Sunday Morning Ski

The Man waxing his skis.

Joy here...After Thursday's double-double workout with my spinning class in the morning and strength training in the afternoon, I decided to give myself Friday off.  But then it was snowing like crazy, so I decided to give myself Saturday off too.  You can see where this is going right?  Friday off, Saturday off, Sunday off, Monday off...

But instead, on Sunday morning, The Man, the Sashinator (one of my cycling sisterhood friends), and I headed out to the local ski loop where The Man and I had our very first failed attempt at skiing earlier this year.  But this time we did the approximately 5km loop with no troubles, even adding a bit of distance.  We went up our first real hill (having to do the awkward sumo wrestler walk to get up) and down a steep incline.  We got our glide right, and we enjoyed being out in the sun.

I can even say that even though it was -10C I was able to get a pretty good sweat going.  In fact, I even had to undo one of my outer layers to try and "cool off."  Can you believe it?  I never thought that the concept of "cooling off" would be necessary in an Ottawa winter, that's for sure!

The frozen lake and beach.

I'm used to trying to "cool off" while Nomi and I run loops around the lake in Malaysia, but here I was, skiing beside a reservoir in a park not unlike the one Nomi and I run through, but in a totally different season, a season where the landscape is covered by fresh, white snow, and the beach is the sand of the snow blown along the crest of the shoreline.  And the shore itself is invisible beneath the blanket of snow that covers both the frozen sand and the frozen lake equally; where one starts and the other ends is invisible.

This park's landscape would seem so familiar to Nomi were she to come in the summer time.  She would feel the warmth of the sun on her skin and see the people relaxing on the beach and running along the pathway in their shorts, sweating as we do when we run in Malaysia.  But in the winter, it would seem something entirely different to her.  She's never run in snow; heck, she's never seen snow in real life, but here I was, skiing away through it and on it, feeling my quads burn the more I pushed and the faster I got, and it made me think:

Canada sure is a strange place, isn't it?  A place of contradictions, opposites, and diversity. 

And that's, well, that's kind of neat. 

Ha ha!

Over and out, 

Joy