New Year's Resolution

Everybody needs a New Year's resolution, right?  That's all the news people have been talking about lately, so I'm assuming it's true.  I don't think I'll make a resolution to exercise more this year, since according to some health surveys I have taken, I exercise too much.  Well, certainly not recently, but overall.  Recently I have just been eating too many Christmas goodies.  Nothing unique in that, I'm sure.  I need to find a fun run that has a Clydesdale/Athena division because I'm back at my fighting weight after so much peanut butter fudge.

So instead of the typical exercise resolution, I'm making a resolution to update this thing more often with various exercise-related excursions.  I see that I haven't posted anything since October, so I think this will be a good idea.  A friend once told me that I should write accounts of trips I do, and I have been trying (and mainly failing) to keep a running log for years.  It seems I only manage to keep track of things during Hike-a-Thon and the cross country season.

Here goes for January 1st:  I woke up at the usual vacation time of 7:30am--believe me, that is really sleeping in.  According to the news it was negative three degrees Fahrenheit at that time.  I had to bundle up right away to go down to the basement (my scary basement) to turn up the heat as I did not have running cold water from the kitchen faucet this morning.  I call it the scary basement because it has a dirt floor and a lot of bugs--I have killed several black widows down there in the past year.  The access for the basement is outside and around the back of the house, hence the bundling up first.  After that I worked on grading papers for awhile, but finally I couldn't take hanging out indoors any longer.  I barely went out at all yesterday, so I was going a little crazy.  I waxed my skis and bundled up and headed for Mount Spokane.

Skating in such cold temperatures is fairly slow going, especially since I don't really have wax that's good for such extreme cold.  Everything was groomed, though, so I went for a long loop despite the cold day and the slow skis.  I went out on Valley View, Blue Jay, and Lodgepole, and then I took Quartz Mountain (always fun for its downhill sections) out to the new trails, and then Buck Land and Mica Road to Linder Ridge Road, and finally back to the lodge on Mountain View.  I don't know the distance for the Linder Ridge section (it's new to the Nordic system since Inland Paper closed snowmobile access this year), but the distance conversion for the rest was 7.378 miles.  I'm guessing it's 8 miles with Linder Ridge.