Sceying

You might wonder what sceying is. Sceying is actually Lander-speak for skiing. Lander is learning to write words, so he spells them according to how they sound. I love it, sometimes it takes Bryan and I a couple minutes to figure out what it says. Lander had spelled out sceying with some magnetic letters. It's awesome that he thinks about skiing when he's at home. I rewarded him by taking him skiing on Friday.

Friday was epic snow at Meadow's. We finally got slammed with tons of fresh powder and I can honestly say it is the best snow I have skied in since we moved here. It was almost as good as Utah snow. I actually saw stellar crystals falling, not the usual graupel. They looked like this:

It was incredible. I skied with my friend Adam (uber-good tele skier) and I skied the best I ever have, thanks to him. I also had the requisite face plants associated with trying to ski faster to keep up with Adam. The best one was in Yoda Bowl where I literally flew in the air about 15 feet downhill before landing on my head. Needless to say, I had some whiplash the next morning.

Lander did great in his lesson. When I caught up to him on the Buttercup lift he was tearing it up. Here is some good video of him. I was trying to ski while I shot this, so it's kind of hard to see him at first. He's the kid with the blue helmet and yellow bib using the adult skiers as slalom gates. Oh yeah, and you can see his arms flailing around a lot. He's so cute. After his episode where he did the splits, he immediately got up again and skied down into the lift line to go tear it up again. He is going to be better than his mom next year. Next year he starts on tele!!! Here is some good video of him:

Lander was knackered on the way home, as you can see by his sleeping position. It was a great day, Lander had a good time, I had a good time, what more can you ask for?

The Weekend

Part I-Playing Bike Racer

Things this weekend went from my normal amount of organized chaos to just plain crazy. I didn't really race this weekend, but did race training. In my opinion this is harder because there just isn't the same motivation to push yourself. It began Saturday with my race training ride. My hopes were that the rain would stop and the roads would dry up so that I wouldn't be trying to push my 25 lb rain bike up hills at race pace. Well, this is the Northwest, where everything is covered in green squishy stuff because it is always wet, even when it's not raining. It's like living on a sponge that never dries out. The rain did stop, but the dampness remained, mostly in part to fog that was covering most of the area Saturday morning. The roads were wet, but it was going to be 60 degrees later in the day. So, I decided to take the race bike out and secretly hoped I would only be riding on wet roads for an hour or so. Well that didn't happen either. We rode to Washougal (where we are building our house) where there are some good climbs and I think it rains the most. After that we headed up to Hockinson to hit the rollers. It was a great ride and in the end my bike looked like this:

It kind of looks like a post Paris-Roubaix bike. I know it's really no big deal, I just had to spend some quality outdoor time cleaning it when I got home. It was 60 degrees, I was happy to be outside. I actually enjoy cleaning my bike, more than I enjoy cleaning my house. Probably because I go have fun on my bike while getting it dirty, my house just gets dirty no matter what.
I really thought that my team kit was going to become my official mtn. biking only team kit. Who wears white in the Northwest in the winter? I know it's a fashion faux pas to wear white after Labor Day, maybe I should heed that rule.



Amazingly, it all came out. I really love the new kit, especially the all white shorts we have for summer. Maybe by July it will dry out enough that I can actually wear them.

The rain came back Saturday night and for some reason I decided to be a heathen and go ride Sunday (gasp) morning. I don't usually do this but our church is at 1:00 p.m., I had my lesson prepared to teach to the Young Women's group, it was a holiday weekend and I wanted to do a couple of hard training days back to back to see how my legs felt. Is that enough justification? I figured that I would for sure get hit by a car or ride into a ditch for breaking the Sabbath, but I got lucky. The weather was also pretty decent. It wasn't the usual drizzle for days on end rain we have, but smaller storms that moved through. It think we only rode in 20 minutes of rain during our 3 hour ride. My legs were pretty shot since I really did everything wrong when I got home from my hard ride on Saturday (not eating immediately, stretching and icing down my knee). I was still able to push it pretty hard. Tauscher and I rode up to Hockinson and pushed it on the rollers. When we hit Battle Ground we backed of and spun home allowing ourselves an hour of recovery riding from the past two days efforts.

