kadmium

Oh, today is me sore. Oh. And today is me tired. Hooboy.

I haven’t written that much about Bolleke, but he’s inspired me to get back into shape. He’s nine years old and still pretty much a source of boundless energy. His favorite thing is to run. Just get on a trail and run. His former owners used to skijor with him, and skijoring is something that I’ve wanted to try since we moved up here, so last month I got him a new harness and towline and the belt for myself, then a couple of weekends ago we went to a gear swap at one of the universities in town and I picked up a pair of skate skis for $100. (A new pair would have cost close to $250.)

The problem is that I’m not very good at skate skiing. I’ve gotten pretty proficient with classical (or diagonal) skiing, but skating is faster, so it’s what a lot of people prefer for skijoring. (Compare classical and skate skiing.) I tried to skate ski with Bolleke one time, and it was pretty funny. He kept stopping and glancing back at me with this piteous look on his face, as if to say, “Look, can we please get this underway?” I took him back out a couple of days later on my diagonal skis after we’d had several inches of snow and the trails hadn’t been groomed, and it went a little better. I was able to actually move fairly well on my skis and the deep snow slowed him down just enough that we had a pretty good run.

But I need to get the skate skiing down. That’s the long-term solution. So this weekened I went out twice, once by myself and once with Katie. I’m getting the hang of it, but it’s a very different motion than classical, and while I’m feel like I’m doing okay on the form, I’m not getting any real power, which leads me to believe that something is not quite right. Katie’s dad has a video tape that he said helped him quite a bit, so I’ll give that a look and see what might be the issue.

We’ll post skijoring pictures when we remember to take the camera with us.

We got flu shots on Sunday. It’s pretty late in the flu season up here, and it’s going to take three weeks for the vaccine to be fully effective, but I share an office with three other guys and one of them has been walking around coughing his lungs out since Thanksgiving, and I decided, eh, it can’t hurt. 9:00 Sunday morning, there we were bright-eyed and bushy-tailed to get our shots.

Now I feel all achey. It’s probably mostly the skiing, but I’ve got aches where skiing doesn’t usually cause them. I think I’ll go to bed early tonight.