Thursday, November 8, 2007

An easy week in Boise

In the last post I mentioned doing intervals with Tim Burke. If you follow the link below you can watch video from a portion of one of those intervals.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KoTfqcWrjlo

The camp in Heber City ended on a high note with a few more quality workouts, the last of which was a hard interval set that left us all on nearly empty. That night we went out for Mexican food and fruity drinks. It was all most of us could do to keep from falling asleep in our tacos.
(So, a little aside - this picture probably should have been included with my last post, but I overlooked it. One of the last mornings in Heber I lucked out and captured the full moon dropping behind the mountains as the sun was just coming up and starting to illuminate the hillsides. I've never seen anything quite like it.)

On Sunday I drove with Sara and her parents to Boise. Game four of the World Series was unfolding for a good portion of the trip so we spent the evening trying to keep it tuned in as we drove across the desert. The highways were quiet save for all the guys who were on their way either to or from deer hunting. The truck stops were overrun with people sporting blaze orange and camo. Speaking of which, I've never quite figured out why deer hunters go to the trouble of wearing camo pants when they top it off with an orange shirt and hat. Any thoughts?

Anyway, I spent last week in Boise. Monday and Tuesday were off days and then Sara and I got back into training. The weather was cool and dry so we were able to get some great sessions in that included an awesome mountain bike ride in the foothills, a couple of high-end interval sessions, and a long ski up into the mountains where we climbed nearly 3000 ft in 3 hours.

Lest you think we spent the whole easy week training, I'll assure you that we did plenty of relaxing. We had the opportunity to help coach the Bogus Basin Nordic Ski team on a couple of different days and, of course, got dressed up for Halloween to hand out candy to the kiddies coming to the door.

I arrived back in Lake Placid yesterday morning at 1 am after flying all day from Boise and I'm back into another big block of training. We skied on the treadmill this morning and did a classic rollerski this afternoon. It snowed a couple of inches here yesterday so everything is white. We may try to ski on the golf course tomorrow if it stays cold through the night. Saturday and Sunday I get to train with the Dartmouth Team in Hanover and then I'll back to Lake Placid for a couple of days before leaving for Alberta to get on snow. Sweet!

1 comment:

Kelly Benware said...

Zach -

Brenton and I had a good time with you this past summer. We look forward to catching up again; I know Brenton always hates missing your calls. It seems we all play the never ending game of phone tag!

The Benwares