Hermes

Nice @Heathpack.

2 hour endurance ride with efforts. Always fun to do new workouts. Beautiful day along the coast with 5-7 mph winds off the ocean.

Heathpack 

Road ride today with friends and then coffee. Perfect. It was supposed to be mountain bike today but we're still too muddy from all of our recent rain. Everything was "just so" today- neither too easy nor too hard, good weather, just 30 miles so I could get on to other things.


The biggest "other thing" I had to do today (all weekend long, actually) was to conduct a bunch of phone interviews for internship positions. We divide these up amongst the doctors at our practice but its still a lot of work.


Last week, one of my colleagues says to me, "Hey I have one in my stack but really you should talk to her. She wants to be a neurologist and she's a mountain biker".


So I pull her app and take a peek. Former junior national mountain bike champion, raced at worlds as well. Briefly raced as a pro. Then goes to college and vet school where she does very well. Class rank is 8th of ~150. Hell yeah.


Talked to her today and I will admit I have a bit of a crush right now. Totally if she wants to come train with us, she is in.

sarals 

@Heathpack, now, that is AWESOME!

Hermes

Day 1 skiing in the bag. 6 degrees in the early morning so we hung out until it warmed up but it was still cold. We had bluebird conditions at Deer Valley with very light wind. Used today like a leg opener. Tomorrow, it is off to Snow Basin that hosted the men's and women's downhill for the winter olympics. SB features two gondolas and continuous runs sporting 2500 vertical feet.



For dinner, we went to the St Regis hotel that was built in 2009 on the slopes of Deer Valley. We took the funicular to the restaurant.

Heathpack 

Nice pics @Hermes. Have fun skiing with the missus.

Yesterday I was wiped, it wasn't a very relaxing weekend and I started to think about everything I needed to get done right before bedtime Sun night. So I didn't sleep well.

Did a little strength workout yesterday am, ugh. My brain was still scrambling during that and it was a struggle. Then just a 15 min guided meditation afterward and my brain was SO. MUCH. BETTER. It's amazing really. But I did have to slog through the rest of my work day (not a holiday for me) exhausted.

This morning was JRA with my Nightcrawler friends. Forecast called for temps of 45F and that's what I dressed for. But most of the ride was 35F and I was cold. Then 15 min into the ride, I was hit full-on by a sprinkler. Now I was really cold. Haha that will make you put a pretty decent effort into the climbing parts.

Coffee after and another meditation, so my head & body are in a good place right now. Normally I'm very even, it feels totally weird to be all over the place like this. So interesting that the bike and physical stuff, and the meditations, are so positive but working them in can be a stressor too. Easy to get into a negative spiral of skipping the things that make your life better. What a trap that is.

My eye surgery is in two days. It's going to start raining tomorrow and keep up for 5 days. Lucky timing there, off the bike anyway for a bit post-op.

Heathpack 

BTW, my Garmin read 31.8F when we finished our ride. That's a fun temp to ride in with wet gloves.

valygrl

Wishing you the best Heathpack. Glad the meditation is a positive.

shovelhd

Good luck with your eye surgery HP. Been there, too many times.

IBOHUNT

Good luck with surgery HP

revchuck 

Ditto!

revchuck 

Went to Virginia for a family funeral Friday, came back yesterday. Between travel and the funeral and family bonding, no exercise was done. Other than eating, anyway.

1:43 at endurance pace this morning, with some fast pedals and ramp-ups included. Felt good to be on the bike in spite of the 70 degrees and 100% humidity. It's warm enough that I'm adding Nuun tabs to my water.

Looks like three hours in the rain tomorrow.

IBOHUNT

Need the rain for the swamp. Gator season is in 7 months

Hermes

Day 2 skiing complete. Snow Basin had perfect weather conditions and excellent snow. The 2500 vertical feet chair rides followed by long uninterrupted runs was tough on the legs. We completed our day by skiing the olympic women's downhill.

Riding in gondolas for some period of time provides the opportunity to talk with others and learn interesting things. One older skier, my age or older, is a ski patrol and masters ski racer. He is from Finland and plans to compete in Europe this season in the GS S and downhill. He improved his downhill speed last year to 115 mph.

Another couple, who was local, was planning a trip to San Diego. They have young children and I asked how old they were. The husband gets the ages wrong by a few years and the wife corrects him. We all had a good laugh.

Another guy competed in quick draw competitions and had a great collection of firearms. It was totally interesting to hear about technique and equipment and the time spent practicing. The competitors get so good that they can get off two shots so fast that the human ear thinks it is only one.

Here are a couple of pics.

Inversion over Ogden



From the top

Racer Ex 

There is an old Zen saying: You should sit in meditation for 20 minutes a day, unless you're too busy. Then you should sit for an hour.

There's a lot of truth to that.

