NENSA camp updates

Today we went for a hike. My garmin battery died about halfway in, so I don't have a cool garmin map, which is really too bad. Anyway, we got lost at the beginning, looking for a trail that ended up not existing, and then we got lost at the end, looking for the same trail to complete the loop. It all ended well, though, and we didn't leave anybody in the woods. Jess will probably know what peaks we bagged, but we had pretty good weather, just the occasional spot of mist, unlike yesterday's rollerski when I definitely got pretty well rained on. Then after some core strength stuff we went and played mini golf, and I got not one, but TWO hole-in-ones. I still ended up 18 above par...

pictures are in no particular order.

Regional Elite Group Camp!

I'm up in Lake Placid right now, with like thirty other kids (most of whom are like eight years my junior), at a training camp for the top skiers in New England. We're staying at the Olympic Training Center, which is just a great place to train, since you have absolutely all the resources necessary right around you. Not to mention, the rollerskiing here is about a bazillion times better than in Boston...

I got a ride with the Stratton kids, so that I would only have to drive about halfway, and we showed up just in time to check in and get training. We had a fairly easy day, just a run and some mobility work, and them some rock climbing for fun in the evening, but today we did some real work. We started with some L3/4 double pole intervals in the morning, 5-6 x 3 minutes. The girls all started together, which was fun. I found myself near the front, which was a nice change from last year when I was sick, injured, and exhausted...

After some lunch (and ice cream), we went over some technique video, and then regrouped a little later on for some circuits and an easy run. The run was slightly less easy than I'd like, but Jess said she was leading, which would explain that =). The circuits were tough, which is a nice change from some of the CSU stuff, and by the end my arms were pretty cooked from the double pole intervals and the arm stuff.

I just spent two paragraphs talking about training. Sorry. Here are some pictures to tide you over! I'll try and take more during the OD skate tomorrow, if its not raining.


Rock climbing at High Peaks


Check out my guns!

Been a while...

Sorry to keep all three of you who read this blog waiting anxiously to hear the latest and greatest from the fabulous life of Alex. I took a short vacation before heading off to Lake Placid tomorrow, down on Nantucket with Ed's family, where they have a house that is normally all rented out in the high season, but I guess we aren't there yet. First I took a small detour up to UNH, though, to do some physiology testing with NENSA. I'd never done this before, but it wasn't as hard as it looked to breathe through the little tube thing. They make you run for a while, and every once in a while (3 minutes, to be exact), I'd get off the treadmill and they'd poke my finger to test the lactate level in my blood. This is useful data for us crazy skier folks, because then we can correlate how hard an effort is to the heart rate, which is data that can be taken easily while out skiing or running or bumbling into trees on a bike. A useful test to do, for sure, and most skiers on "real" teams do this at least once a year.


My fingers, unfortunately, are frigid even when I'm running as hard as I can on a treadmill in an 80 degree room, because they had to poke six different fingers to get enough blood out of me. At least they weren't taking blood from my toes?



The woman behind all the scenes! Janice is the one who makes NENSA happen, in my eyes.

Then I drove the other direction for a while, missed one ferry by 15 seconds, so went to get some DELICIOUS ice cream to console myself and wait for the next one.


Father and son fiddle with mechanical things.


Ed drove the tandem...


I found pretty things to take pictures of...








yum.


Looking back at the second seat. "wasn't there something there before? It got all quiet all of a sudden..."






Inside Cisco Brewery.


The distillery at Cisco. The stuff on the counter are their infusions-- strawberry-kiwi, and pineapple-habanero. The pineapple-habanero one tasted like chinese food to me... but in a good way.

Cupcake Prime!

I know that all my readers are just dying to know how the bake sale went, so I won't hold you in suspense. It was a success! We more than broke even (my original goal), we made money! How much money? Well, $80. But, we reasoned that we just paid entry fee to one eastern cup, each. Most of that was sympathy money, I think, with people dropping a fiver into the donations bucket and just taking a cupcake. Not that that is a bad thing, at all. Some people truly are generous. I had a great time doing this, but I think Jess might have felt like she was a baby duck innocently out for a swim that ended up in class three rapids...

I'll admit, we made way too much stuff for this. But this is mostly due to me being entirely too enthusiastic about baked goods, and not listening to Jess saying "really Alex, we don't need the scones", as well as it being almost 100 degrees out, leading to people wanting cold lemonade far more than baked goods that taste best hot out of the oven. I'll also admit that I've made prettier-looking goodies... It's remarkably hard to frost a cupcake in an elegant manner when your kitchen is 110 degrees already.

So, I'd say this was a successful test. On a smaller scale, I'll be able to do it again. The car bomb cupcakes were a big hit, as were the chocolate chip cookies. Look for those items in the future... I'm thinking I'll try and do at least one more Wells, although without my trusty baking partner it will definitely be on a smaller scale, and hopefully a couple cross races. Who knows if that will fly, since those are real races, but its worth a shot.


