Now that I’m back home and have recovered from some of the craziness that came with my week long escapade to the mountains, I’m ready to sit down and hammer out the blog.  When I first started blogging/rambling back whenever it began, I was all like “YA! lets do this, I’ve got so much cool stuff I want to say! gogogo!”, and you know, I got writing.  I figured I’d be able to throw down a cool story here or there, say something funny, post some cool pictures on a fairly regular basis without too much effort.  It should be as easy as pressing a few buttons with minimal thinking required.

… Turns out that’s not entirely true, well not in my case at least.  Whenever I get back from a trip, training camp or something cool I’ll try to make a recount of the most memorable parts of it so I don’t bore people with mundane details, make them feel awkward with out of context jokes or references, or make it seem like I’m going out of my way to make something sound exciting.  It’s so hard to make this a quick and clean process, I’ll end up spending the better part of an afternoon editing my blog post rather than writing the research paper I have due on Monday!  It’s quite time consuming.  I guess the essence of what I’m trying to say is this: making stories sound good in writing is harder, an takes much longer than doing it in person (and I’m not even good at that. go figure.).

Regardless, I will continue blogging with as much effort as I can muster, even if it is solely for the benefit of my parents while I’m away at training camps and forget to call them.

Where was I… oh right, here!

I’m not sure what it is about travelling out west for these ski trips that makes each one so incredible.  Maybe its the dynamic landscape; definitely a factor.  Maybe the early snowfalls; certainly possible.  Or perhaps it could just be that I don’t have to go to school for a week; not quite as likely since I still have mountains of work to do.  In all honestly, I don’t think I could pin down what it is that makes it special.  It just is, I guess.  I think I talked about travelling and my aspirations to do so at some point in my life in my last post.  To continue on that briefly…  The point of going somewhere new or different (for me at least), is to experience new and different things.  Getting stuck in routine and never going somewhere or trying something fresh and exciting sucks.  You miss out on so much that you might not even know is out there.  I’ve been fortunate enough that with my upbringing my parents have been able to expose me to travel and adventure. Whether it be up North to hike the Chilkoot trail, out East to explore the great Fundy tides, out West to hike some mountains, down under (aka Australia) to see the wildlife and venture out to the Great Barrier Reef, or maybe just to Chinatown with my mum and Grandma (that was definitely an adventure worth remembering).  Before you continue to read on; think of something you’ve done recently that’s worth remembering and appreciate that you were able to do it, and now think of something that you’re going to do and how you can make it better than what you’ve done before.

Okay so now that you’ve had the Jenn life talk of the day lets get on with whats happened in my life over the past number of days… It was kind of unnerving to learn that I was going to be spending a week rooming with two sick people.  Skiers are probably some of the most paranoid people when it comes to our health.  I wouldn’t consider myself a worry-wart when it comes to these kinds of things, but by now its been ingrained into me to have that nagging voice reminding me to constantly wash my hands, and wear a gas mask (okay maybe not, but it crossed my mind) whenever I’m around people who are ill.  Fortunately my roommates were very considerate about keeping their viruses/colds/infections to themselves and everyone seemed to be in pretty good shape when I left.

I had a pretty sweet time while I was in Canmore last week.  Getting to spend time with the NDC and getting some quality training in with them was very beneficial, both physically and mentally.  It’s been a bit of a lonely summer and fall in terms of training partners, especially female ones (Kieran, if you’re reading this, you’re a great training partner.  I really appreciate having someone to go out and rollerski from dusk till dawn in steady downpour, endure tedious technique sessions and talk about the evolution of the human race and whether or not its possible for you to hunt down and defeat a lion on foot, with your ski pole.  Unfortunately, you’re a dude so… yeah.).  Being able to get out on that 1.8km loop with Alannah, Erin and Andrea for those LSD skis really gives you time to get to know each other.  Despite the shortness of the loop it was still quite entertaining.

One of my absolute FAVOURITE things about LSD workouts at altitude is lactate testing! wooooo ya! lactates are great. best things ever. you should get one sometime. haha nooooo thanks. I had to endure two lactates during my stay in Canmore and I think I suffered more blood loss during that time than I did when I rode headfirst off the bridge in Swamp Run out on Gnarly.  Lactates are just supposed to be a quick prick on your finger that clots up almost right away (smaller puncture than flu-shot needles).  Unfortunately, my platelets must’ve been off doing more important things than preventing me from bleeding out… so I improvised.  After abusing my pole grip to mop up as much gore as possible I made haste for the wax trailer (because there were no bandages or gauze available for my crisis).  With a strip of shop towel and a glob of klister to stick it on I managed to pull off a pretty sketchy bloodstopper.  hey, it worked,  I did finished the workout.

yea, so all in all it was a great week, here’s a couple more pictures worth sharing. creds to Phil, Pav, Pav and Erin for the respective photos in this post.

So it wasn’t actually a van, maybe it was a Fiat500.  Pav’s rental car was the talk of the ski community for several days, needless to say.  While it does function well as a vehicle, it doesn’t quite cut it when it comes down to carrying capacity necessary to support a ski team.

Other than my travels out West there isn’t much to speak of, well I guess there was GBSSA cross country.  That was kind of a big deal.  For the first time in Eastview history our cross country team succeeded in capturing the overall title at our OFSAA qualifier.  In addition to the overall title we won two divisions, had three other team podiums as well as a number of top5 finishes and the overall female title.  Super proud to be part of this team in my last year of high school.  I’m looking forward to OFSAA next Saturday, hopefully everyone races well so we can close this season off on a continued high from our GB results.

Till later

JacksonOUT