What's next?

My last post concentrated mostly on skiing so it's natural to continue with this "interesting" topic. For past couple of weeks they have been able groom the tracks with big snow cats and conditions have been great! Seriously it's almost unbelievable to be able to ski on wide firm tracks in bright sunshine with 3 feet of snow everywhere during late November. I have to admit that some days when it's been windy and/or snowing the tracks are softer, snow piles to make the trails a bit bumpy and it's much colder. On the last Saturday of November our team had a first practice race. Even though I was trying to start easy the altitude hit me already at the first hill. I can't even describe how much worse it feels to workout at high-intensity at 3300 meters compared like 1800 meters (the highest altitude I've been doing high-intensity before this). It didn't help that the conditions were like those that I described above. Last Sunday (on the 25th anniversary of Grand Mesa Nordic Council) there was a community race which included 5k classic race at 11am and 5k freestyle race 1.5 hours later. Now the conditions were pretty much perfect and my classic race was decent, considering that I hadn't trained that much during past two months. For me at least it was impossible to recover at that altitude and the freestyle race was pretty much just skiing to the finish line.

Can't really ask for better conditions

Start line of 5k classic race. You can recognize me on the right side of the picture from the Haka outfit. (Photographer Lori Stone)

After those races I was thinking that it would be interesting to see how the injury and the whole exchange period have affected my body composition. The exercise lab on campus has a BodPod machine (all you studying exercise sciences know what I'm talking about). Basically it measures your body volume and based on that and your weight calculates fat and fat-free masses. I had done the measurement a few weeks after the beginning of the semester and then my body weight was 72kg and fat percentage 6.2. After that I hadn't even been on a scale once. I was expecting that I would have lost some muscle mass and gained some fat mass due to lower training volume and no upper body strength training during my injury period. Well it was quite a lot worse than that: bodyweight 76kg and fat percentage 13.4. I've never been even close to this heavy or fatty.

At this point I was still smiling

How is it even possible to make that kind of change in three months?

Mostly likely this change is not only caused by less training, but also nutrition has a part to play. The dining hall here (and as far as I've understood in most universities) is a buffet style (eat whatever and as much as you like). This is (evidently) dangerous in long term. Being in United States there is always pizzas, burgers and sodas available. Fortunately you can also choose healthier meal options and there is a quite diverse salad table, which is pretty much the same every day, though. Apparently the healthier meals seem to be quite energy dense too, because I've never had a burger in the dining hall and pizza only a few times. Some of the weight gain has to also be attributed to higher beer consumption. There are just too nice local breweries here.

A few weeks ago I saw somebody with a pair of Järvinen skis on the parking lot next to the ski trails and after a short conversation it turned out that she was originally from Finland. It was surprisingly difficult to switch language in the middle of a conversation by the way. Anyway, she invited me to have a Thanksgiving meal with her family, which was nice experience since we obviously don't have this holiday in Europe. This also reflects the hospitality that people here demonstrate. Just to give an overview how big holiday Thanksgiving is here, the Thanksgiving break lasted the whole week while Fall break was only one day.

Thanksgiving dinner

Last week my parents visited me for a few days while traveling in United States. In Grand Junction I took them to hike on Mt. Garfield and ski on Grand Mesa and we also visited Arches National Park again. Finally we traveled to Salt Lake City where we paid a visit to some of the locations of the 2002 Winter Olympic Games. I also had some time to walk around the city the next day.

Finally some bad news for those who have expected me to come back to Finland soon (if there is any). I'm going to stay a couple of months longer to do my internship by working as the assistant coach of the ski team and as an assistant in the exercise lab on campus. But that's going to begin in January. For now I'm concentrating on the winter break when I'm doing a road trip to California with a friend of mine and visit some famous national parks on the way. Stay tuned for the report from that trip.

To return to my poor ski performance and horrible body composition I've decided that I have to start acting like an athlete again.