Saturday, January 8, 2011

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.

4 comments:

  1. nice! that looked like a cool day..... yea xc is pretty sweet....amanda and i rented for like 8 days back in 08....once you figure out where to distribute your weight over the ski pattern you can really get cruising....you should hit fox park on your lunch break...gotta be some goodness in there

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  2. once we get some snow I will be doing lunch laps on 10-E.

    Out of business again

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  3. i hear they're turning it into a wind farm

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  4. Anonymous1/10/2011

    ha! look at the last event they had

    http://www.tenneymtn.com/blog/

    nuash-ballz

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