Suprisingly my lesson at church went great and by the time I got home at 4:30 I was exhausted. Needless to say, I have this habit of not doing things that are logical to most people. You would think that after two hard training days I might actually go to bed early on Sunday night and get some much needed rest. Well, not me. I stayed up to watch Desparate Housewives at 9:00 and then my thought process went something like this. "I am getting up at 7:00 to meet Schauer and Tauscher for a nice long endurance ride. If I go to bed at midnight I can get 7 hours of sleep, good enough." So I proceeded to waste a couple of hours in front of the TV while I painted my fingernails and toenails bright pink. Don't ask why I did this, I never do this so I have no clue. I finally made my way to bed around 12:20, fine with me. I fell asleep quickly, until my rude awakening at 3:20 a.m..

Part II-Playing Rescue Hero(Lander's terminology)

At 3:20 a.m. my cell phone and home phone simultaneously started ringing. It can be only one thing, there is a rescue. I literally fall out of bed and crawl downstairs to call into the PMR voicemail to get more information, I had to listen to it twice because I spaced off the first time. I left my message saying I would be there and then wondered how I was going to get my gear together and be up to T-line lodge at 5:30 a.m.. It takes 1.5 hours to get to T-line from my house and my gear was strewn all over the house and the garage. It took me a good 10 minutes to wake up to the point that I felt competent that I could actually pack all the gear I needed and then some, thank goodness for checklists. I was out the door at 4:20, a little later than planned, but I did my best and luckily made it up there with all the pertinent gear.

I got to T-line at 6:00 just in time for the morning debrief and planning session. I tried to situate myself as far away from the TV cameras as possible, but that was unsuccessful and I ended up in some pictures that made their way to all the major news networks in the U.S.. GREAT!!! Luckily my bright green hat (I need a more incognito hat) was covering the mess my hair was in. Not that I cared, but I spend so much time looking like a dork it would be nice to limit these kind of situations as much as possible. Our team was responsible for hauling gear into the field. I like that job, I usually have a good time because there is a lot of waiting around so we get to chat with eachother and hang out.

We were out the door at 7:00 a.m. hauling our sled full of gear. There were six on our team Steve, Iain, Todd, Keith, Tom and myself. We didn't have very far to hike to get to the rim of White River Canyon so we were there in no time. We did a compression test to check the avy danger, it would be sketchy that day. We figured we would be stationed there for a while so we dug a huge snow cave. This accomplished two things, we had something to do that kept us warm and we had a place to get out of the snow and wind. It was alot of fun and I can honestly say that the longer we hung out in the snow cave, the goofier we got. There were many joking comments about how my pink fingernails didn't match my red jacket, it was ridiculous. Did we make sure to punch enough air holes? I don't know, maybe I have a few less brain cells than before. This mission had a happy ending, I was pleased. A full report will be posted here that is a little more detailed than what you saw on the news.

All I can say is that it was a great holiday weekend. We had some fun time with the family interspersed between all the adventure. What more could I ask for, I was totally beat when I went to work Tuesday morning.

Testing the Engine

Last Saturday I did my inaugural "testing the engine" race simulation ride. After months of slow endurance training I am now in the transition phase of my training and I am always apprehensive when it comes to the first hard ride of the season. I really look forward to pushing myself as hard as I can, but I really don't want to ride with other people because then they will see how bad I SUCK!!!!

I decided to leave my ego at home and go out with the group from North River Racing because they always ride hard and I knew I would probably be hanging on for dear life most of the ride. Luckily the weather was decent and I was able to take the race bike out, it felt great. We rode down to Estacada from The 'Couve so the route was unfamiliar (i.e. I was probably going to blow on the hills because I didn't know how long they were) so that made it a very interesting ride and it was beautiful. I have to say that the ride went better than I expected. For some reason, I didn't get dropped on the hills. I would watch my heart rate soar to places I had not seen it go for 6 months. At one point I hit 190 bpm and past experience tells me that when that happens on a hill, it's all over for me. To my astonishment I was able to recover from that and still climb up other hills after that. What is going on? Could it possibly be that I might actually be able to climb? What a novel idea!!! I don't want to get my hopes up after one ride, but I will see how this weekend goes. I don't ever care if I am the best climber in the group, I just want to be able to hang with the main group in all the races I do (especially Cascade, Elkhorn, etc.).

I was also able to do some flat speed work. At one point, Steve Long and I were pacing off of each other on a section with a nice tail wind and we were hovering at about the 28-30 mph mark. It was amazing. My legs were toast, but it was worth it.

I ended up with about 75 miles when I got home. I figure for the first hard ride of the season that was a reasonable distance. I am excited to see how this weekend goes, hopefully as well as last weekend.

