August 21st, 2008
It’s been awesome to be back home in the green mountain state. Last week was my first full week home since before June, so I was stoked to be able to kick back a little bit, but it ended up being a busy week. Jess came with me to Vermont from Park City and since she doesn’t get to hang out here very often whenever she comes she likes to do ‘fun red neck stuff’. So we cruised around on the motorcycle a few times, worked out in the rain, and drove up north to help Ryan Foster build his cabin during the weekend. It’s on a sweet plot of land up near Jay Peak in Northern VT and I think it will probably be used as one of our new weekend hang outs and a skiing retreat during the winter.
Ryan had already built the first floor deck before the weekend started but with Ethan and his dad there and me there to mess up some framing, we were able to get a lot of wood up that weekend. I still had some training to do while I was up there so I headed out Sunday morning and did some level 4 bounding intervals up Jay peak in the morning before strapping the tools back on. It felt pretty hard core. We even went down to the local bar Saturday night which was a hilarious experience. This place is in the middle of nowhere so the fact that there was even a bar in this town was unbelievable. It was more like somebody’s house than a bar and there was a DJ playing everything from Alan Jackson to Buckcherry. and all the local girls were out on the dance floor whipping their perms around. it was awesome, pretty funny to go and hang out the some of the good old locals of the ‘kingdom’.
here’s a look at some of the progress.
After the weekend I made it back to southern VT in time for a solid week of training and in time to help Sverre out with the Stratton Junior camp. We did some skate roller skiing speeds one day in the rain and it was a amazing that there were only a few minor falls. each speed I was followed by 6 or 8 juniors hammering in behind me. I was impressed by some of the technique and speed of some of the juniors, especially the Stratton kids. On Wednesday the whole camp went to Weston to do some hard double poling and intervals up the ‘three’ hills. Each hill is pretty steep and takes a sold 15+ minutes to get up at Junior level 3 pace. It was a hard core work out. Seeing some of those kids working their asses off is great. Seeing them skiing way harder than they should be, having a severe bonk about to set in, and some serious blisters from the previous three days, brings me back to my junior days at the Stratton camps.
Well I still have a few solid days of training left in this week before I have a slight recovery week next before heading to Whistler for another US Ski team camp. I’ll be sure to report on any more fun ‘red neck stuff’ that goes on this weekend. later
