Back to... reality?

Ski camp in Lake Placid is over, but life on the ranch here is hardly different than an extended summer vacation, thanks to the unemployment thing. It will (hopefully) be ending soon, so I figure I have to take advantage of having the days all to myself while I can. In this vein of thought, I bleached all my water bottles today. Its a busy life, ok?

Placid wrapped up well, with one of my biggest weeks of training in my life. I guess there are some advantages to training four or five hours a day but it makes you kind of tired and not at all in the mood to move fast. It was a good group of people at the camp, and the camp did exactly what it should in terms of mental motivation to keep things going into the fall in a quality manner, rather than filling every day with easy bike rides. We finished it up with a rollerski OD on some new roads, then we stole some more chocolate soy milk (that stuff is awesome, I highly recommend it) from the cafeteria and all went our separate ways. Hopefully Jess and I will meet up for some mini-training weekends this fall, it really helps to keep me motivated.

The theme last week seemed to be dayglo everywhere, NENSA provided us with some sweet dayglo synthetic shirts, to add to my already-large collection of disgustingly bright shirts, and coaches everywhere are cracking down on wearing either a reflective vest or a yellow shirt while rollerskiing. A skier in Maine was hit by a car and killed earlier this summer, so this seems to be the first action to take to become defensive skiers. I just wanted to say that I approve. Rollerskiers benefit from the gawk-factor, but sometimes, we're just hard to see. And we have these things attached to our hands and feet that make it difficult to get off the road quickly. So, wear those reflective vests. I figure I already look like a doofus since I'm on rollerskis, so adding the vest isn't making me any geekier.

Thats Jennie, not me. I didn't do the time trial, so I took some pictures. Shes modeling a yellow shirt, although its not quite bright enough...

In other geek news, I've managed to strip out two of three screws holding my binding to my classic rollerskis (oh, THAT was that rattling noise?), so I better do something about that soon, or bad things will happen. Along those lines, I also managed to break two snow tips by being a beast - I double pole with so much force that the metal tip got pounded into the plastic basket. The pullups work?

Who says maintenance is necessary in rollerskiing, too?