Lafayette Trails

Well, I'm 100% sold on cross country skiing.  Today was my first outing on the new setup and conditions were far from ideal and I still had a great time and got a good workout in just 4.2mi.

Met up with Bill and we shot up to just north of the notch and a little place called Lafayette Trails.  Small little out and back type network with a few mini offshoot loops.  We met up with what turned out to be a pretty sizable group that consisted mostly of people who consider Nordic a second or third sport so everyone was fairly well matched.

There were 4 others behind the camera. It was a tour de force.

Trails at first were pretty chewed up and hard packed.  Tumble mentioned that during holiday week a bunch of yahoos came in and post holed the whole place and kind of ruined things, its just now slowly starting to recover.  I was having a hard time getting going initially.  Had to figure out where to put my weight and get into that classic rhythm.  Took me a bit to figure out how to get the waxless pattern to really bite and grip for the kick but I found out I was having issues more due to the conditions than my form per se.  Once we got a bit higher and there was some light snow that had been softened up by the sun a tad I really got going well and felt good.

 looked good too....

Going down slope was a tad sketchy but really fun.  Its nice to be able to turn seemingly boring terrain into something interesting and challenging just by getting out of your comfort zone a bit.  I stayed upright all day, Bill had a few crashes.  It was a lot of stop and go and regrouping but I definitely felt like I was working.  And it is definitely full body.  Upper, core, lower and cardio...felt great.

I was ready for more but we had carpooled and we were running a bit low on daylight due to a later start.  I'm excited to get a bunch more mileage in this winter and be able to check out areas of the state previously unreachable to me.  I botched my garmin data by accidentally stopping the recording of data right after I started it, but Bill got a new device for xmas and recorded the track and I was able to upload it to my Garmin account.