Mashed Potatoes and Peanut Butter

Well, here I am again. Now that I seem to be a regular commuter on this here world wide information superhighway, I guess my mom will feel like she is getting enough news of the daily goings on of her eldest son.

I got out for a ski tonight in some less than ideal skating conditions. I'm not sure how much of the problem was a lack of compaction during grooming and how much was snow that fell after grooming. In any case the snow had a consistency of dry mashed potatoes where by any push off led to my ski sinking into the snow anywhere up to 3 inches. This transitioned into a nonexistent glide due to the fresh inch of snow which had fallen in the last 2 hours.

I don't think that the situation could have been helped with anything less than a double turbo roto-corker with a fresh block of jetstream blue accelerator dust.

Even the track set felt as though it had been levelled off with a nice layer of natural peanut butter leading to ever decreasing glide speeds regardless of the steepness of the trail. In fact the soft snow on the trail would have been lovely to snowboard on if it could have been mounted on some apparatus which would tilt the whole thing up by about 35 to 40 degrees.

Despite this I managed to slog through about 14 km with muscles still protesting from the last ski at the Gatineau Loppet. Below is a picture of me at Hardwood Hills in my typical ski attire. Daylight skiing is a luxury I rarely indulge in. The flip side is that I was the only car in the lot which is nice for a recluse like me. All things considered I am super fortunate that Hardwood now has night skiing or else I doubt I would be doing it at all.



The decreasing after glow of the big race last weekend is being displaced by a building desire to get at least one more ski race in this season. I have the bug. It looks most likely to be satisfied by the Fischer Loppet at Hardwood on Mar. 6 as long as Grandpa and Nanna Charles can look after the small fries on that morning. The only question is whether to do the 20 km and really try to race it or do the 40 km length for an extra dose of good old suffering. Probably the 40 km since those skinny boards aren't called misery sticks for nothin'.

I'll leave you with a quote from John Muir, someone I really identify with in regards to his attitude towards the outdoors and wild places.

"Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul."

Go outside and do something fun.