Skiing on slush in the rain

Yesterday morning I woke up early to do a ride with the cycling team that I will be riding for this year (Hagens Berman Cycling, to be pronounced in a thick German accent). After my alarm went off I sat up, looked out the window, saw that it was raining, and then rolled over and went back to bed. Such is my dedication to winter cycling training.

When I finally arose from my slumbers, I decided to try skiing in the pass in hopes that it would be snowing there instead of raining. I headed out to Cabin Creek, and was pleased to see that it was a wet snow falling. Unfortunately, the new snow seemed to have the consistency of glue, making for really snow skiing. The only upside was that I felt like a real hero on the downhills, since I didn't have to deploy the snow plow techniques I usually use to scrub off sped on some of the downhills. Eventually the snow turned to rain, which actually made for faster skiing, I guess skiing in slush is faster than skiing in packing snow.

I still ended up having a good long ski, completing 4 laps of the "bread and butter" loop (this name is borrowed from Markez, who uses it to describe his favourite loop up at Cypress). The bread and butter loop heads out and back on the "Road" trail, then does a full lap of the Viking/Berg course with the Mt. Ozbaldy loop thrown in for good measure. The lap is 12.3 km long, a map of it as plotted by my GPS is shown below:


It is really fun skiing, with a good mix of twists, turns, and climb. Here is an elevation profile of the loop, according to my Matlab processing of the elevation data from the GPS it was 1240 feet of elevation gain per loop.

So, my four loops put me at 49.2 km for the day which is a respectable total, and made even more so since the conditions were so slow and it ended up being just over 4 hours of skiing (in fast conditions it would have been closer to 3 hours). Anyways, any day out skiing is a great day no matter what the conditions, so I drove home with a smile on my face.

After I arrived home Roanne and I spent the late afternoon and evening working on a puzzle. At this point I think Roanne is really looking forward to being able to get out and be active after her treatment is over, she has been able to maintain a pretty normal life in terms of going to work every day, but has had to really scale back her physical activity since the chemotherapy makes her feel so tired. I think to celebrate the completion of her treatment, we will go to Italy and ride a Gran Fondo, but more on that later.

Finally, let's tally my weekly weigh-in average! I definitely had a good week, starting off really strong with some all-time records and then slowly creeping back up (as the effects of the canoli that Fras and Car fed me wore off). Yesterday I was 163.0 and this morning I was 163.2, so I definitely need to turn it back around for the coming week and hopefully hit 161 again. My weekly average was ... 162.5! Tremendous! The only downside is that it is going to be hard dropping down from that for the coming week, wish me luck!