Pineland! Weston!

I only have so much creativity. It cannot be wasted on post titles.

I passed on racing this weekend because I had to work Saturday. Ordinarily this would suck -- wait, it sucked this time, too -- but at least that meant that when Linnea and I headed to Pineland on Sunday, I was so full of energy to do stuff that I didn't need to drink any coffee to be annoyingly hyperactive. But I drank some anyway.

It convinced me that I should be in the X Games:


Thank god there is no video of this "wicked air" to ruin the illusion. Let's just assume that the hang time was epic, and I held the grab for three or four seconds (while turning a 720) and that the picture doesn't do it justice.

Aside from the mad wicked sweet epic air FTW, Pineland was really good skiing. I'd kinda forgotten about it as a ski destination from Boston, but I checked and it's actually three miles close than Waterville. The trails are smoother and have far superior flow to Waterville (you're a biker, you can appreciate flow, right?), the cafe is great, the trail pass is cheap.

The drawback to Pineland is less snow (ayuh, it's coastal Maine) and a slightly smaller, slightly flatter trail system than Waterville, and eight freaking dollars in tolls -- there goes your trail pass savings!

All things considered, though, I'll be making more Pineland trips in the future. If you always drive up 93 to ski from Boston, you should check it out. Even with about 6 inches of compacted snow, their trails were 100% open.

Meanwhile, back on the racing front, tonight was Tuesday night world championships round two. The "full course" was in effect, but we only skied two laps, so it was a killer 14 minute nordic short track. As usual, the gap to the front group opened in front of me and I was in no mood to go around and bridge to a bunch of guys who are faster than me, anyway.

Thus, the top five places were gone only a few minutes into the race, and once they were really gone I started to think maybe I should've stuck my nose in the wind and gone after them. So I came around the front of the chase group, took a pull (made an attack?) and set out solo. After all of three minutes of solo aerobic madness, I had a 20m gap on a solidifying chase group of three...and a ton of lactic in my legs.

I decided that I'd done enough "working out" and it was time to "smarten up" to consolidate the all-important sixth place. I stood up and let them catch me, pushed into the train in 2nd place (thanks, UCI cross!) and tried to recover a bit.

Since we were only skiing two laps, the race was practically over at this point, so recovery was minimal because SPRINT TIME was rapidly approaching. With two "fingers" (about 60 seconds) of course left I got excited and hit the gas, only to realize that 60 seconds is a really long way to hammer, especially when the entire race is 14 minutes. Good thing the entire point of Tuesday night is to hurt, because I sure did. But I brought it home for 6th place, albeit a million miles behind the front group. Maybe next week...