Home, sweet home

After a hellish 7-hour layover in the Seattle airport, where I huddled in a corner trying not to shiver too badly while I "slept", I made it back to Newton. That felt like a pretty long day, but the upside is that I got a lot of work done on the plane, and did my laundry as soon as I got home, so life suddenly feels a lot more organized. Amazing how having clean ski clothing can do that to you, its just too bad it gets smelly again so quickly. I decided to skip the Tuesday night race, for many reasons, but the most important one being that I don't need to push myself into sickness right now. Travel is stressful on my body, and I'm just now admitting that after knowing it for a long time - and just now accepting that its stressful, and doing something about it. But next Tuesday, all y'all masters better watch out...

I decided to join the CSU orienteers instead of the race, because they were doing a night course at Hammond Pond - my goal was an easy half hour of running to loosen up. I more or less put that plan into place, except for the parts where I was pushing the pace or leaping through the snow giggling, or the fact that I actually ran for 45 minutes. It turns out, I really like running in the snow. This might make me a traitor to my sport, but it is super fun to go gallumphing through the woods in untracked fluffy snow in the dark. My sweet new headlamp is super strong, and the snow helps reflect the light, so the orienteering actually gets much easier, and the snow covers up all those pesky rocks and blueberry bushes, so you can run a little faster. While running faster wasn't my goal, it happened anyway... whoops.

Anyway, that was a nice way to not think about ski racing for a night, to unwind a bit and let my legs stretch out, just to have fun. The fun factor was at least one order of magnitude higher than a Tuesday night master blastering. But next week... its on!