Fun in the Snow!

This weekend I continued to get out and enjoy the great wintery outdoors here in Alberta!  It was a busy one too, one that required fitting workouts in around life it seemed.  My brother, sister-in-law, niece and I decided on a spur of the moment trip out to the mountains.  Before we could leave on Saturday I had to knock out a one hour run.  So I could get the run done early I opted to run around my neighbourhood.

I’ve mentioned it before, but I am not a huge fan of running the sidewalks around my neighbourhood at this time of year.  Not everyone does a great job of shovelling the snow and often it compacts into a big icy mess.  A light dusting of snow had fallen overnight so I grabbed my Yaktrax.  It was –8C (17F) out, so I opted to wear two long sleeve tech shirts and a jacket.  It was such slow going on the run thanks to me being unsure about my footing.  Yaktrax are great in the snow, but aren’t for running on ice.  Every once in awhile I’d hit a snow covered patch of ice and it would be pretty slippery.  I was a good 1.5 to 2 minutes slower per mile than I normally am.  The run went well despite being really slow though.  I only slipped and fell once!  As soon as I finished running it was time to hurry up and shower and head out to the mountains!

My niece was pretty excited about going out to the mountains.  We stopped off in Canmore for lunch at my favourite brew pub, the Grizzly Paw.  I tried something new on tap, the Unity Brew.  It was a dark rye IPA style beer that 11 microbreweries from around Alberta had gotten together to brew.  All proceeds sold at the Grizzly Paw go towards go towards charity.  Drinking beer for charity?  No problem!

After lunch we headed out to the Ice Magic Festival at Lake Louise.  The festival is a major ice carving competition, with each team getting 15 – 300 lb blocks of ice and having 34 hours to transform it into a minimum 7 ft high sculpture.  This year the theme was Podium Bound - Spirit of the Competition.  I would have loved to see how the sculptures turned out in the end, but it was neat to see the teams in progress too.  Everyone had a sketch so you could see how the finished product was supposed to look.

It was a really fun winter wonderland kind of weekend out in the mountains.  Good times!  We hung out in Banff overnight, checked out the shops on Sunday morning, then grabbed some lunch before heading back to Calgary.  Once I got home it was “hurry up” time in an attempt to finish off the rest of my workouts though!  I still had a brick and a swim on tap.  I hopped on my bike for just over an hour for a workout with plenty of single leg drills, lots of high cadence and then rounding out with some low cadence sets.  By the time I was done I had to make a critical decision.  It was either brick run or swim time.  I needed to leave the house in 20 minutes in order to make it to the YMCA with enough time to swim.  It didn’t give me enough time to change, run then change again so I skipped the run and just went straight to the Y.  Even still I was pushing it to get my workout done in just under an hour.

The swim was a really good one though.  Angie has suggested that I feel free to add paddle work to my workouts in the warm up or cool down.  I found that concentrating on high elbows with paddles makes me really think about taking that into the rest of my swimming.  I got my 2000 m workout done, showered, grabbed some pizza from Mitillini’s on the way home and that was that!

Talk about one full and action packed weekend!  I hope all of you had a good one too!  I’ll be trying to catch up…I have 275 posts in my Google Reader..!!