Island Notes III

Author: Charles Mandel

The off-season... don't ya just love it? Well, no. And who can blame you? What a miserable time of year: great gobs of snow plummeting out of the sky, sticking to everything in sight and piling up on the single-track; frigid temperatures and dark, dark, dark. And as if that wasn't enough, you have to work on your abs all the time, for Gawd's sake.

I've done some desperate things in my time in the name of winter. Snow biking is obvious. I've jittered over snowmobile tracks for miles on end and shovelled Larry's Trail so we could do a three-kilometre loop over and over and over. This year the wet snow killed the shovelling. This is how Larry and I found ourselves marching over the trail in snowshoes recently one sunny day.

"The theory,'' said Larry, who is full of theories, "is that if we pack the snow down enough, when it freezes, we'll be able to ride." In that he has all these wildly creative ideas, Larry reminds me of a Certain Bear of Very Little Brain named Pooh. That, of course, makes me Piglet. And on that thought, perhaps I shouldn't take this particular analogy any further.

At any rate, the next day the temperature went below zero. Larry phoned. He'd ridden, but we hadn't made the trail wide enough. Every few feet the ridge bumps from the snowshoe tracks threw his wheel to one side or another, where it made contact with the snow and ground to a halt. Sigh. The things we do to stay in shape.

So, well may you ask, why don't you just strap on some skis? Well, my friend, I've done that and been there. Given that I've only been on skis a few times before, my attempts at cross-country at Brookvale usually provides anyone and everyone within site a good laugh. Why just the other day, I put broad smiles on the faces of all those who saw me whip down a small slope at a speed not quite approaching that of the Concorde before landing limbs akimbo in an inviting pile of snow.

Snow-shoeing is more my speed. We do snow-shoe here and we do it hard. My friend Rod and I have clambered up and down Strathgartney and Appin Road (fabled Island trails that one day you too will experience), doing that anaerobic thing. Believe it or not, outside of the gym, snow-shoeing is the next best thing to cycling in my opinion. Sometimes I'm humping up a steep hill and I can't believe that we actually bike the damn thing. It just confirms how crazy we all are.

I must admit, though, the gym is where I am more and more these days, pumping out intervals on the Life Cycle (how pathetic is that?) and slamming the weights. XC glory in '04, I know it's waiting for me--how else could I keep my interest up. That, and a big dose of Metallica on the headphones helps.

Spinning? Done it and it's a great work-out, but this year I'm doing something different. My friend Donovan has also talked me into yoga. Ooommm. Not really. Actually, we got a great deal on 10 classes for $13 through the community schools program here. A cute little dumpling of an East Indian woman - honestly, she looks as if she should be home baking and then eating all the results - leads us through a brutal one-hour-and-a-half session of stretching and abs work. Right when we're at the apex of some particularly horrible groin-wrenching stretch, Krishna (our teacher) will say with a gentle smile, "We're having fun."

Yup. That about sums up winter training.

I think I'll eat some chocolate now.

What I'm interested to hear now is what everyone else is doing. Check into the ecmtb.com forums and post your winter training regime. I look forward to seeing it.

Posted by bikergrl at February 19, 2004 11:27 AM

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