Training Log Archive: Swampfox

Watched the Big Game yesterday with Kris. It was hard to concentrate, because the black beast was also there, and since Kris wasn't serving any doggy nachos, and with the black beast being a voracious carnivore and me being the closest available target....well, good thing Kris kindly let me use her Norwegian bubble wrap blanket to stay warm with.

After a Big Game is won and done, I like to reflect a little bit on what I saw. A lot was written afterwards about how Beyonce' won the Super Bowl, and I was wondering which one was Beyonce'. Ha! Just kidding! Actually, though, I really *was* wondering which one Coldplay was.

Then, after I am finished reflecting, I like to peruse a few entirely random newspapers to see what others thought of the Big Game, and see if they had the same thoughts I did. Usually they don't.

The first entirely random newspaper I looked at was the Denver Post. The Denver Post seemed pretty happy about the Big Game and was filled with congratulatory articles about how great it had all been. Though Beyonce' never came up, which seemed strange at first.

Okay. Then, the next entirely random paper I checked was the Charlotte Observer. There, the tone and direction of the articles was slightly different. There were about 43 articles focusing on Newton's post-game interview and what a disaster it had been. I guess when it comes to analysis of the post-game interview, nobody does it better than the Charlotte Observer.

Finally, I checked one last entirely random newspaper, which turned out to be the Lawrence Journal-World. Curiously, there was not one reference to the Big Game. I realize this is Chiefs territory, but, really? Not even one teensy article about the Big Game??? How can they even claim to be a newspaper??? On the other hand, there was a fascinating article about how KU Basketball Coach Bill Self uses various letters written by Phog Allen to Bob Dole as a motivational tool to get Jayhawk basketball players to hit the offensive glass harder. How these presumably really boring letters could be of any possible motivational value to a bunch of young basketball players is hard to understand--but that is the genius of a coach like Bill Self.

After that, I went skiing and did a little running, too.

C • Confused 1

People were opting to go into the parking lot and parking across the road in about equal numbers, and I chose to the safer option of parking across the road, too.

Trail condition were very good, if soft. I think there's more snow up there now than I have ever seen here in mid-winter.

Went up to go skiing in the mid-afternoon, and almost as soon as I got on the interstate I passed a fresh wreck--a car had hit an ice patch and spun off the highway. The conditions were perfect for badness: sunny earlier in the day but now clouded over and getting colder, lots of fresh snow, and big wind. There were many more ice patches on the road. Up top, I paused at the entrance to the parking lot, as it was clogged with snow and looked bad. I thought I could get in, but getting out? Getting out two hours later with the wind working the whole time to bring in snow reinforcements? I pulled across the highway and parked to assess things. I wanted to ski, but I also didn't want to get stuck there after skiing. In the end, it was the stop sign I was parked next to that decided me. It was shaking so violently in the wind that I started to wonder if it was even safe to be parked by it. That made me think that this was just crazy, and it would be smarter to bugle a retreat and come back another day.

I wasn't up top for very long, and it turned out that already in the bit of time the gates across the east bound lanes on the interstate had been swung shut. I was glad to get home in one piece, and subbed in a run from home in lieu of skiing.

The trails were fat with snow. Good or skiing, bad for snow biking. Good thing I was skiing!

Quite a few people I saw commented on it being cold; I can't remember so many people saying that on any other day. It wasn't so absolutely cold, rather, it was cold plus some wind with some real cut to it. By the time I was done, my face was cold, my hands were cold, and so were my feet. With all that, no surprise my skis were slow.

Yowsa! exhuberance! It was over all too soon.

Went up top to ski, only to find a scene of a landscape nearly completely overwhelmed by snow. Most barbed wire fences had disappeared. Several vehicles were in the parking lot, but remembering the parking lot horrors from after the storm last week, I decided I was not going to venture down the snow filled chute into the lot, and instead nestled behind another truck on the other side of the highway and felt fortunate to be there (there was barely any room). I made my way to the trail head to find, well, a grooming style I had never seen before. It consisted of several snowmobile passes over the trails, leaving deep furrows in the snow (in the track of the snowmobile) with huge ridges of snow cast to either side of each furrow. It was hard to discern what the point of all this activity had been, though presumably there was method to the madness. It just did not allow for much skiing in the aftermath. All I could do was use my skate equipment to shuffle along classic style. An interesting variation on skiing, still fun, but I am hoping the usual grooming techniques will be in evidence tomorrow.

There was a truly unusual amount of snow for the Laramie Range, 2' of new, I will guess, maybe more. It snows all winter long here, but in the Laramie Range the snow falls almost never come up to the kind of thing you here about in the high mountain ranges of Colorado, much less the California Sierra Nevada. No doubt when this snow starts to melt in the spring Cheyenne will experience bad floods, though at least part of the devastation will be averted because of the large Walmart distribution facility off of I-80 west of Cheyenne, which serves as something of a flood diversion works.