The skiing at Waterville Valley has been decent–not quite enough snow to call it good, especially at the South End (where the Nordic Center is and so where I go with my family) but good enough that the whole family is going. And that leads to my title. Iris, at all of three years old, made it all the way around the Pond Loop, or about 1 kilometer. In only an hour and fifteen minutes. There was a six year old proud of traveling the same distance (though admittedly the six year old was a lot faster).

And Heidi is the other fast girl in the title, as she was faster than me the other day. In my defense, I was classic skiing, and pulling both of my daughters, who combined with clothes and the Chariot probably added 80 pounds to my load, but with that handicap it was all I could do to keep up with my wife and she was definitely the faster skier that day!

Hopefully I was getting in some training overcoming all that resistance

I went up to Holderness this afternoon after classes and skied about six laps of the lighted loop there. Two of them I did at near race pace, though with early season skiing and it being my first day it was hard to keep my pulse truly pinned. It is kind of weird snow, not really setting up at all. But I have come to think of any snow that comes before Christmas as bonus, so it was nice to be back on the skis. It was also nice (or scary, if we think of other implications) that I did not have any of the troubles I used to when transitioning from rollerskiing back to snow. Apparently it takes more than 10 days on rollerskis to start thinking that is normal…

Or rather, to rollerski. There is ice and snow on all of the roads, so that it may be that finally ordering new rollerski tips will not help me this year.
On the other hand, there is no skiing yet either. There is a bunch of snow forecast for tomorrow, but then there will be ice and rain that will not help the skiing.
Still, this looks like the week I will actually break out my skis.

In other news, two of my favorite running trails have been closed to all travel. Not just gates, but big trees felled to keep everyone off. Supposedly the organization doing this is also going to build a bunch of new hiking trails in the same area, which would be extremely cool. But for now, I am very annoyed. No trails to run on, no snow to ski on, no dry pavement…

Nationals is now a month away. I will have one or two chances to enter local races before then, and the way the weather is looking, almost no time on snow.
But I am optimistic that I can improve on last year’s race, getting back into the top 20 and perhaps challenging for top 10. To get there I am doing intervals three times a week. I have time to train about an hour and a half every day. Three times a week this means intervals, varying lengths and intensities, mostly on rollerskis. None of it is long or hard enough to burn me out, but it is enough to get my muscles and energy systems ready to ski fast. And when I back off a little before nationals, it should give me a bit of a peak.
Will that minor peak be enough to embarrass some Olympic hopefuls, or will it be me looking silly?
Only time will tell!