Training Log Archive: biggins

8 hour driving day to get to the other side of Italy. Its pretty foggy around here.

Ski-o tour day 4: SUI middle
Ok race, still felt tired, but managed to push up most of the hills for the most part. A little hesitation on the first long leg when some of the junctions looked weird, and then I blew the cut into the control. Caught up to the Romanian guy in front of me, then Adrian caught us both, then we all spread out in the opposite order on the long climb back up from the top of the map.

Easy team party ski around some big trails (probably the marathon course) and up over a hugish mountain. Just before sunset, so the low spots in the valleys were super chilly.

Event: Ski O Tour, Col de la Givrine
 

ski-o tour day 3: long in SUI
This one was a lot tougher physically than the first day's long, many more skinny trails and off trail crusty skiing. Felt pretty tired skiing for most of the race, probably because of all that and also not sleeping very well two nights ago (the timezones caught up, I was up from 3:30am). Didn't have many got-lost nav mistakes, but I had a bunch of what I think were probably bad route choices, though without seeing the maps its hard to say. Did a lot of shortcutting, probably had my skis off half a dozen times to run up or down some rocky cliffs and whatnot, but I think most of those were pretty solid choices. Most of the mistakes were going too far out of my way to stay on a trail or avoid climb or something like that, when I should have just sucked it up and gone straight [-er].

Rest day. Easy ski-o down to the first two long maps, and around a bunch of controls. All the little trails were icy and ungroomed, so crazy and crazy.

Easy morning ski with the posse around one of the big trails from yesterday. All newly groomed, but icy, so a little crazy on some of the downhills and we sortof broke Cristina.

Ski-o tour day 2: sprint.
In a castle. Woot. Well sortof next to a castle. And I did ski my long leg through the moat. Still awesome. There wasn't really much snow, conditions today were much closer to the France I've come to know and love. But most things were slidy, and I only ran across a couple patches of bare dirt/pavement/gravel.

My race wasn't so fantastic, which I will somewhat blame on the map and probably mostly blame on general sprinty panic. They made ski-o on top of a sprint map, which doesn't really jive well with the symbols (mostly the green ones), and had another stupid fence maze that was pretty pointless. Also they solid overprinted the circle on top of the maze, so you couldn't actually see several of the entrances or exits or walls. And they still haven't gotten the line sizes right for the map symbols.

But as far as the parts that were actually my fault, coming out of 2 I read lots of the parallel castle walls wrong, and crossed the road to what I thought was a dotted trail (there were groomer tracks in the snow over there), but it was on the bottom of the walls instead of the top. So I got to double back across the road. The gps says that cost a minute, which would explain why Adrian appeared just then (he started a minute back). Then on the butterfly I got totally turned around and wandered around the field a bit, found most controls that were out there, and also a couple patches of dirt. Lost probably a minute and a half there. Adrian lost a whole lot more though, somehow getting more lost than I did.

Then no problems for the rest of it, plus I didn't die going down into the last control, which was somewhat of an actual concern, considering that my route involved skiing down over a stone wall at fairly high speed and flying past the control (yay touchless punching). So in summary it was super fun but not so successful: more castles, less tiny fence mazes, and I probably need a compass that works. Also I skied through a moat. Which was awesome.

Ski-o tour day 1 mass start long.
This one started in exactly the same place as the fake-transjurassienne I did two years ago, though I can happily report there is currently much more snow this time. As in, some. Trails were all good, I hit dirt a few times in the woods, but for the most part it was soft dirt. It didn't freeze last night, and was a ways above zero for the race, but it was old saturated snow so the glide was fine, even with the rock skis.

The race went well. Took it pretty easy, I'm feeling ok but still coughing up colored stuff. Got a little mixed up on the first one, I was following the pack but couldn't really see where any trails were, since there was some crazy thick fog around. Went a bit up a wrong trail but decided it was up in the wrong place and turned around for the right one. Saw the tail end of the pack leaving the control and that was mostly it for other people during the race. My first map had a bunch of narrow snowmobile stuff early on, and it was mushy steep snow, so not bad for climbing in, but tiring. Second map was more long legs on big trails (or downhill narrow through straight fields), so that was quite a bit easier. Third map crossed the road and headed up a crappy narrow trail for one control, then out a different crappy narrow trail, then a super long skate on a big trail for a couple controls and some bonus distance. Got stuck on a barbed wire fence in there somewhere too.

Anyway not a bad race, not particularly fast but I don't feel wrecked or much more sick afterwards, so I'll take it for now.

Also we're using touchless SI, which I think I like better than touchless Emit, because your arm beeps when it registers. This is better than just the flashing led of the emits because while skiing even looking down at your arm requires you to change focus from either reading the map or reading the trail, while just listening for the beep can happen in parallel. The only notable downside so far (besides the one dead control) was that it seems to take about half a minute per person to get the arm thing turned on and active (and had to be done by the SI guys), which for a mass start field of 60 that doesn't like waiting around in the cold means they were sortof freaking out when we didn't all orderly arrive at the start line 30 minutes in advance. Also the totally bonked the computers (control assignments / split printouts), so no results yet. But that may be unrelated.

Warmdown jog (Ali came, does that make it a joggeroo?) back to the start to grab the spare equipment bag. Saw Sandra and Marc on the way back, but they disappeared before we caught up with them.

Made it to Geneva, found the posse, drove to Premanon, got ourselves registrated and fed and waxed and showered, and now mass start long tomorrow!