Man it is cold, I do not envy you guys that live up north, Here in south Louisiana, we only get a few days a year below freezing, 20 degrees when I woke up. We have much humidity so cold weather hurts. My wife thinks I am crazy but I swim when its cold, Pool is outside but warm, just a short sprint from the locker room. What do you guys do when its cold and your already racked up the miles on the trainer/tred mill?
we suffer.
we suffer.
. . and we also do well when the real racing season gets underway in the late spring and summer
I always found that I would have a great season of running and triathlon success after the longest coldest winters in Southern Ontario (Toronto area). I think that this was due to a number of factors:
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I xc skiied more
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I ran more
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My mind/body was refreshed and ready to train hard for cycling and swimming when the weather got nicer in the spring/summer.
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I didn’t worry about it.
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I had long term seasonal golas with no big expectations on performance until the key races in July and August.
-20C with a half a metre of snow on the ground here today!!
I’ll second the suffering!
Personally, most of the time when it’s 0°F and 70%RH (most of this week in MI) I say F*&$ it and ride my mtn bike or run anyway. I think the mental toughness gained is immeasureable.
yep.
you know its cold when your hands freeze up and you can’t pull the brake levers!
Man, I was thinking about this some more and this cold here in Michigan has been like a funeral durdge (sp?). The cold, the dark, the circus that has been my personal life for last three months have all combined to sap any energy I have for preparation and training. It seems like a time for dying. Incredibly, two people I know (one customer, one industry insider- both I knew) committed suicide in the last two weeks. Another person I know died of natural causes Wednesday (they were very old and sick). This is the down time of the natural cycle here I think. There a sense that we have reached bottom though, and that the “growing time” is around the next corner. A few more weeks of cold, maybe a snow storm and then those beautiful, ephemeral 45 degree days that suddenly feel like 70 degrees. There is that sense. Customers are pouring through the door. Yesterday I did four fittings, today, two already. People are gearing up, but right now we are coming out of the “dying time”.
“I always found that I would have a great season of running and triathlon success after the longest coldest winters in Southern Ontario (Toronto area).”
If given a choice I’d much rather now be in Barbados than in the Great White North. A couple of days ago we hit -30C (-21F) here in rural eastern Ontario with a wind chill factor that must have been twenty degrees colder. I decided to go x-country skiing on the abondoned railway track trail with by black Lab. It was miserable. My hands froze even with super thermal gloves. After about half an hour I decided “this sucks” and headed home. Amazing that the cold doesn’t seem to bother my dog one bit.