Winner, Winner Chicken Dinner

I love that saying, not sure why. So yesterday Bryan and I went to the Oregon Bicycle Racing Organization's annual awards banquet so I could claim my "major award". Through some stroke of dumb luck or persistence or whatever you want to call it I ended up winning the Best All Around Rider competition for the Senior Women for 2006. It was a great evening with good food, fun people and the best roast of Candi Murray since she is retiring this year. Candi has kept OBRA running smoothly for the last 3 decades and has turned it into one of the most successful bike racing organizations in the country. The only two states that have more racers per capita and races per year are California and Colorado, I think that is pretty awesome. It is awesome to live in an area that promotes cycling and bike racing so much, kudos to OBRA. Here's a picture of my major award. I also received my new racing number for next year. Bryan says that it screams "Hey, get on my wheel!!!" I guess incognito is not going to be a tactic for me this year.

Kent Swanson Jr. Memorial Avalanche Training

This past weekend I had the opportunity of joining Portland Mountain Rescue and other professional rescuers for a three day avalanche course. This course went beyond what I learned in my level one course a few years ago and there was a ton of useful information that I hope I can absorb from my notes over the next few weeks. Our instructor was Ian Tomm, the operations manager for the Canadian Avalanche Association, he was awesome!!!! If you are reading this post and you do any sort of backcountry skiing you need to check out their web-site and the new Avaluator trip planning system that they are introducing this year. This is a great tool to assess risk when going into the backcountry while you are in the planning phases of your trip. I can only hope that something like this will catch on the the U.S. and that we can have a similar database of BC ski routes. In addition to learning about the Avaluator trip planner we practiced a new search method for finding multiple beacons, terrain evaluation and route finding, snowpack analysis and a rescue scenario. It was non-stop from start to finish and I had a great time. PMR is a great organization and I am proud to be a part of it. It was a beautiful day on Sunday and here are some pictures I took. I also included some pictures of Saturday the Reuben took of us girlies trying to get the Rutschblock to fail. No such luck, we have an enormously stable snowpack right now.

Trying to get the Rutschblock to fail, unsuccessful

At least we had fun trying

Chris and I having fun doing compression tests

Cool clouds

Dome cloud at about the 9000' level

Mt. Jefferson

Our trusty PMR truck

Lander, Knight of Winter

So today was day three of no school for Lander. Despite sledding on Tuesday, skiing on Wednesday and hanging out at the house today, he is getting quite bored. While I was bored riding the trainer and watching 4 episodes of Lost, Lander was left to entertain himself. He scavenged upstairs for a while, I thought he was playing with Legos, until he came downstairs dressed like this. He announced he was a winter knight. This is the best outfit I have ever seen!!!! I especially like the ski socks, thermal underwear and the Little Richard wig, they complement each other nicely. I am sure he can slay dragons with his plastic screwdriver sword. He kind of reminds me of a character from The Princess Bride.

Snow Day

Growing up in Utah I never understood the concept of a "Snow Day". It snows a lot in Utah, big deal. Up here in the Pacific Northwest, a "Snow Day" is marked by mass confusion and hysteria when 3-5 inches of snow fall and major cities and town shut down completely. It is really amusing. I drove to work yesterday (20 miles) and it took 3 HOURS!!! School was cancelled for two days and there were dozens of sledding related injuries to kids that think that sledding down a street is safe when cars are sliding down the same hill backwards/sideways and doing 360's. It has been chaos. The roads around our house are still snowpacked so I guess I won't be riding my bike outside anytime soon. It's a good thing I have intervals I can do on the trainer tomorrow. At least I can look forward to watching a few more episodes of Lost-Season 2.

The great thing about working part-time in a research lab is that I can pretty much make my own hours. Today Lander and I headed to the mountain to ski rather than battle the mayhem of traffic around town. At least most people that go to the mountain know how to drive in the snow because they do it everytime they go skiing. It was a perfect day. There were a few new inches of snow and it was mostly sunny with no wind. Here are some pics and some more video of Lander skiing. He had a great instructor today, she had him up on the chair lift the whole 2 hours, he did AWESOME!!! Lander had one melt-down when he wanted to go into the terrain park. He flailed on the ground and managed to kick both his skis off. He will probably be rippin' the rails by the time he is 6.

Clouds and inversion layer

Lander and me

Me goofin' around on the ski lift

More video of Lander (some of these aren't that great because I was in the wrong place trying to move around on my skis and film at the same time without falling over. So when you see the camera moving around spastically, that is me trying to stay upright.):

Lander does the splits

MLsKi Day

No School + No Work=SKIING!!!! Today Bryan, Lander and I packed it up and headed to Meadows for a day of nice sunny Northwest skiing. It was a beautiful day, one of the few times I have actually been able to see where I was going. Here are some pics and video of Lander's ski lesson.

