Training Log Archive: Ari-o

Back to Hidden Valley. Not as early as I would have liked, it turns out that when you drink a couple glasses of 13.5% beer, it does not make for an early morning. Also, it was -15 overnight. In the teens by 10, though, so I did an hour of classic on some beautiful fun old school narrow classic tracks. Kick was something blue (but not borrowed, the one stick of wax I'd packed).

Then down to Duluth to ski with Jakob. We skied the Magney-Snively trails near the area I ran (most of) the 50 miler last year. Most of the trails in the Midwest are pretty tame, but these have some real hills. The kind where you can actually learn to ski down a hill well. Beautiful, beautiful woods, 20k of trails you could ski forever. Perfect snow (oh, well, two rocks). If you like trails of all sorts, Duluth is not a bad place.

Left the house at 7 a.m., caught the 77 to the Blue Line to O'Hare; plenty of time there to wander before seat 1A for the flight to Duluth, right over the Birkie Trail.

Rental car at the too-cute Duluth Airport, (15 minutes gate to car, including bags) and then a drive to Ely to visit Collin, who is doing a year of med school here. Chilly (but not -15 like yesterday) but gorgeous blue sky; haven't seen that all week in Chicago. We both wanted to do a three hour skate. And we did, successfully.

Best ski of the year. Perfect packed powder conditions, fun trails, beautiful woods, spectacular pink-red-orange sky along the horizon as we finished. I had left my drink belt at home so we had to duck in to the chalet a couple times to guzzle water, but that was fine. Finished right around 0, my jacket frozen on the outside, with just a thin wool underneath. Just a perfect ski.

Forgot to mention …

At breakfast I realized I'd brought everything I needed for clothing except … underpants. I had several options, the least bad of which was to wash out my wind briefs in the shower, wring them out, dry them as best I could, and, uh, put them back on. (Patting dry with paper towels worked particularly well, sorry rainforest. Unfortunately there's no hand dryer in the men's shower room.) This actually worked okay, better than sitting at work in gross wind briefs all day or killing half an hour going up and back to get underpants. Also, lesson was learned.

All sorts of NP leg stuff. Included speed skaters (which become skate lunges) and then sprints around the bean with some squats in between, which I did totally OCD: started on the outside row of concrete and worked my way in towards the end. Made 8 loops and by the 8th loop I could touch the bean! A couple people caught on.

Ran from NP breakfast to work. Discovered a few key things:

1. The showers here are quite nice and barely used.
2. I really should bring underpants to work, but in a pinch wind briefs and be washed out and wringed out and patted dry with paper towels and be dry-enough to wear.
3. The run to/from work would be 1 mile on a road, 5 miles along the lake, and 1 mile along the river. Basically other than the first mile, no stop lights. This is going to happen, maybe a couple of three days per week. A little flat, but that's okay.

It sleeted/snowed in the morning and the sidewalks turned to ice. After work I was going to run (apparently the lake shore path is well-maintained, HEAR THAT DCR?!) but then I forgot the groceries I'd left at work so my workout wound up being running across town back to the office and lot of stairs up to the L. Oh, well.

Run to #NP_Chi! A little easier than hauling my bike down three flights of stairs and biking seven-and-a-half miles.

Ah, what do you do without hills and stairs, because Chicago? Bench dips, push ups, mountain climbers and box jumps. Good way to make things hurt. We did sets of 10 of each, with the push ups and dips combined, which is actually good core training as you transition PU-BD-PU-BD …

And then some sprints.

And then I ran home.

Maybe would have run in the evening but it was 35, pouring, and big puddles. And everything is going to freeze, hooray!

First run in Chicago. 50˚ during the day, so it should be shorts weather in the evening, right? Nope, 30˚ and windy. A little chilly, but nice to run along the lake even in this weather. A few 60 sec pickups, and a stiff headwind on the way back. HRM was all over the place …