It's taper time for the Birkie. This is the time that the foreplay starts with the skis. Hot waxing, scraping, and polishing. All looking for that great glide and kick. This winter I again focused on keeping a good running base and skiing once a week. The longest I skied was only two hours, but I have a lot of miles on the legs otherwise. I'm hoping that comes through for me again this year, as last year under the same plan I PR'd by 20 minutes.
This next week will see a moderate amount of running, and probably one trip to the gym early in the week. Culminating with Friday off for the drive up to Haward, WI. I treat the Birkie as a fun event, not a serious race. I still ski it as hard as possible, but I don't want to ski five days a week getting ready for it. So I look at this coming Saturday as 4 hours of skiing through beautiful North Wisconsin woods to get to the bar.
A couple of side notes for when this is all done...I'll be working with Karl again this year since that's been really productive for me the last year and a half. I also got a new toy, a Garmin 310XT. My old Garmin has been getting a little flakey, and I've been frustrated that Polar doesn't have Mac support. So now I have GPS and HRM rolled into one. I've used it once so far and it's pretty slick. Also to get ready for the season I have a fitness test on Tuesday morning with Optum Health Performance. I was turned onto them by my buddy Brian. I'll do a writeup about how that went afterward, but the numbers from that will hopefully help fine tune my training.
