Week of 2/15, It'd be nice to be in Montana or Idaho...

Well, not entirely nice. Both places are pretty cold and snowy right now but I'm drawn to both by their unique endurance sports culture..McCall, Idaho specifically is home to some of the best Nordic skiing I've ever seen, (half of the battle for XC skate is how well an area's trails are groomed) and this upcoming weekend is the Payette Lakes Ski Marathon, 35k freestyle, meaning you skate the distance.

Over in Butte, MT this weekend is the Powerhound Winter Triathlon. Folks will run 5k, bike 10k, skate 5k.. It's fairly short by Winter Triathlon standards, but seeing as there are no hard and fast rules around what each segment's distance is proportionately relative to another race directors can more or less make it up as they go, in fact, some Winter Triathlons opt to re-order the sequence of events to: bike, skate, run..

It's all good, Winter Triathlon is very grassroots and Nordic ski racing in the US has always been a labor of love for everyone involved.

I'm mostly fantasizing because I haven't been skiing enough this winter and to be candid, the skiing just outside of Seattle sucks. The Nordic areas are infrequently groomed leaving athletes with mostly icy, rough snow and sometimes powder. Neither is fun to skate over, but you can if you are hard core. I've done both and once I discover an area neglects their Nordic area I usually never come back. I guess I'm spoiled, I'd rather drive 5 to 10 hours for solid skiing. All that said, I'm getting on skis in the next week or so, I'm jonesing to skate.

Oh yeah, I do swim, bike, run still, it's was a roughly twelve hour training week, so onto the week at hand..

I was really out of it over the first half of the week, though managed to continue plugging away the daily two-a-days. Last half of the week energy levels came around, in the end still managed 4x swim, bike, run and happy to be on plan with slightly reduced volume.