Snow! Snow! Snow!

Pocatello got some good snow the past few days. A very white Christmas here! I spent much of Christmas Day shoveling. Went to church service in a near blizzard....not many others made it, so it was an informal, very family-like service, which was great. I hope everyone out there remembers the real reason and TRUTH behind Christmas.

I didn't do a workout on Christmas Day. I ate fairly healthy, so I'm putting it in the positive category. Our traditional Christmas Eve dinner was heathly, too....salmon and ribeye with sliced potatoes on the grill. Yum!

So far, I've kept my weight under 185. I find the R/R weeks to be kind of stressful because I can watch my weight go up. I gained two pounds this week. Of course, some of that is the Christmas treats, but still....I did a few half hour workouts: two swim and weight sessions and a 30 minute elliptical session, all in the gym. The gym is closed now until Jan 6 I think, so that will put a big damper on things. I'll definitely have to watch what I eat, make sure I hit some extra time on the bike trainer, and get creative with pushups, pullups, and dips and stretching exercises to make up for that. Maybe I'll get in some run if the roads look ok, meaning there isn't a huge probability of me slipping and breaking an ankle.

I was supposed to do a bike fitness test today, but that didn't happen. The weather was pretty nice today, so we took the baby and the dog out for a little snowshoe fun. Family fun in the winter sun, I called it. It was really nice. Interestingly, I find that snowshoeing is a great exercise for hip flexors, mostly because you have to pick up your foot and the snowshoe with snow on it (three pounds per foot?) and lift it high enough to get over the 6-8 inches of posthole.

Backcountry skiing also works the hip flexors alot, and I plan to get ALOT of that tomorrow. I'm hoping for a full day of backcountry turns. Down the hill, then up the hill. I figure with skis and boots on, my feet are about 6-7 pounds that have to be picked up and moved when going uphill. It's a great workout. And the downhill burns the quads pretty good, too. Best of all, I get to get outside again. The mountains should have some great snow, but we'll have to be careful with avalanches. The Sawtooths and Tetons have avalanche warnings, and the local mountains aren't completely safe from that, but it is a bit less of a danger. My pack is set and weighs about ten pounds, with water, safety gear, and stove/gas for a mid-day coffee during a break. Should be fun!

I've been thinking about power meters for my bike. "Dreaming" is a better word since they cost over $1k. But the iBike website is interesting. They have a power meter for $200. Somehow it measures power without attaching to the wheel hub. I wonder how accurate it really is. And you can get a firmware upgrade for $40 that allows it to measure power on an indoor trainer. It's really quite interesting. But, again, I question its accuracy.