Had a good run of training. We've been getting buried with snow, so I've been skiing as much as logistically possible, when it's been too stormy I've been Zwifting (and shoveling and plowing).

Spoiled to have this 15 minutes from the house:



Wind hold today with the storm coming in. See what tomorrow brings. Hermes, you should check out Alta. Favorite place to ski out that way.

Friday we tried to ski Squaw, parking lot was full of holiday skiers. Same with Alpine. So we ended up at Homewood. One chair running on a generator, no electricty, cash only tickets written in magic marker. Epic powder.

During one of the chair lift conversations I was asked if I had skied the resort before. Realized I had first skied there in 1967. If the chair lift had been a double with wood slats and I had been wearing leather boots, it would have felt exactly the same as 1967.

revchuck 

Three hours at endurance pace with 3x20' SST intervals, the first two at 60-70 rpm and the last at 85+ rpm. It's been a while since I've done these and it took some concentration. The last one was the hardest, not sure whether it was due to fatigue or the higher cadence. Made my smoothie, did my ride report, and took a two-hour nap. Life is good!

Stretching out this build to a full three weeks at my request so I can do the recon ride for the Rouge-Roubaix gravel sections. It's going to be my biggest build in a while.

Hermes

Day 3 skiing at Deer Valley, UT. We had another bluebird day. Heading home on Thursday.

revchuck 

Three hours at endurance pace this morning, this time without intervals. Interesting to note the differences between this ride and the one above; today's ride was 10 kj higher than Wednesday's (so functionally equal), while the TSS and IF were considerably different - 173 and .78 for Wednesday, and 161 and .74 for today. Desire for a nap is about equal.

Racer Ex 

Absurdly good skiing yesterday for 3 hours. The first big storm we had knocked out power to the south lift and buried the parking lot, so the area had been closed for close to a week. Rumor had it that they were going to be up and running so a line started to form at the "area closed" rope. I got in 8 runs in cotton ball moguls and some barely touched trees before they dropped the rope. Then it was on like Donkey Kong.

Yes, this is a huge bowl of untracked powder.



Skied almost another two hours until my legs went completely jello, just me and maybe 70 of my best buddies making track after track. At worst I had 2 people ahead of me in the lift line, at best I skied onto the chair.

Extremely quiet chair lift rides; everyone seemed to be both in awe and saving every ounce of energy for one more run.

Buried today in yet another storm, cleared the driveway of a good 4-6 inches of snow. Trainer ride in Italy today, more skiing tomorrow.

shovelhd

Man I would shred that ****.

happybday29475

Me too!

Here too! The last couple of weeks have been remarkable.

It has been, and it looks like will continue to be, a great winter/spring to dabble in backcountry skiing. My goal for this winter is - bite your tongue, this is not PC for this forum - spend less time on the trainer and more time skiing in the nearby mountains. Let's just say that I've re-learned that I can be on skis (XC, AT, or alpine) less than 45 minutes from my door, and that my bike fitness is not what it should be.

It's funny - a lot of my bike team's chatter right now is about XC skiing. I think it's healthy, but I don't think it's good for April races...

sarals 

I did it. I'm certified at VSC! What a tremendous experience!!!!

More to come...

Hermes

@sarals I am sorry to hear that. What hospital? Does the psyche ward allow visitors?

Heathpack 

I spent much of the day rewiring my visual cortex. Looking at things went from it giving me a big giant incapacitating headache to just a small teensy tolerable headache.

Then once I got to the tolerable headache stage, I made two quarts of lemon curd.

Tomorrow I think I will actually be up to pushing some pedals in circles for a bit.

sarals 

Had to be restrained. No visitors....

revchuck 

Dang, with all the pictures and talk about skiing, riding my bike seems almost too mundane.

Yesterday's ride was supposed to be 1:30 at endurance pace, but I had a chance to do a group ride and usually ride alone, so I joined in. I had to open up the bike shop, so I planned to cut out in time to get back, shower and have the place open.

The ride started off almost absurdly slow, but finally ramped up about 40 minutes in. I knew I'd have to put in some effort to get my TSS where it needed to be for that ride, so when it came my turn to pull, I just stayed there until I had to pull off to ride back to the shop. It turned out to be about nine minutes at 110% of FTP, which should have hurt, but didn't. Apparently all that anaerobic stuff I did in my last build is paying off. I easily maintained a solid Z3 pace on the way back to the shop. Felt good. TSS target was 75, ended up with 95. Oops.

I plugged in my Garmin 520 when I got home to charge it for the next ride, and...nothing. Apparently, I may have bent one of the pins where you insert the USB cord. I dug out my old 500 and charged it, hoping it wouldn't be fussy about working, and it seems to be playing nice. I've got about a 4:30 ride today, hope it maintains its positive attitude!