K had never been on any kind of skis before so she had to learn it all from the very beginning. We started with getting up from a fall (which I learned to teach right away after forgetting to teach another friend last winter), moved on to "french fry, pizza pie," and then eventually made it to going forward. Kicking and gliding took some time but she was getting it by the end. We managed about 2 miles with only a few falls - almost all of them at the bottom of hills. She'd make it down looking great and get excited or something at the bottom. Rumor has it she wants to try again, so I'm calling it a successful day.

Tuesdays are not going to be good exercise days for me this semester and this week was no different. The rains that came Monday night left the whole town a sheet of ice Tuesday and it wasn't much better Wednesday, so it didn't take much to talk myself out of trying to run outside. I flirted with the idea of hitting the treadmill but bailed after visiting a friend in the hospital and staying longer than planned. That night I resolved to make it out running every remaining day of the week.

Thursday and Friday both brought good runs, if a bit cold. Saturday morning was F-R-I-G-I-D with wind chills around -10* when I headed out for my morning long run with the training group. About 80 people made it out that morning and I caved to peer-pressure, running 7 miles when the plan only technically called for 4. It was week 1 of half marathon training but 4 would have been a big cut back, since I've been doing 6-8 on weekends lately.

Today, since I ran more than planned on Saturday, I decided to be happy with 14 running miles for the week and try skiing instead. We weren't sure how the trails would be but decided to give them a shot since we did get about 1" of new snow in the past couple days. Burchfield hasn't been renting skis since the weekend and as a result, the trails were great! We parked at the Riverbend trailhead instead of the park, like we usually do, and it was a great decision. The hills between Burchfield and Riverbend were likely to be an icy, root-y, rocky mess and I'm perfectly happy that we skipped them. The few skiers who did get out this weekend left great tracks for us to follow and I was ON today. Got in some good practice with pole-less kicking, double-poling, and running up hills. Three times around a 1-mile loop left us with 3 miles for the day.

Week totals:

Mon: Skied 2 miles nice and easy and worked on technique. Felt good on sore legs.
Tues: Nada
Wed: Does sliding around on ice count?
Thurs: Ran 3.4 miles with dogger.
Fri: Ran 4 miles outside with friend B while the wussy boys ran on the indoor track.
Sat: Ran 7 miles with the training group, different people than usual.
Sun: Skied 3 miles with Doug, lots of technique work.

Total: 14.4 miles run, 5 miles skied. Not bad for high-riding laziness.

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