Wells ave bake sale this weekend!

Sunday morning, at Well's ave, you can have a second chance to buy (or win) more cupcakes! The car-bomb cupcakes will be making a second appearance. Along with some other goodies. Stop on by and support your local ski racer!

Lake Placid update

Monday afternoon we ran up Cascade mt, which is a pretty small one close to the road but with an awesome view. Going up we passed this huge family wearing dresses and long hair and stuff with two babies--intense. We also discovered that three of us were wearing the Colby sports bra. Go Colby!



Tuesday morning were some hillbounding/ski walking intervals up Whiteface; we were hoping to make it to the top but I think we were only about 3/4 of the way up before it was time to turn around. They're blasting a new trail up whiteface, and we accidentally bounded through the blasting site but the guys were pretty nice and pointed us the right way (up). It was a gorgeous day, so we stopped by the Flume on the way back to jump off some rocks into FREEZING water.





Tuesday afternoon we went double poling in Keene, and the weather was still gorgeous. I could get used to this... As the van was going along scooping up athletes, Patty sees Kathleen skiing past where the van had stopped, so Paul leaned out the window and yelled "Kathleen! turn around!", and then as she started back, he realized that she probably didn't want to stop. Patty thought she did want to stop, so they quickly made a bet- 20 pushups to the loser. Kathleen skied up and stopped so Paul lost the bet and Patty added some weight to his pushups...

























Ahhhh team vans... gotta love the smell...

Last night was mini golf night. Adventure Cove here we come! We teamed up as fairly as possible, ranking ourselves from a 1-5 and trying to split up the horrible people and the golf pros, and that sort of worked, and my team won.


My team


The other team. Water look a little green to ya?


Lauren concentrating

Lake Placid

It feels like fall up here a little bit, the leaves are turning on some early maples and the temperatures are more bearable. Barely...

I arrived yesterday, after picking up Kathleen in Tilton (near that awesome Thai food place where I'm totally stopping for dinner on the way home...), and we bopped over to Hanover, where I left my car and we piled into Alice's prius. What a cool car. We arrived at the olympic training center (OTC) only ten minutes late, luckily we weren't the latest ones, and even before checking in, we headed out for some double pole intervals on Bear Cub rd. Apparently some of the locals have been getting quite annoyed at rollerskiers this summer, causing the OTC to tell us we can't come back if they get too many more complaints. For all we know, it could be skiers just here for the summer causing the problems, but I can see how a huge group of guys taking over the whole road would annoy the average driver...

We avoided angry drivers and did our intervals, which were great fun--who doesn't like to double pole up hills? Today we started out with a distance skate ski, working on some no pole, and this afternoon we're headed over to Cascade Mt. for an easy jog/hike, followed by some core strength. Hopefully it won't rain on us...


I was in the "blue suit" yesterday-- matches the hills behind me =)

NENSA Camp #2

Heading back to Lake Placid for the week. Senior/U23 camp. Should be good fun! If only this darned stuffy nose would clear up...

Cantaloupe vs Beagle

Got a call yesterday from the parental units that Rudi (one of my beagles) has a cantaloupe-sized tumor in his belly. Hes just a little beagle. The tumor fills most of his belly cavity, and apparently wraps around his liver and his colon. They had hoped it was attached to his spleen, because then they could just remove it, but its attached to connective tissue instead, so there is nothing they can do. I guess the good news is that he doesn't realize he has a giant tumor in his belly, and happily wolfs down chickum and goes sniffercizing for rabbits like nothing is wrong. But they don't think he'll last more than a couple months.

This is pretty hard news. I know there are plenty of worse things going on in the world than my dog being sick, the dog I don't even live with anymore, but Rudi is a special little beagle and has a place in our hearts that no human could ever fill. Not the Einstein of the dogs, but emotionally intelligent and a champion snuggler. He doesn't realize he's an old dog, he wants to play with his toys and tear out the squeaker and distribute the fluff evenly throughout the house. I'm not ready for him to go, what will Tira do? She won't understand, and shes way more intelligent than Rudi. I wish I could get sick days to go home to see my dogs.







Me?? You think I would steal that chicken that was sitting on the table?

Road Kill

I was noticing the amount of roadkill recently. It seems as though every time I go rollerskiing or biking on the road, I'm seeing dead animals pretty frequently. Over 35 miles of rollerskiing last Saturday, I saw a dead bat, two dead frogs, countless dead salamanders, two dead birds, a dead mouse, many dead earthworms, a slug or two (squashed dead), and a dead racoon. The racoon was in the middle of the road, so Ken moved it. I wish I'd had a camera on me, but since I didn't, I'll leave you with my strikingly lifelike interpretation:



But all this roadkill makes me wonder. If there are so many dead animals on one 35-mile stretch of road, can you extrapolate and say that there are this many dead animals everywhere? I'm not going to go all PETA (that's People for the Eating of Tasty Animals, right?), I'm just saying, roads have a helluva bigger impact on our world than we'd like to think, and roadkill is just the most obvious one.

Nothing beats the suicidal chipmonk when I was riding the gaps last summer, though, that *tried* to run through Blazar's wheel... it didn't make it. We call that natural selection.

24 Hours of Great Glen-- the annotated Garmin picture you've been waiting for

because you have been waiting for it, haven't you?

The garmin elevation data is always kind of shaky, but for the two full laps that it was able to record data before the battery conked out, the ascent was 1337 and 1449 feet. Call it 1400ft, over 8 miles, the only thing I have to compare it to is the ride I did in VT a couple weeks ago, that was 1800 feet over 9 miles. I guess great glen isn't nearly as hilly as it feels... It always feels flat on skis but hilly on a bike--I guess I can just chalk that up to my inability to turn pedals in circles. Or the mud slowing things down.