Flail-a-thon

Our recent warm has thrown a monkey wrench into the scheduled regular programming for playing outside....we seem to be suffering a bit from the Goldilocks and the 3 bears...the snow is too soft, too icy but the 'just right' is a bit elusive at the moment, unless......

you are a skate or cross country skier.  I have been reluctant to try those skinny skis as the last time on them was a bit of a circus.  It included some good falls, one of which sent me on my butt with a really really sore tailbone that took about 8 months to heal.  With such success on those unstable little planks, I decided to just stay away...

If you are a skate skier, Bend offers many a mile of groomed trail for your skiing pleasure.  With my tail between my legs (probably to protect my tailbone), I decided that it was worth another attempt.

Let's get it out of the way up front...This skate skiing thing is hard hard hard - especially for someone who is used to a snowboard and has forgotten all about having something underneath each foot.  Josh and I decided to head up to the groomers up at Meissner Sno Park and see what the day had in store.  He too was learning how to do this silly sport so we would flail in stereo.

After spending a little time trying to figure out how to get the skis attached to the boots, I took a couple of cautious steps and realized I had no idea what to do and could only hope that muscle memory had a better retention than my brain.  We had a slight uphill to start which was OK but then it was this descent where I proceeded to snow plow like a champ...or is it chump?  The snow conditions were awesome - it was warm, the snow was fast (skier was slow however) and it was a good day to be out.  Once we hit the flats, I sort of kind of remembered what I was supposed to do but it felt about as stable as walking a slack line in a gail force wind.

We did the tangent loop and everything was copacetic until we reached the long hill....for some reason, I did just fine on the flats but any hill just threw whatever little technique I had out the door (baby included with the bathwater).  I tried the caveman method of trying to muscle my way through it but it just brought fatigue...somehow, I managed to get to the top (eventually) and at that point I had lost a good liter or so of body fluids from my efforts of flailing.  We finally made it back to the car and decided that as much as it was difficult starting a new sport, it was actually sort of fun to be a Noob and try to figure stuff out.

My stubbornness won over on Sunday too as I made a return visit and did the same loop again - albeit with a little more optimism of having watched some 'how to' YouTube videos.  I figured a couple of little things out but still need to work on the uphill thing...it was about the same level of success from the prior sesh so back to the YouTube drawing board - or it probably is more about just getting out there and getting some mileage to figure this stuff out...I find it is too easy to overthink stuff and sometimes getting out there and learning on your own dime is the best way to do it.

Good times - hopefully each adventure out will unlock a little more...