Sunday, March 18, 2012

optional day - cross-country skiing!

This was really fun :). I am pretty sure I overdid it for an optional day, but Alex, my friend and fellow racewalker from California, was here to ski with friends and I really wanted to join him for some cross-country skiing. We opted for classic skiing instead of skate skiing, because there was a lot of fresh powder and it was not groomed. I own my own pair of classic skis (gift from my grandma - they were hers, and then she got too old to do it any more), so all I had to pay for was the trail pass.

We went to the Nordic Center at Solitude, because it's been such a warm spring that there was unlikely to be much snow at Soldier Hollow or Mountain Dell golf course. There was plenty of snow at Solitude, at 8700 feet (2600 meters) in elevation. It was snowing pretty hard the whole time we were out there, and there was a lot of fresh powder - probably a foot or so (30 cm).

We only went 7km in 1 hr 54 min moving time (about 2.5 hr) but that is because we were breaking trail the whole way in the fresh powder. In fact, we were slower going DOWN hill than coming back up, because we had to break trail on the way down but on the way up we could follow our tracks. There was fresh snow in our tracks on the way back up, but it was still lots better than a whole foot of powder!

Here's the Garmin data if you're curious about where we went, elevation, etc.

2 comments:

Harriet said...

It sounds as much fun as being out in the cold can be. :-)

Tammy said...

Yeah, I'm not a big fan of the cold either...but you are not cold at all when x-c skiing (unlike downhill skiing...I get cold on the lifts, and I dislike it!). I'm going to have to do it again soon.