wintervention

On Friday night Lisa and I joined some friends at the Boulder Theater for Warren Miller's WIntervention premiere.
The stoke factor was high at the theater, with sponsor shwag give-aways and a bar in the middle of the crowd. The movie featured the usual Warren Miller jaw-dropping cinematography in some of the most spectacular terrain on Earth: Colorado, Tahoe, Antarctica, Georgia, Austria, and New Zealand.

Needless to say people in town are itching for the ski season to start. After spending the last five winters living at the beach in Southern California, I am seriously looking forward to getting back in the mountains this winter! I may not be able to surf in the morning and ski in the afternoon anymore, but that hardly ever happened anyway to be perfectly honest.

What's on tap? Back Country skiing hut trips, snowshoeing, nordic skiing, maybe some winter multisport races...The secret sauce of the curiously dominant athletes from Colorado and Canada is not altitude, but instead putting the bike away for several months and substituting skiing. Yes, it is true, my sea level friends.

While their competitors are noodling around "building base" over the winter, the Snow People are bleeding out of their eyeballs with intensity on their skis and/or climbing on the skis for hours at high altitude. Last winter I had time for continuous 400 mile bike weeks, even hitting 500...not anymore! Balancing work, a long commute, working in the mountain towns and family means it has to be about Quality more than Quantity this "out season". I am looking forward to new challenges in new places and working on specific skills more than logging mega-hours of the same old training.

Quality Time in the mountains...