Wow, it’s been a really fun week! It’s finally starting to get less hot and humid, which means I’m fairly confident that I will in fact survive the summer. The Fourth of July week was great – we did some tubing down the river that started as a relaxing ride and turned into “class 3 floating”. Despite a couple bruises and capsized inner tubes, it was super fun. Erika started the float with flip flops, a hat and sunglasses, and a tube, and after a couple flips in the rapids ended the float riding in another tube with only one shoe! Stratton Mountain put on a great fireworks show, and all the noise doubled as it echoed off the mountains. There were hundreds of fireflies, and I think they started competing with the fireworks because as soon as the sparks faded they went nuts, blinking on and off all over the mountain.
Annie P. and I went to the Londonderry 4th Parade, where there were tons of tractors, old automobiles, and farm floats that threw cheese. You know you’re in Vermont when you go to a parade and come out with cheese. 🙂
John Deere featured prominently in this parade
Some of the SMS kids rode their unicycles in the parade – I was impressed they could ride and not fall when the parade kept stopping!
The SMS kids in the parade
The SMST2 team joined a CSA this summer, called Earth Sky Time Farm. For a great price they provide us with fresh vegetables, herbs, fruits and eggs, bread or hummus straight from the farm! I’ve also been into bread baking lately, learning how to make loaves with a variety of yummy things in them. So far, my favorite is multi-grain bread with pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds and dried fruit baked into it.
Multi-grain, fruit and nut breads. Yum!
It’s been really cool to visit the Earth Sky Tim farm, see where and how everything we eat is grown, and sometimes get to pick it ourselves. They also have a stand in many of the farmer’s markets, and some of the workers play bluegrass music as well (they’re really good).
A little girl at the market checking out the bluegrass band percussion secion
This is off topic, and not at all relevant but I needed to include this picture. There have been a lot of weird bugs around lately, including some HUGE moths that are nearly the size of my hand! Packer demonstrates with one that crash landed in the strength room:
Gah!
Speaking of the strength room, training has been going really well lately! I was really proud of our whole team as I believe everyone set a personal best in our 10km L3 test the other day. The test is pretty neat because you wear your heart rate monitor and are not supposed to go over your L3 zone, and at the end Gus tests our lactate to make sure we stayed in the zone. It teaches you pacing, efficiency, and helps measure how the training and intervals are sinking in. And seeing as many people lowered their time by at least 1.5 minutes, thing are going great!
Stratton Mountain is working hard to get the community active and involved in many different sports. As part of this push, they did an event where families could participate in many different activities, and the SMST2 team did a demo roller ski agility course and team sprint race. It was fun to introduce the sport to people who had never seen roller skis, and most of the spectators said it looked “fun”, “hard”, and that they wanted to try it!
Signing a little girl’s T-shirt from the event (photo by Lilly Caldwell)
The SMS crew (plus some of the junior skiers!) and a couple kids from the event (photo by Lilly Caldwell)
Today we’re headed over to do a 1.5 day camp with the CSU team out in Massachusetts. It’ll be fun to join them for a couple workouts and give a talk about training, goal setting and racing on the World Cup circuit.
