THIS STUFF CAN KILL YA!!

After a hard workout I like to imbibe my favourite poison as a reward....Coke. Really, you’d think it’d be the perfect post race recovery drink. It’s got 6-8 teaspoons of sugar per can-perfect for replenishing depleted glycogen stores. But sometimes I wonder if it’s the best for me. My fears may have been confirmed last weekend. With the cold winter we’ve had, some of the Coke cans stored in our insulated garage froze pretty hard and burst. They formed a nice tar like looking pool that in my procrastination avoided cleaning up for several weeks. Upon arriving home from the Dogtooth Dash skimo nat’l champs on the weekend, I noticed a dead mouse in the middle of the Coke tar pit. Now, I’m always looking for a new method to trap the elusive mice that invade my home, but this gave some cause for concern. Did the poor fella suck up the Coke tar causing an overdose of sugar? Perhaps a hyper-glycemic reaction to the concentrated Coke gob. Did he die of a heart attack? Remotely possible, but unlikely, Coca-Cola has gone back to the original formula and put cocaine in it causing a drug overdose. Maybe the fury creature was simply enjoying himself so much that he didn’t notice that his feet were getting frozen/glued/stuck in the tar mess. Man- that would have been scary...not being able to extract your legs. It’s possible he died doing all three. Realizing he was stuck, just decided to enjoy his predicament and continue to slurp up the goo, until his poor little sugar ravaged heart gave out. Maybe it’s time for me to rethink my workout recovery nutrition

the Gear is Here

This year has been "gear-o-rama". With my expedition to Worlds I figure I needed to make sure I had what I needed and even some back ups. I've gotten Dynafit boots on a pro deal. A sponsor helped me get skis and bindings. I've purchased a few pairs of skins, looking for the elusive perfect mix of speed and kick. Through it all I've come to learn where to score the stuff.

I"ve tried getting ski companies to help out, but alas even my old Atomic connections couldn't come through. So I resorted to buying retail. But I learned some good lessons worthy of being passed on.

It's almost impossible to get the skimo stuff in North America, so I resorted to buying Euro. A strong Euro dollar didn't help, but there are 3 great online shops I"ll pass contact info on here. For my skis I called "Telemark-Pyrenees" (www.telemark-pyrenees.com). They said they had 1 pair of SkiTrab World cups left. I ordered them and they were at my door in just under a week. They were packed better than any online purchase I'd ever seen. In contrast, earlier in the year, utilizing a pro deal on some back-country skis ordered out of the usa, they came falling out of the box, with messed up paper work nessesitating me paying double duty on them and took over 3 weeks to arrive in the mail.

Next I ordered some Haero bindings from Vertical world (www.verticalworld.it). They also arrived in 1 week, with proper paper work. The vender even threw in a hat I hadn't ordered. It's the ugliest thing I've ever seen, but the gesture makes me want to order more stuff (which I did!).

Euro pricing is either comparable or way better. The skins I got cost me about 50 Euro (65$CAD/US). In one case comparable skins from a shop in Whistler cost 200$+....plus the crazy BC 14% tax and shipping (way more duty than imported goods).

Another good shop out of Germany is: www.riapsport.de maybe a little more expensive than the others, but they've also got the skimo goods.

Good luck and happy shopping!

HIndsite

Well it's been a week since I've been back from Italy and the world skimo championships. Whenever you've geared a big part of your life towards an event/competition, I've found there's a certain amount of let down or even mild depression. You've been gunning in your mind and training for so long for the event....now it's done.

Soooo, you've got to re-focus and set yoursites on the next challenge. For me there's a little dissappointment because the race didn't go as well as I'd hoped (teams). The entire race was going right according to plan. My fitness was good, we were in the hunt, then I fell apart on the downhill. Maybe I shouldn't make such a big deal of it. We probably only lost a couple of places, but still, one of my reasons for going over was to show myself that I could ski at that level. For that last downhill 1300 meters worth I felt I failed.

But any failure, dissappointment and set back are only opportunities to re-evaluate. See where you went wrong and correct the errors. So now that I'm back and have had plenty of time to mull things over here are a couple conclusions. First, I need to train downhill with my race skis. Our tiny 160 cm narrow, insanely light skis handle totally differently than any other kind of alpine board. I found this out while training this past week at Norquay.

Norquay is a smaller hill (by Rocky mountain standards) that has one chair with only knarly runs. All double black or hard black. I took my K2's with similar dimensions to my race skis and with a friend hammered 8 runs as fast as we could w/ no stopping. No sweat. A few days later I did the same, but with my race skis. I felt like a beginner!! The light skis required a totally different balance point. After 7 runs on them though I felt waaaay better. Why didn't I do this years ago? or even a couple of months ago? Duh.

I've actually got a couple bigger races left. Our Canadian Nat'l champs included. The organizer promises a more technical course (it was alreay the most technical course in Canada). I'm going to keep hitting Norquay on my race boards. Fortunately this year has officially become an epic year and the normally rocky Norquay has great snow. And thankfully I bought one of those 100$ mid-week season passes. Thanks Norquay. Now if you'd only let us do some skinning uphill.