There a perfectly good chair lift - right frikin' THERE. But no - we had to ski up ski down ski up ski down ski.........all day and all night. 24 Hours. Bad thing is....we paid real money to do this.
In preparation for my hopefully-slightly-better-than-mediocre bike race season, I decided to sign up for the 24 Hours of Sunlight ski race with one of my old Bailey hommies, Eric. We were a duo team, but there were also solos, 4-person and 5-person and more-than-5 person teams as well. Like some people in the race, I decided to hike-snowboard instead of the traditional skin-up ski-down method. Most skied, some boarded, a few snow-shoed and at least a few did it on nordic equipment (totally insane).
I knew I was in for some big-time hurtin' since I hadn't been doing much all winter except for tracking my woeful fantasy football team and drinking lots beers. My three week "taper" during a drinking vacation to Costa Rica probably didn't help my endurance a whole lot either. - but I thought even though it's gonna hurt like hell, it would be good training for the bike - and it probably was.
Besides the fact that we had to ski (hike) up an insanely steep run to the top of Sunlight Mountain and then decend an even more insane black/blue run - and the fact that we were up the entire night - and the fact that it was cold - it was actually pretty fun. Well, actually the "fun" part came after we were done. Eric managed 11 laps to my pussy-assed 7. I think that total would have been good enough for second in the "duo" category (even though we were a duo - we signed up under the "just for fun" class since it was cheaper - had we signed up for the duo, we proabably would have won some swag).
The Bad: 1)it sucked carrying that snowboard on my camelback up that damn mountain - seems it was either bonking me in the back of the head or smacking the back of my feet. 2) I'm not as good of a snow boarder as I once was - or thought I was. The run down was literally a frikin' ice chute, which I could have managed on skis but not a board 3) Since the lodge screwed up our reservation for a room, we had to "camp out" in the cafeteria with a bunch of other people where the most horrible cover band you could possibly imagine was playing until 12:30 am with their amps turned up to "hearing damage" level. Actually, the band probably was not all that bad, but the volume was too much and we were not drinking beer and just wanted to chill out while the other was out on the course. 4) I pulled something in my knee while I was walking up and had a hard time even walking back down on my last lap. That sort of freaked me out since I did not want it to be a problem for biking, and luckily it hasn't so far 5) I was so tired (sleepy) afterwards that I could barely choke down 3 beers (now that's just pitiful).
