today...

break has been good, lots of skiing. yesterday was ridiculous, 4 hours (in two skis) about 40 km... arms are toast... today, a 1.5 hour skate ski, probably like 15 km or a little more, steady, easy pace... then a 2 hour break for lunch, and back up, and on the snow for 15 min warm up, and 4, 4 min intervals with 4 minutes rest, and 10 minutes cool down. snow was abrasive and slow, and my form was OK... i'm at a stage where i reach a certain exertion level, and my form suffers, so i'm gradually working to improve my form, so that i can hold form to match my out put... it's ... delicate.

the intervals were on a gradual uphill to flat/uphill, so i was able to use V1 and V2...

i play it by ear... i'm generally inclined to make hay while the sun shines, treat the vacation like a 'camp' with as much skiing as i can stand, but i'm aware there are physiological downsides to going going going. like... uh, gone. but i try to go easy most of the time.

i don't know if i'm getting 'better' as fast as i could get 'better', but i know, relative to last year, that i'm skiing better, just by the vast increase in volume. my theory is that i'm trading 'training' theory (i.e., ski easy, moderately) for skiing fun, and hopefully improvement will continue.

in a year or so, i'll definitely have to train smarter, not harder... but by then, hopefully abillity will allow me to do similar work load with more appropriate effort (read, go easier)...

i haven't gotten around to grading all the papers, i'm only noodling on the guitar a little (my hands are always cold and tired), and no significant reading, in english, or french.

i hope that next week (next year) will be a 'taper week' with only one day per week skiing, when i'll have time to grade, and chill/relax and feed my head.

that is all.

and more...

christmas, skied (telemarked) for a couple hours. good snow up high, a little wet down low. yesterday, some crappy intervals (and in, i skied crappy)... like 4, 4, 3, 4, 4... today skied like 21 km... and now i'm sitting down for a few minutes and heading back up... to do like a 1 hour classic ski...

tommorrow, should be about intervals in the morning, and a more leisurely ski in the PM.

going to take some pics soon... for those of you who live where it's warm...

2 gnarly wrecks on the road up and back... should be safer going up at 3:00 pm though...

so, like 31 days?

29 days and counting...

tired this morning, but got in a solid hour and half ski at a very pleasant slow pace. the race was a debacle. i skied like $#!^, grip wax was same, etc. oh well. i'm inspired to start training in earnest now. where others will be ramping up over the holidays for holiday indulgences, i will be going fully macrobiotic, lean, wild protein, hunted and killed with my own hands, 1.5 hours of stretching each and every day.

and ice cream.

lots and lots of icecream.

tommorrow, thinking it's going to be worth paying to ride the chairlifts, so i'll do that for a couple hours, take a brunch break, then skate, and classic for 1.5 hours....

maybe this will be the year i get to 100 ski days... of course, maybe this will be the year i get up and dunk again. hmm.

today, threw in an hour of guitar, and juggled a little... over to some neighbors for some christmas eve dinner. peace.

according to the map it's 9.6 km, w/ 400 feet of rise... so i did that twice, in 40, and 37 minutes, (note, to who ever reads this, it's really just so i can figure out 'next time' what i did, how i did it, and how i was feeling. i'm aware that you, any possible readers, do not care what i had for lunch.

but if you do, you'd love to hear about breakfast.
waffles, yogurt, blackberries, syrup, coffee.

shit. i just realized that the $100 i spent at the store, did not include syrup.

for lunch... well i had an apple, a bananna, and 2 oranges around 10, then i had peanut butter and jelly on leftover waffles at 10:30(out of bread). this is a suprisingly good sandwich by the way. the buckwheat waffle is a strange color, but nutricious and delicious. at 11:35, after a ski team meeting where the head coach did the talking, and i just lamented the fact that i didn't have a spoon, i trotted down to the teacher's lounge where the principal and his wife had a big spread. i had chips and bean dip. returning to the classroom, i had pasta with fresh carrots, brocolli, and cauliflower. after a little while i had an apple. then, the ski, and at last dinner. a light repast of chips and home made salsa, and hummus and fresh veggies.

can you tell the fridge was out of meat? then to the store, where after spending a ton on groceries, i ate again, a gourmet meal of 2 corn tortillas, refried beans, a scrambled egg, and vermont cheddar, with a little hot sauce and garlic worked in there.

tommorrow, either waffles with jam, or oats, the usual meal... but man, those buck wheat waffles are gooooooddd....

tommorrow is a classic ski day... and a big feed day, as the bread should be coming out of the machine now. the sandwich, will be turkey and salami with cheddar on home made white. i mean, i just can't deal with the low fat content of the turkey alone...

if you came from ultimate talk.com, and if you made it this far, here's a frisbee point.

a great drill for developing your throwing is to get a stack of discs (all you have). and practice throwing game throws to a space, and a target, then jog and get them. i.e., if you have 5 frisbees, fake a backhand to move the invisible mark, then pivot, extend and throw the same 'leading forehand' to a cutter 5 times. they will all land in the same place. next, pivot, and throw 5 hard flat throws to an imaginary team mate who is making a hard comeback cut. measure success by having the discs fly low, level and true on a straight line past a point where they would catch them...

wait. this is so bogus.

make a friend. play catch...

race a coming...

so since the race i've skied another say 8 days? So that's like 24 or so. have not gotten around to lifting, although i'm going to try to do some yoga tommorrow morning... classic race saturday... i think i'm just doing the 10 k, but there is a 20 k race... it depends on who i can talk into betting on what... not that it's outcome dependent... this type of bet, i usually bet way above myself, but i keep the stakes low enough, and it makes it more fun...

