Joy-the-skiing-Pioneer

Do I look like I know what I'm doing????
(Because I don't.)

Joy here...Now that I've signed up for half marathon #3 in my short running career, and now that I've found that my key to surviving an Ottawa winter lies in cross-country skiing, I've had to integrate cross-country skiing into my workout repertoire.  So that repertoire at the moment includes short (60-minute) runs, indoor bike rides (both at home and at spinning class), once-weekly strength training, and now skiing.  None of this is being done at this point with any real plan in place or any real strategy.  My strategy thus far is simply to move the body and hope that come the end of May I'll have enough fitness to have an enjoyable half marathon.

Yesterday we planned to head out to do a cross-country ski and practice some of the drills that our instructor gave us on our first ever lesson, but when we went to the park where there are groomed trails where we planned to just go back-and-forth on a stretch of a 5km cross-country ski loop, we discovered that there was some sort of race or event taking place.  The nice, quiet loop that we had hoped to use was being used by tonnes of other people, and we figured that we didn't want to get in their way.

We, therefore, had to find another place to go.

The snow-covered ground, without a
ski trail to be seen.

Now, my usual winter self would have thought, "well, I guess the workout gods are giving me a message to just turn the car around and go home, crawl back in bed, and eat chocolate."  But my newfound skiing self thought, "okay, let's just find another place with snow and make our own trails!"

With that pioneering spirit of adventure that my immigrant great-grandparents would have been proud of, we pulled into another park, this one deserted, and planned to just make our own trails.  Instead of counting on groomed tracks into which we would insert our skis and just move forwards practicing what our instructor taught us, I looked out on the blanket of fresh, white snow, uncharted and untouched, and I told The Man to get behind me and follow my lead.  And then I went out there...poles and skis moving bravely over uncharted territory.

There was ice and snow, and the terrain itself rolled in unpredictable ways beneath the camouflage of ice and snow, but I was able to get a good glide going with my skis.

Look at the sun valiantly trying to shine
over the winter landscape.

The sky was white; the snow was white; and we trundled onwards and outwards...figuring out how to make our skis go uphills and then downhills (down, definitely being more fun than up), and at the end of it all, we were able to look back at those ski tracks that I had made through the virgin snow and be proud of the progress we had made and proud of the mark we had left behind us.

And so as we finished our 60 minutes of skiing through open, snow-covered fields, with the sun trying desperately to break through the snow-white clouds above, we got in the car and felt a sense of accomplishment.

It's amazing what a little spirit of adventure can do!

Over and out,
Joy