Lander's Ski Lesson Videos:

Lander excited to be skiing

Lander more interested in sampling snow than skiing

Mt. Jefferson

View from the top of Cascade

Why?

Today Lisa T. and I went skiing at Mt. Hood Meadows. When we arrived there was a large section of the bottom part of the resort closed off and patrolers said there was an incident. I thought to myself, it must be really serious, and it was.

05:21 PM PST on Friday, January 5, 2007
By KGW Staff
GOVERNMENT CAMP -- A skier was killed Friday after a collision on a trail at Mt. Hood Meadows.

KGW
Mount Hood.
Hood River County deputies said 45-year-old Portlander Geoffrey Scott Bradeen died after a collision around 9:45 a.m.

Officials said it appeared he was skiing on the North Canyon run when someone else crashed into him. Deputies said it appeared Bradeen may have fallen and was hit in the head by a snowboarder while trying to get up. An assistant medical examiner on scene determined the head injuries to be the cause of Bradeen’s death. Police said that the victim was not wearing a helmet at the time of the crash.

"I honestly have not seen a situation like this in 20 years," said Mt. Hood Meadows General Manager Dave Riley, "where there was a fatality and one of the people left the scene."
The area where the death happened was closed for investigation and deputies were trying to interview a snowboarder who may have more information.

No charges were expected, since it was not being investigated as a criminal matter, deputies said.


I am not going to even go into a diatribe about my personal opinions on this situation, those who know me know exactly how I feel (Long Live ALTA!!!). All I can say is that what happened is totally inexcusable, it was on a GREEN RUN which is really wide and mellow. What if that had been a child, what if it had been my child? I realize that there is an inherent risk in skiing. To me that means that I need to be careful of what I am doing and where I am doing it and attentive those around me. It's the same concept as driving a car too fast, I don't care how good you think you are at it, you don't have any control when you have to dodge an obstacle or stop suddenly. Is it that complicated to understand? My thoughts and prayers go out to the family. As for the snowboarder who caused all this, YOU SUCK!!!!

Ironically, I had an altercation earlier today with a snowboarder that almost hit me from behind and he had the nerve to shout obscenities at me when I told him to watch where he was going. Another skier told me on the lift he almost got hit as well by a snowboarder who had to cut across the entire width of a run so he could catch his 1/2 inch of air off his "sweet jump". All I can say is "I MISS ALTA, I LOVE YOU!!!"

Dropping a Knee at Alta-holics Anonymous

I LOVE ALTA!!!! Tele skiing in Utah over Christmas was awesome. There wasn't a whole lot of new snow, but there was plenty of fun to be had at Alta. Bryan and I found some great spots off trail and even made a few fresh turns in the fluffy pow. The best part was that I got Bryan on tele skis for 2 whole days. The first day was a result of him taking a core sample out of the bottom of his alpine ski on the 2nd run of the day courtesy of a hidden rock. He opted to rent tele gear while his ski was being repaired. Day 2 Phil joined us and I had a lot of laughs watching Phil and Bryan waffle around on tele gear. I think they ultimately deserved this since they drug me through a ton of gated black diamond areas the day before. Phil's famous words were "Come on, it will be great.", only to find moguls the size of VW Beatles. We did find a lot of good snow even though I had to do some survival tele skiing in the huge moguls to get to it. It was anything but graceful. Here are some pics from our trip and a couple of videos of Bryan and I skiing. Bryan makes me jealous, this is only is 4th time on tele and he is linking turns and looking like a pro. He still has some good wrecks though, unfortunately, I didn't get any of them on film.

Awesome sunrise en route to Alta

Bryan tele skiing:

Jeanie tele skiing

Me dropping a knee

Catherine's Area-My personal favorite

The infamous Utah inversion layer

By the time we left Utah I had tele'd 4 days and went cross country skiing one day, with no rest in between. My legs were shot. I could barely walk by our last day skiing. One byproduct of my 5 consecutive days of skiing was one very swollen right knee. I guess the fact that I have a torn LCL and partial ACL tear really makes it difficult to recover from skiing.

