My second winter triathlon

Wednesday was just an amazing day.  As you know, it has been less than spring-like here in Tahoe, and it dumped something like 2 feet of lovely powder on Tuesday night, making Wednesday a fantastic day for  skiing.  Tom and I headed out with our friend Andrew to Tahoe's best-kept secret for powder skiing . . . Homewood Resort.  This is a pretty small little resort right on the west shore of the lake, and is easily forgotten about most of the time.  On a powder day, however, everyone and their brother heads off to Squaw Valley (where we hold season passes) for skiing, 'cause it's big and bad and there's cliffs and steeps and all kinds of things whoppeee!! -- and eight thousand other people have exactly the same idea, and thus the place is skied out in about 45 minutes, if that long.  Seriously, you can be in the first wave of people up the mountain, get in one decent untracked run, then it just tracks out.

We take this opportunity to drive a little longer for Homewood, which despite its small size actually has some really decent skiing, trees and steeps and all that.  It's just missing high speed chairs and easily accessible "steep and deep" . . . and all the people.  Leaving lots of untracked pow.  All day long.   We skied from 9am to 1pm, and I swear it was pretty much untracked the whole way.  Well, you can see for yourself in this video that Tom whipped up:  He's filming, Andrew is in the red, and I'm wearing tan.  It's a long video, but pretty damn cool . . .  (it's a little off center, but if you click through the embed to YouTube it plays right.  I'll figure it out eventually).



Although I am not a half-bad skier on the groomers, I have struggled with skiing in the powder.  I have spent a lot of frustrated time falling over, falling back and just plain fighting with the deep snow.  I spent most of this season with ill-fitting boots, further fucking up my mojo.  Last week I got me some new boots, and the difference was remarkable.  We had a bit of powder to ski in last week, and for the first time things just clicked and I felt like I could actually ski in the stuff.  On Wednesday it all really came together and NOW I know what I've been missing . . .

So we skied until our legs screamed uncle and went and had a nice lunch, meat fries and bloody marys, omy!

I then got it in my head to try another winter triathlon.  The last time I did this, I skied-ran-yoga'd, which was definitely the wrong order of events, as I could barely move in yoga.  This time, I skied, rested an hour or two (with the bloodys), hit a hot yoga class then ran home (4 miles) from the studio.  Way better!  In fact, running after yoga just felt wonderful, all loose and ready and aware of my body and comfortable -- this won't be the last time I put these two activities together . . .

I might hesitate a bit before throwing the skiing in, too, because yesterday I was POOPED, like I had done a freakin' tri or something.  The couch beckoned . . .

Today called for 9 miles and Surprise! it was snowing and cold and windy as hell out there.  I'm usually not too intimidated by weather, but it just did NOT look appealing in the least.  Therefore, I headed to the Rec Center, and prepared for 9 miles on the indoor track.  I decided I might have a hard time with the round and round and round at 12 laps per mile, so I mixed it up a little bit by running 2 miles on the track, then a mile on the treadmill.  This kept me going for quite a while, then insanity called (oh my god, running inside is so fucking BORING!!), and I quit after 8 miles.  Given my inability to handle treadmills and tracks in the past, I was happy to wring even 8 miles out.  So I'm calling it a success.

Tomorrow we are off to hang by some hot springs in the remote Nevada desert.  I've got a 14 miler on tap for tomorrow, and then next week!  The 20 miler!