Playing with fire

Today I had a rare day off from the restaurant, so I decided to pull a double. Made me wish that I could have a summer of just pulling double sessions and resting. I bet I'd get a lot of reading done. And a lot of napping.

In the morning Schulzy and I rolled over to McCahill's to do some threshold work. When we got there at 10 Dave was still asleep, so I spent some time talking to his 94 year old gramma Helmi while Anna played with Molly, the McCahill's black lab. After forcing Dave to down some Cheerios, we skied down to Averyville Rd. for our workout. Anna had done threshold on the 4th (I had an unscheduled off day due to a late night), so she just easy skied. For me and Dmac, it was 30 minutes of sustained threshold. Both of us felt like we nailed the workout. The terrain at the top of Averville is pretty good, with some decent climbs, a fair bit of good V2 uphill, and not too much rest.

After skiing back to Dave's, Schulzy and I headed home to eat a delicious lunch of scrambled eggs with chedder, tomatoes, and green peppers. We lazed around in the afternoon, reading and generally doing nothing. I slept from 3 til about 4:45. It was great. When I went to sleep it was pouring and thundering, but when I got up it had cleared up. My good spirits and hope that it would stay clear were misplaced, unfortunately.

After I drove Anna to work at 5 I rallied over to Van Ho to do my second workout. The plan was to run for half an hour, then do 5 x (4x30 sec) max bounding intervals, then finish up with the last day of unload strength. As I suited up at Van Ho everything looked money, but as soon as I hit the trails I started hearing rumblings over the sounds of my Ipod. Whatever, I thought, maybe someone's just doing trailwork. The rumblings got louder and a bit more frequent, but I convinced myself it was just the bobsled track on the otherside of the complex. After my 30 minute run, I grabbed my poles and headed over to Main Street to do my intervals. Main Street's hill was perfect because it wasn't beast-steep, so I could ease into my max workout. After the first of the five rounds of bounding, the thunder got so loud it was drowning out the Phish I was bumping. Then the skies opened up and it started to pour and I decided maybe being out in the woods alone with metal poles during a thunderstorm was a bad idea, so I hauled ass back to my car. Due to a wrong turn onto some single track (Van Ho was recently roped off for mountain biking and some signs were removed), it took 10 minutes of tearing ass to get back to the car, but I was safe. As soon as I threw the poles in the car and toweled off there was a lightning strike that couldn't have been more than a mile away.

So the workout was cut short, but it was in the name of safety. I've got to work tomorrow, so I'll only get in one workout. Now it's off to make burgers with the enormous amount of ground beef we bought at Price Chopper. Sweet.

-- O