As you can see, my right knee is puffy compared to my left. This picture doesn't do it justice. Also, you will notice a nice yellow/purple bruise above my left knee. This is from my first stint on cross country skis. Bryan and I both had one really great crash on or XC skis. Mental note, if there is any chance you might want to slow down on a downhill, do it before you get going too fast. Obviously, I had some issues. This picture also does not do my contusion justice, it is very bright and colorful and now it is more purple than yellow. I am pretty sure I broke a blood vessel.

Mach 1 Tubing

While we were in Utah we got to go "Extreme Tubing" with my brother and his family at his company party. This was really cool since they had a rope tow up to the top of the hill and then the slope was divided into different lanes. Each person had to be in their own tube, but you could hold each others tubes and go down as a group. Some lanes were faster than others, and some had bumps that you could get airborn on. It was a lot of fun. Lander had a blast. We went so fast I thought he would be scared, but he just had the biggest grin on his face after each run. I am pretty convinced we hit 30 mph at least. He is such an adrenaline junkie. Here are some pics.

Lander with his huge cheesey grin.

Lander waiting for mom to tow him to the rope tow!

Ahhh, Utaaahhhhh

Today we made our traditional trek to Utah for Christmas. Well, actually it started yesterday, when we left the 'Couve at about 1:30 p.m.. It was and uneventful trip to Boise, where we stayed the night. I was grateful for that since we have had some pretty epic trips in horrible weather driving to/from Utah. I did, however, procure two new rock chips in my windshield because in Oregon they put pebbles on icy roads instead of sand and evidently some city slicker in a Mercedes SUV last night couldn't figure out that you don't drive in the gravel that is piled up on the side of the road. No worries though, I will have them fixed and it will be good as new. I got a rock chip the first week I had my truck when it was brand new 4 years ago, got it fixed, and have not had a problem yet.

The scariest part of our trip was when we arrived in the Salt Lake valley. People in Utah drive fast. If you have never been in I-15, it's enormously wide and well lit, like a race track, which is what most people think it is. The speed limit is 65 mph, but I was going 75 mph and still getting passed by people, a lot of people!!!! It's just so different than what I am used to in Portland. In fact, I can't even think of anywere near Portland/'Couve where I could go 75 mph at any time on any given day. It's hard to go anywhere fast in Portland because of traffic which is why I commute on my bike so much.

The other great thing about Utah is that you can stand anywhere and spit in any direction and chances are you are going to hit a Mormon church. Bryan and I are devout Mormons, but we still find it so funny to be in the bubble of Provo again. Chances are by the time we leave we will be more than happy to escape being immersed in Mormondom. We love it here, but sometimes it's just too much.

Bryan and I are excited to ski. Hopefully we will get some good pics in the Utah pow. I am sure I will have some good face plants on the tele's, maybe I can get one of those on film.

I hope everyone has a Merry Christmas.

Knee Problems-Take 2

Okay, this week I had and MRI on my right knee because I was still have some swelling and a wierd popping sound that occurs when I extend my leg fully. I figured that since it has been two years since my ski accident where I injured my knee I better get it checked out. Let me preface the MRI results with the fact that although my knee swells and pops and occasionally hurts after I ski, it has been fully functional on it. I have bike raced, skied, climbed, gone on rescues on Mt. Hood and it has held up fine. So, the doc's office called Friday before we left for Utah and gave me my results. I have a partial ACL (Anterior Cruciate Ligament) tear and a completely torn LCL (Lateral Collateral Ligament). At this point I don't know the extent of the damage to the ACL (evidently it got torn when it ripped a chunk of bone off of my tibia in my tele skiing accident) or where the LCL is torn. I don't even know when the LCL got torn, if I did it in my ski accident or if I have somehow torn it since them. Am I that dumb? I would like to think I would know if I tore up my knee again. Anyway, it explains the swelling and popping and the pain in the region where the LCL attaches to my tibia. I meet with the doc on Jan. 11 and he will discuss the options with me. At this point I know I am fully functional on it and so any surgery NEEDS to be scheduled between bike racing and skiing. I am thinking I can sandwich a surgery between the end of the bike racing season this August and ski season in Dec./Jan.. Hopefully make a full recovery so I can ski next year. Gotta have priorities right?

This is really not the news I had hoped for. I was really hoping that it was something that could be fixed with very minor surgery, not ligament repair. Oh well, that is life. I am still going to train and race, and most definitely ski in Utah. Hopefully the doc will have some good news like "I'm sorry, we mixed your MRI up with someone else really don't have such a crappy knee." With my luck, that won't happen. I will post and update after my appointment. I am hoping to get some of the MRI pics as well and will post those as well.