Jess giving me one of those looks that says, Alex why are we doing this what have we gotten ourselves into!?!??!


Some teammates came out to support me =)


The setup.




If I know Callie, the only reason she came all the way down to Well's ave was because she knew I'd have cupcakes/scones there... Here she is sprinting for a cookie preme.

Bake Sales and Bike Races!

Bike racers! This is your lucky day! This Sunday, Jess and I are going to be selling our cupcakes/works of art at the Wells Ave race, and you can be there to buy them. The scoop is this: they put skiing nationals out in Anchorage, AK, next January, and both Jess and I are going to race there. Because there is no point to being wicked fast on skis if you can't race against the best in the country to prove it! Just plane tickets are upwards of $800 right now, and with gas prices the way they are, they won't get much lower. So, we're trying to raise some money to get ourselves way up north this winter.

This weekend is our "pilot" bakesale--we'll give out some cupcake premes, we'll be set up right next to registration, we'll have coffee, scones, and healthy muffins for the health-conscious racers, and we'll have boozy, sugary, creations from heaven for everyone else. We'll be there from ~10am-noon, approximately, and if this is a good idea, we (or maybe just me, since Jess lives in Rochester and was just here for a conference) could make appearances throughout the summer.

Our list of goodies, rather tentatively, is as follows:
-Margarita Cupcakes
-Car-bomb Cupcakes (Guinness cake with Bailey's frosting)
-Vegan Lemon Cupcakes
-Cookies and Cream Cupcakes (possibly)
-Sparkling Cranberry Gem Cookies
-Chocolate Chip Cookies
-Lemon Bars
-Strawberry Scones
-Soft Pretzels (possibly)
-Healthy post-race Recovery Muffins
-Cinnamon rolls (possibly)
-Coffee

See you there! (and if you have any special requests, you can leave them in the comments)

Testing

Nordic skiers tend to be geeks, at least the ones I've met fall into that category. I sort of thought maybe I wasn't smart enough to be a "real" nordic dork, but then I realized that since my old computer died, I don't have all my training data from the past six (give or take) years that I've been "collecting" it, and this really upset me. For example, yesterday I time trialed a 3k. I've been doing this since I got to college, so at one to two 3000m tests each year, I'm missing ten data points. I would love to see how I compare, but all I have to go on are vague memories of faster times. From what I can remember, it looked sort of like this:

2003:
13:30ish (Sept.)
12:45ish (Nov.)

2004:
12:46 (Sept.)
12:36 (Nov.)

2005:
12:37 (Oct., in NZ alone)

2006:
12:30ish? (Sept.)
12:18 (post highschool PR. Its post highschool because I think I was a lot faster in highschool. I'll say thats thanks to running track, because I didn't get any fatter or in worse shape after highschool) (Nov.)

2007:
12:36, I think (Nov.)

2008:
12:38 (June)

I'm obviously not much of a speedster. They say female elite skiers should run something like 11:30, but that seems like it would be bit of a stretch for me... even if I were doing running intervals and speed and drills. Which I'm not. I don't know how much I was held back by leg speed, my average HR for the test was 187, which I've always presumed to be my upper threshold limit, with a max of 191, which just doesn't seem that high. Maybe I just need hills to get a higher HR? Maybe I don't have as high a max as I though. Maybe I'm way overthinking these sorts of things. Regardless, I'm very glad that I will be running a treadmill test to figure these sorts of things out with NENSA soon.

The thing that bothers me more about losing my training stuff (which hopefully Ed can recover, using his magic computer whiz skills), is that I don't remember my numbers for the strength test in past years. I think my previous best for situps in a minute was 84, and then 80 after a minute rest. This beat all the guys on the team, and I was very proud of me. The format of this test is that you do as many exercises in a minute that you can, you rest a minute, then you do another minute on.

situps: 87/79
pushups: 60/41
dips: 10/7
pullups: 3/6 (I should have done pullups before dips, because I KNOW I can do more than 6 pullups. But my hands were really sweaty and kept slipping on the bar, and my triceps were shaking from the dips, which I should probably practice a little more...)

Anyway. The joys of being a Nordic dork. I think I've just lost the last three readers from this blog...

Freedom Trail!

I may have lived here for a while, but I've never done the touristy things around Boston. Luckily, Jess is here for a conference and wanted to do some touristy stuff, so I had an excuse and joined her. We wanted to go to the New England Aquarium, but it was too expensive, so we walked the freedom trail instead. It was a lot of walking and I was tired by the end. I guess I'm not in shape or something...



Anyway, because I bet lots of other bostonites haven't actually seen their city, here is the visual tour, of sorts.


Old state house, which used to be a school and is now a steak restaurant.


The craziness that is Quincy Market.


One of the things I actually like about this city is the strange juxtaposition between old and new. Other cities have it too, but Boston likes to make a big deal out of its historic stuff, so I guess its just more marked.