Turkey Break

Thanksgiving break began last Tuesday and lasted until last night. I was so excited to get this much needed break and the chance to rip the powder for 4 or 5 days.

I left for the mountains Wednesday morning and rode Loveland all day and Keystone for a little bit at night (Keystone is the only major resort with night skiing out here). Afterwards I met up with my friend Samira (volunteer in my math class) and chilled at the bar waiting for her friend to get off work and give us a couch or floor to crash on - never happened.

So neither of us wanted to drive back down to Denver and then back up the next day to ride at Copper, so we thought it would be clever to just car camp. We found a dirt road along the side of one of the mountains and decided it was secluded enough. For those of you that forget, I drive a Wrangler so it was quite a feat to set-up camp inside of it. So I blasted the heat for about 30 minutes, lined the soft top with clothing for insulation, crawled in my sleeping bag, wrapped that in my comforter and laid my head on the wheel well and passed out immediately.

11 pm, Samantha calls and wakes me up. We kept the phone call quick because I wanted to be back a sleep before I realized how cold it was in the Jeep (I could definitely see my breath at this point). As I laid back to sleep, I could here Samira talking on the phone in her car (hopefully to her friend) and eventually passed back out.

4am - This is where the fun begins. I move constantly when I sleep so when I awoke, my sleeping bag was open, comforter on the floor and ice sickles hanging from my nose. Holy crap it was like 25 degrees!! So I put on another sweatshirt, situated my bed and somehow managed to pass back out for about an hour.

5am - Woke up and decided this was stupid and too damn cold, so I turned the car on and read the Onion for about an hour before a cop rolled up. Apparently we weren't breaking any laws so we actually just talked about snowboarding with him for about 10 minutes and he went on his way.

Thanksgiving I rode Copper mountain hard for about 5 hours. I can officially do a front-side 180 on my board and a mute grab :) Around 1pm we called it a day and I headed down to my friend Ashley's and had Thanksgiving at her house. I really appreciate this since Thanksgiving has always been my favorite holiday and this was my first without seeing any of my friends from back home or any of my family.

Friday and Saturday I went back up to the mountain and stayed with my friend Carly B. The snow was ridiculous. Each day the mountain got at least 6 inches of snow, so I experienced my first powder days on a snowboard!!! Let me tell you that riding on powder is like night and day compared to a groomer. It felt just like slalom skiing.

So on another note, I've started to really get back into training. I spend at least 90 minutes a day doing a combination of swimming/running/biking. I think I hit around 30-35 miles on the road last week, 6 days in the pool and 2 days of biking (inside of course). I'm really excited for the next triathlon season and am about 90% sure I'm going to do the Grandma's Marathon in Minnesota (or maybe Wisconsin?) this March.

Other than that, I'm just finishing off the semester. This is our last normal week of school, then it's block days, half days, assessment days, etc... Two weeks til Al comes to visit and three more weeks til I return back to the mitten.