Who's In?

We did get two inches of snow, being generous in the measuring. I strapped on my skis and skated across the slightly windblown, powderless inch that remained a day later on the local playing fields. And determined that my hunch based on towing a kid while on skates was correct. I’m in good shape, but completely unfit for a 50 km race, or even a 25 km race. Or even a 25 km dawdle. Just a lap around two soccer fields, and a couple of trips up a nearby hill had be convinced. The anterior tibialis have just had not enough practice holding my feet off the ground. To say nothing of the rest of the specific muscles required. So plans are revised.

No Loppet in my year. There will be a Play Forever League consolation basketball game on the day of the ski race. Sigh. Would rather be missing a championship game to go off skiing… My team lost our semi-final last week by one basket. Two too many mistakes on our part, but that’s neither here nor there.

My goal now is to get up to ski the course in Lake Placid at some point this winter, so I know what I’m working toward for next year. And to sneak in as much snow time as I can in the next six weeks. Or fewer, as foretold by the Oracle at Punxatawny.

On that topic, The New York Times says: Groundhog Day has been part of the Western calendar since around the fifth century, which means it has survived centuries of Catholicism, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and the advent of the agriculture of cloned sheep. But whether it will survive in an age of global warming was one questionǿalbeit not the biggest one—raised by the awkward coincidence yesterday of Groundhog Day 2007 falling on the same day a report was released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change of the United Nations.

On the plus side, I will stop for a while with writing about this boring and solipsistic topic. Be back later with issues.

I’ve found tons of really interesting research and reports at Peak Performance, a U.K. publication you can subscribe to, or get online info through its blog. It’s got everything from “How to Train for a Triathlon,” to “Sports Drinks and Teeth.” Did you know the acidity in sports drinks is high and therefore if you drink them regularly your teeth enamel may erode 30 percent faster than if you just drink water? Yikes.