blog-o'sweeney: It's all about the base

With another half foot of snow on the ground, I was up early this morning planning the day's activities with the kids, and I figured I would update some training notes as well. My season's goals are to improve on CX-so what that means now (and a big thanks to Cort for the sage advice) is base, base, base. I had been doing 5 x 10 minute steady state intervals a couple of times per week on the trainer but have been told that's not smart right now. So with all the snow (and no XC skis in the quiver yet) I'm paring the work down to 90 minutes on the trainer at 65-70% HR and watching a movie. Yea, 90 minutes on the sit and spin machine is a lot, but it's also a bit therepeutic-or at least that's what I keep telling myself. But even Maggie (the 12 year old border collie mix and faithful companion on many a moutain hike) looks at me strangely when I pass the 60 min. mark.

To mix things up a bit, I've also added running to my repetoire-I'm up to about 5 miles now and I'm managing that in about 45 minutes. I had planned to do a St. Patrick's Day 10K road race back home in Western Mass., but have since had to bag that as I have an all day Saturday class the day of the race. Which completely sucks. Running for me is by no means fun, but it's putting some base mileage in the bank and it's working out different muscle groups. It's been all pavement miles so far and I'll look forward to hitting the trails a bit in the spring-it has to be more interesting. Next year I want to add XC skiing to the mix-I took our 7 year old out a few back and she really enjoyed it; so much so that I had to buy her a little beginner set which she plows around the yard in now! Another family sport is born!!!

On the climbing front, I think I've finally discovered a new potential partner for swinging the ice tools-my buddy Brad was up for an outing over the Superbowl weekend and he had a ball doing it. He's ready for some easy multi-pitch, that's for sure!