Some fresh snow dressing the trees for some great scenery, and a couple of amazing skis, scenery wise, whether it was getting lost. er... lost-ish. long story for a couple hours in the woods, or catching a couple of sweet sun sets w/ the sun and the mountains... well, you get the idea... every morning right now i get sunrise and alpenglow on the mountains in the distance behind school... school is very busy, basically it's taking as much as 30-1 hour of prep for each class of 85 minutes, not counting grading.

the grading is suffering. so am i, but the workouts go a long way towards clearing my head each day.

i've gotten back into the swing of plugging away at the guitar, and the french... the juggling too, although, i've a lot less time right now... luckily, i have little or no life...

started reading sideways (as in the book they made the movie from. haven't seen the movie, and i hear the book is good)...

that's all.

what i'm listening to...

this guy is a genius, if you didn't hear him on NPR this weekend, or at whatever hipper than me places you live...

www.jonathancoulton.com

i recommend (highly)

re: your brains

code monkey

the acoustical version of 'baby got back' is certainly nice, too... nice to hear such a true to the original source material of that other seattle legend, sir mix-a-lot.

nothing to do with frisbee.

yes, it's ski season, and you know what that means. what did i have for lunch. where, and how much did i ski. what am i reading. how is the juggling coming?

first of all, the overview. I spent 6 days in yellowstone over thanksgiving at a ski camp. We took 15 hs students, plus another 10 or so who are dually enrolled in a ski training program that trains for both hs races and JO's (junior olympics).

We ski'd 2 times a day, for an hour or so. The rest of the time was taken up, getting ready to ski, winding down from skiing, and eating. By the last 2 days, the desire to ski overwhelmed skiing, and i skied like 30 or 40 km per day. That took 3 ski's per day, over an hour sometimes.

(that was 6 days of nordic skiing).

Then I moved into a new house, about a mile from summit (my work). Accessible by a well plowed bike path, my studded gary fisher kaitai (1996) with the new fenders is serving me well. This has been a HUGE boon to my work, as it frees up over an hour per day. The house also has 17 foot ceilings, a true boon to the juggling.

I attended a 2 day clinic that a US Nordic Wax Guru, and general skiing stud, (and his wife is a Gold/Silver/Bronze medalist... all in the same event... can you tell me who that is), that helped somewhat. Then skied, tues/wed/thurs/fri/sat, including some epic full moon skates. I also spent a lot of time updating my HS Website: You can see what i'm teaching, if you like.

Then I took Sunday and Monday off to concentrate on a tight IT band (my poor skating technique aggravates a general tightness), before skiing Tues, Wed, Thurs, and Friday. (We go up after school, about 18-26 miles, dependant upon venue.

Today was a race, a 10K. I skied it in 37 something, 7 minutes faster than last year at this time, 35% off the winner, about 15% off where i'd like to be in the next year or so. It was also about a minute faster than my spring time on the same course, on what was slightly slower conditions for me. I wanted to go 36, but I blew my splits (my bad, lack of experience in race tactics (maybe the big minute or two), questionable wax / base prep (worth seconds, not minutes), and fatigue from lots of skiing, and a bad night's sleep from a good deal of work related stress. Last year in this race, I was the 'overall most improved skier in bend.' To repeat will be difficult. The race is filled w/ sandbaggers, and a comporable 15% improvement will be 5.4 minuntes, and a really difficult 5.4 minutes. I think I can approach that w/ improved technique (drills and video), longer slower days that the improved technique will allow, rest and intervals in the last 3 weeks prior to the race, and an effort to nail the wax and base prep.

So, 16 days of skiing (and like 24 'ski workouts'). I'll either take sunday or monday off as a rest day, and start working out again (i stopped lifting for yellowstone, getting use to skiing stress, and a mild back strain from moving that i didn't think squats/hang cleans/ and dead lifts would really help.

I'm racing a classic race in 2 weeks (10k) and maybe a 5k in a week. It's tough for me: as a relatively new nordic skier, jumping into longer races is tough. The 5 K should be more my speed: at least it won't kill me. I was wrecked today, barely able to keep on my ski's for the 1 or 2 k ski back to the lodge after the race.

In other news, I bought a new waffle iron, and a bread maker. This may cost me getting that digital camera i had my heart set on, at least for the next month or so. I also bought a new guitar (a cheapie) as i was using one belonging to a housemate at the old place. Right now there's a 'bananna / wheat' bread cooking that looks, to my uninitiated eye, to be going swimmingly. Tommorrow may be french toast.

Oh, and at my house-mates insistence (an no real resistance from me), we got the cable internet w/ the cable and the sports package. Hello, english premier league soccer. Tommorow, I think Chelsea is playing Arsenal.

I've done a poor job on the french with the move, but look to get back into it tommorrow....

Um. A buh, A buh, A buh, a that's all folks.