Rather than ease into things, I decided to just kick down the door and announce myself to the slopes. Sunday brought 40 degrees and sunny skies and surprisingly good snow at Winter Park. I felt like Charlie with his Angels as I had a brunette, a blond and a redhead in my entourage. We were on the lifts before 9 and were knocking out runs in a hurry. It usually takes me a while to get my "ski legs" back, but this time I felt really good right out of the gate. The training program also must be working well, as I was skiing full, long runs without needing to stop to let my quads recover.
We took a break around lunch after 10 or so runs, then headed back up to the top for some more quad burning runs. We ended the day with something like 17 runs between 9 and 2. A pretty big day (by our standards) for mid-season, let alone the first day of our season. I think we I will see a 50 mile day this year. Really couldn't have asked for a better first day with the warm temps and packed powder conditions. You don't get 40s and sun in December that often, so it felt good to have taken advantage of the good weather.
Here are the elevation and speed graphs from Day 1:
Elevation Change versus Distance:
Speed vs Distance from Day 1:
Never being satisfied without being completely and utterly destroyed, I arranged for a day off at work to hit up Copper Mountain with The Punisher and his crew on Monday. We were loaded up and on our way to Copper by 7am, and the snow was falling quickly. Copper was reporting 2" new at 5:30 a.m., but by the time we hit the slopes that number was very understated.
John's buddy Clint is a tele-marking ski patrol at Loveland, and the kid can ski. He makes the tele look easy even in the tight, powdery terrain we skied. John & Clint both have great form and look good. I go real fast, but I doubt anyone would ever mistake me for someone with good form.
The previous days sun and packed powder had given way to cold temps with more wind and several inches of powder on the groomed runs. Aside from getting cold, the conditions were pretty good and the snow was fantastic. We skied from the East side to the West side and eventually up into the upper bowl areas later in the day.
My legs were certainly feeling the previous day's effort (which was magnified in the powder), but I was still hanging pretty tough. Later in the day I opted to skip a few of the steep, mogul runs for fear of taking a hard fall due to tired legs but I probably could have done them albeit a bit more slowly.
So the season is off to a ripping start with back to back big days. The totals for the two days are as follows:
Distance covered (up & down): 74 miles
Number of runs: 30
Moving Time: 6 hours 25 minutes
Elevation Drop: 38,500 feet
Max Speed: 46mph
Elevation Graph From Copper:
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